Neeson.

Prepare to be devastated. Films of hair-raising terror about people doing unspeakable things to each other are a dime a dozen, usually with a built-in hole in their armor (people can always outsmart people). But movies about helpless humans versus uncontrollable nature are rare. A new one called The Grey, about the survivors of an airplane crash in the frozen wastes of Alaska at the mercy of carnivorous wolves, is the movie equivalent of a wet finger in a hot socket.

This is the scariest wilderness survival movie about men stalked by animals since Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins landed on the menu of a bloodthirsty, 10-ton grizzly in Lee Tamahori’s 1997 thriller The Edge, written by David Mamet. Liam Neeson stars as a decent man doing a tour of duty in an isolated oil refinery in the Alaskan wilds with a crew of ex-cons, drifters and other rejects from society with whom he has nothing in common. Haunted by memories of better times, a woman who left him and a small ray of hope that when he gets back to civilization he’ll play a better hand of poker, he boards a plane home that crashes in an explosion of flames with only six survivors. Cut off from cell phone signals and every other form of communication, the men are wounded, suffering from frostbite, understandably pessimistic, pondering suicide and surrounded by howling wolves. As the men crawl away from the wreckage to search for a sign of life, the sound of a helicopter overhead or the curl of smoke from a remote cabin chimney, the wolves get closer. I’ve read that wolves get a bad rap; they’re not aggressive and run from people. These wolves are different. They’re ravenous, territorial timber wolves—carnivorous, bloodthirsty, hungry for meat. While the dwindling handful of survivors search for a way to defend themselves, scenes filled with nerve-frying suspense build steadily, paralyzing you with anxiety. If possible, wear gloves or your nails could get chewed to the quick.

With a lack of oxygen to the brain in the altitude, the men suffer from hallucinations and wander away from the fire into harm’s way. Without weapons and unable to run because they’re up to their knees in snow, they’re tough alpha males, but before they can even formalize their strategy they get picked off, one by one, torn limb from limb and devoured by killers with molars like fangs. There’s graphic gore, but miraculously, the writers also find humor in the men’s natural coarseness. When they cook one wolf to stay alive, the gruffest man says, “I’m more of a cat person myself.” The word harrowing doesn’t begin to cover it. You can’t avoid wondering, “What would I do if this happened to me?” One last rant at the sky, one final plea for help, one more challenge to the Almighty to prove His existence, and escape remains impossible. All the more reason for men with nothing in common to turn their conflicted tensions into a sustained interdependence to stay alive.
Alaska is played by the wilds of Canada. The men who support leader Liam Neeson are played by actors with more brawn than beauty, including Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, Frank Grillo and Dermot Mulroney, unrecognizable with long, matted hair and a white beard, as one of the more pragmatic survivors. Written and directed by Joe Carnahan (The A-Team), it’s basically a one-note narrative with nowhere to go except straight into the jaws of tragedy, but the film manages to give each man enough room for character development to make you feel like you’re living through this white-knuckle experience with them. It’s one of the most captivating studies of shared peril. The Grey avoids smug clichés, takes you to places you least expect and settles for no comfortable solutions, while it explores the dark shadows of the male psyche and finds more emotional fragility there than you find in the usual phony macho myths from Hollywood.

rreed@observer.com

THE GREY

Running Time 117 minutes

Written by Joe Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers

Directed by Joe Carnahan

Starring Liam Neeson, Dermot Mulroney and Frank Grillo

3/4

(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Every generation gets its own flavor of survivalist--people driven to prepare for the end of societal order, AKA the Apocalypse, Armageddon, an epidemic of uncontrolled terrorism or any old kind of cataclysm--and Reuters reported Saturday on the most recent incarnation: "preppers." Are preppers any different from previous forward-thinking folks who dug bomb shelters or laid up stores of long-lasting dried goods and arms, just in case?

They are following in the footsteps of hippies in the 1960s who set up communes to separate themselves from what they saw as a materialistic society, and the survivalists in the 1990s who were hoping to escape the dictates of what they perceived as an increasingly secular and oppressive government.

Preppers aren't wild-eyed fanatical stereotypes, either.

"Modern preppers are much different from the survivalists of the old days," [said attorney and blogger Michael T. Snider]. "You could be living next door to a prepper and never even know it. Many suburbanites are turning spare rooms into food pantries and are going for survival training on the weekends."

