mostly conjecture

Rating: 4/10 (11 May 2009)

i'm going to resist giving my opinion here on this guys actions, because it's not my place to do so and because most of this movie is fiction sown together by some facts.. what we know is: Christopher, graduated, went travelling (like thousands of graduates do every year), naturally met some people along the way, and died on his travels
we know very little about his behaviour, his motivations, the order of his writings, his past, his plans for the future or the reasons for his death although it seems that he intended to be in Alaska for just a few months before moving on perhaps to a life of perpetual travel or a life as a rich lawyer who can say. it does appear that he made a pretty bloody remarkable kayaking trip which I'd like to know more about and which should perhaps have been the focus of the film
i would expect that the main character had a love of nature, and i found this was totally lost in this movie. the wild is pretty much depicted as being alien, hostile, claustrophobic, and something merely there to be conquered. i didn't feel at any moment that Penn has a love of nature. surely it needs to be at the heart of this movie otherwise we risk describing a person without purpose.
i actually found that Penn revels in this concept, and paints his romantic notion of a nihilistic central character. maybe his interpretation is right, maybe it's wrong. but either way going to Alaska is clearly a big deal for the guy, so why not show us more joy instead of focusing on his death and rewinding from that point?
given the lack of concrete information i wonder why this movie was made as a factual account. it would have been more sensible to leave it alone and make a movie about all those fabulous people, perhaps like Christopher, that go travelling with purpose and end up doing something very special instead of tragically starving to death alone in a broken bus