Ultimately pointless

Rating: 3/10 (1 November 2012)

You will see a lot of reviews here of people calling this movie "left wing bullsh!t", and maybe you'll think, "well, I'm left wing, so I'll probably like it". So let me preface this by saying I'm as liberal as they come.
I've seen movies with bad acting, and bad effects, and bad writing, but this movie suffers from a bad underlying message, and there's no way to overlook that.
This is story of a privileged young man, 'Alexander Supertramp' who leaves his family and burns his last bit of cash because he feels that 'people are mean to each other' and he can't live in society anymore. Instead of trying to change society though, he decides to leave it completely - but hold on, not that completely.
You see, while he complains about life being too easy after cashing a cheque for work he did, he's shaved, clean, wearing different clothes that all mysteriously fit into his backpack, with nice sparkling teeth and not even one little cold (until the very end). He's both still buying his way through life and mooching off people who actually need money and goods - for example the residents of Slab City, the Colorado campsite. The girl he meets there is a character I can actually feel sympathy for; she obviously wants to leave and would if she could. Their relationship is a mystery - not because he doesn't want to have sex with her, but because he doesn't even seem to like her.
And finally, I have to agree with many of the other posters here who call Alex's trip to Alaska reckless and stupid. For all his supposed knowledge and ability to learn, he completely failed to prepare for this trip. If the older man he was living with at the end hadn't given him some supplies, and had he not found the bus, he probably would not have lasted two weeks. At one point it becomes obvious that even though he could fish and had a book on local flora, he had never before used it, relying on wildlife he shot.
His final 'wisdom', that happiness is worthless if not shared, is ultimately pointless.
One scene in particular stands out as representative of the whole movie: Alex, apparently on a routine food run and not too close to his camp, sees an adult moose and immediately shoots it. Nevermind that the moose is clearly too much meat even if he manages to preserve it (which he never learned), or to drag back to the camp, or that he does not have his 'how to skin and prepare game' manual with him - he sees the huge moose and shoots it. In the end, he doesn't get one bite of food out of it.