Great setup, but the ending doomed it...

Rating: Null/10 (21 February 2017)

I read the book Into the Wild about 20 years ago and the story has haunted me ever since. I saw the movie about a year after it came out, and the first two hours were quite good. The screenplay was clever, and the direction and cinematography were both very good. However, I was ultimately quite disappointed by the way it ended.
Chris McCandless was a fascinating individual, but he was somewhat of an enigma. This movie was beautifully filmed and the detail of shooting on location was quite bold and gave the movie an authenticity rarely seen anymore. However, it ultimately failed to capture Chris McCandless. Instead we were presented with a two dimensional drifter who was conflicted about his parents and sought wisdom on the road. He is a modern day David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, drifting from place to place and helping the locals make sense of their life. In the movie he found redemption but then died after making a tragic mistake.
The ending of the movie ruined it. The scene when he passed out after eating some plants, then awoke in a panic and discovered his mistake was simply laughable. After two hours of masterful film-making, we are clubbed over the head with an over the top melodrama. More than that, in a movie based on real life, we are shown an ending to the story as it never truly happened.
This movie was clearly made for those who did not read the book. The portrayal of McCandless in the book presents a complex individual. The people who knew him during his two years of wandering seem to have had a great deal of difficulty figuring him out -- he was full of contradictions.
The most haunting aspect of Into the Wild (the book) is this: what happened to him at the end? Why did he die? The book presents a hypothesis of poisoning which has been proved wrong. The movie presents a fantasy that he ate the wrong plant. The truth is much more intriguing. All we have are some scribbles in the margins of books and an incomplete journal which showed signs of desperation towards the end.
And by all means, please read the book BEFORE you watch this movie!