Self-aware movie about self-absorbed idiot

Rating: 2/10 (7 June 2013)

For anything based (especially closely) on a true story, there is no getting away from the basics of the story. And for this one, there's no getting away from the fact that McCandless made decisions throughout the narrative so bad most 6-year-olds would do better. I have thought this since the original Backpacker article, and do not understand why anyone cares why this particular person got himself killed in the wilderness.
The movie had a chance to do that regardless and I totally gave it a chance. Films can use the medium to express a different perspective even of topics that you disagree with. In that, Penn and his cohorts totally, totally failed me. It's 100% an L.A. version of what the outdoors is about, repeated encountered with what I can only characterize as the idealized version of hippie/dropout culture; really every scene to me was trite. The narration, overly-digital handwriting, and whole structure (everything, all the way through contemporary pop music every 11 minutes to set the timeframe,) completely ruined it for me and not once did I ever get totally absorbed into the story, and think I was watching anything but a TV movie.
Two stars only because it was executed in a fundamentally workman-like manner, and there was no actually painful acting, mismatched footage, overly visible crew or FX, etc. But it was a close call. Bad show.