The prepper next door is serious. They're not looking to Mayan prophecy or a wizened fundamentalist like Harold Camping for cues as to when the end might come--they believe it could happen any time.

The idea behind becoming a prepper may seem more rational now than it once did. Worries about the nation's economic woes alone can make a Mad Max machine-gun run to trade pelts or dry goods for gas and potable water seem much closer to reality than it was when that movie premiered in 1979 (and things were pretty tough then).

Being ready for what preppers call "uncivilization" is mainstream enough that one major membership warehouse chain has products geared toward holing up for a short time in your cabin, cellar or re-purposed missile silo. For less than the cost of an iPad (which would be useless in a catastrophe anyway, unless your Angry Birds addiction is just that profound), Costco will send the Shelf Reliance Ultimate Survival Pack to your door. It supposedly contains supplies enough for two people to survive up to two weeks.

Order 26 and you'll be good for a year.

[Reuters]

This week we will celebrate the 39^th Anniversary of Earth Day, a holiday that in many ways coincided with the beginning of the mass environmental movement in the United States.  The first Earth Day, in 1970, was proposed by then Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, and organized by Denis Hayes, one of the truly effective leaders of the environmental movement.   Here in the 21^st century, the planet needs protection more than ever, and we finally find a concern for sustaining the earth slowly entering the political mainstream.

The challenge in this increasingly urban world is to build an understanding of the importance of the biosphere.  Today, it is important because we need it in order to survive. As advanced as our technology is, we require the ecological services provided by sunlight, biodiversity, and the subtle and complex web of natural environmental relationships to provide us with air, water and food. We may someday be able to live without our planet, but that day is a long way off.

In addition to the services that humans require from the planet to survive, there is a deeper relationship with the biosphere that we need to acknowledge. Let’s imagine that some day we had the technology to live without the planet: Would we want to? Beyond sentiment and nostalgia, what does our relationship with the Earth say about our own ethics and values? 

We are a species that takes our domination of the planet pretty seriously. We are most interested in maintaining those forms of life that help us maintain our own. That is probably both logical and biological- we are very much attracted to the idea of survival. But we also take great pleasure in our natural surroundings. We want more than mere survival. Earth Day coincides with spring time and even here in Manhattan, many of us are thrilled to see the light green aura of life remerge as trees bud and flowers bloom.  This past weekend I enjoyed biking from the new waterside park in Harlem (just west of Fairway) down to the Intrepid along the Hudson. All over the Northeast, people are emerging from winter’s cold and rediscovering their gardens, forests and beaches. The preservation of these pleasures requires that we preserve and value our planet.

It is possible to imagine a world without nature. In fact, science fiction is filled with technologies that replace natural systems. When I was a kid I used to watch the TV cartoon, “The Jetsons”. The Jetsons was a cartoon about family and work life in the future. Cars flew through the air, your food came from a machine in the wall, the family dog walked on a treadmill—and there was no nature.  No trees. You lived up in the sky and no one ever looked down at whatever was going on below.  You never saw a mountain or the ocean. In Star Wars, the home planet is completely covered by a “world city”.  To find nature in that version of the future (or the past) you must travel to other planets.

Human imagination has a way of someday becoming human reality. Look at the “communicator” held by Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek TV show- now look down at your cell phone—anything look familiar? In the end, the preservation of our planet and its amazing beauty requires that we value it enough to control the technologies that damage it. Someday, the precautionary principle that we apply to the introduction of new drugs in the market place will need to be applied to the use of new production and product technologies.  In the United States, the FDA requires extensive testing of new drugs before they can be sold. We take the precaution of making sure we understand how the new drug interacts with the human body. We see if the drug’s desired effects are more valuable than its side effects.  When it comes to new technologies, we are all like the canary lowered into the cave to see if the mine is safe for humans.  If the canary comes back alive, we send the miners down. If the canary is dead, we don’t. Similarly, if a new technology kills us, or destroys the biosphere, we consider stopping it.

Technology makes modern life possible, but its use must be guided by a deeper understanding of its impact on the biosphere. On this Earth Day, it’s important to think about the Earth and our responsibility to our children and to their children. It’s our job to pass the planet to the next generation intact and in good repair. To do that we need to value the earth for more than what it provides to us, but for the miracle it represents.  Let’s make that the theme of this 39^th Earth Day.