Should be watched with the much better Grizzly Man by Herzog

Rating: Null/10 (25 November 2018)

I like Penn and consider him talented. But for a much better treatment of idealistic and naïve man in unforgiving nature, I recommend Grizzly Man above Penn's flawed, and itself naïve "Into the Wild."
What Christopher McCandless did was place himself in an area where two kinds of humans manage to stay alive: a) those who bring plentiful food stores for their entire stay duration or transit duration of their presence there; or b) are people with hundred of generations and lifetimes of training and practice in getting barely substance levels of food from the land there.
What McCandless did is no different than people who think they can befriend all grizzly's or sharks, cross the Sahara or Kalahari with no water, or for that matter transcend gravity and jump from a plane with no chute.
Nature has no benign or malicious spirit, no intent, no spiritual element at all. It is beautiful in the grand and the small, and for the human animal either has sufficient calories or will kill you from starvation, just as the right large predators will kill you.
What on earth is Sean Penn thinking? To portray McCandless as something between Thoreau at Walden and Kerouac?No. Thoreau knew his soundings intimately, was a couple hours walk from several settlements. And Kerouac stuck to well traveled roads. McCandliss did not even bother with a map and put himself somewhere where there was no food.
Watch "Grizzly Man," which is Werner Herzog's treatment about the same type of pathology, frankly the same type of suicide. Herzog is sensitive to his subject takes us to the edge of romanticizing the self destructiveness, but doesn't cross over.Penn absurdly romanticizes his subject and in fact for anyone who has read the books that stick to the facts, one can see Penn falsifies a lot of key facts as well.