Never has a piece of footage inspired more rage in me.

Rating: 1/10 (20 January 2013)

I am generally easy to please when it comes to films. Prior to this, the worst thing I could say about a film was that it was a bit dull. Into the Wild changed all of that. I can only imagine what the real Christopher was like, but if this is supposed to portray him in a positive light, I doubt he had many redeeming features. Every single thing he did made me hate him more. To begin with, he had a fantastic life. As the summary on this website says, he was a 'top student and athlete'. He had a decent sum of money for a student, and a family who cared for him. So what does he do? He throws all of it away on a whim. He gives his money away, destroys everything he owns and completely abandons civilisation, all without telling his family a thing. This is one of the most reckless, selfish, idiotic, inconsiderate things I have ever heard of. I understand wanting to reconnect with nature, I understand that people feel that society is too materialistic. If you want to indulge those feelings, go camping. Go on safari. Volunteer for a charity. What you do not do is throw away your entire life. And if you do decide to destroy everything you have ever achieved, you could at least have the common courtesy to tell your parents where you are. He could easily have kept in touch with his family while on his insane quest. All he accomplished by keeping quiet was making his parents fear for his life. Fear which was perfectly justified, considering the ending. On his journey into the depths of stupidity, he met several people who were inexplicably sympathetic to his situation. They offered him every opportunity to live his life with them. He had every chance to abandon his aimless wandering, but he turned them all down. Why? Because he was convinced that he knew better than everybody else. He ends up dying due to his own bottomless stupidity when he eats poisonous berries, despite the fact that he had a guidebook which told him which berries were safe to eat. Any reasonable person would consult the book BEFORE eating the mystery fruits. I hated everything about him, throughout the film my fists were usually clenched. When he died at the end of the film, I imagine the audience was supposed to cry. I laughed out loud for five minutes. I know that makes me sound like a monster, but it's the truth. If a team of psychologists and writers studied me for years on end and created a character whose sole purpose was to make me angry, they would not even come close to the blinding fury that I experienced watching this film. As terrible as this sounds, I am glad Christopher McCandless is dead.