When the movie ended I felt a distinct sense of dissatisfaction with my own life - that there was not enough fight in it. The implication is that he will die, but the fight has brought him back to life. The movie ends just as Ottway charges the wolf. He then recites a poem which his father had written: He tapes his knife to one hand and broken mini-bar bottles between the fingers of his left. He then dumps the contents of his bag, the few items he had managed to scrounge from the wreck. All this time, the group had hoped they were moving farther away from the wolves territory, and now Ottway finds that he has walked right into the center of it. Ottway looks around and sees the carcasses of other animals and realizes he is actually in the wolves’ den. When he is done, he places his own on top.Īnd then the wolves appear. Each wallet he places respectfully on the ground, almost as if he is building an altar. There he pulls out the bag he had been carrying containing the wallets of all his now deceased companions which he has gradually collected, looking through their photographs of loved ones. We then see Ottway trudging through the snow until he can go no farther and collapses on his knees. (That’s a sentiment that the humanist in me thrills at.) When the sky does not respond, Ottway pauses and then says to himself, DO SOMETHING! FUCK FAITH! EARN IT! SHOW ME SOMETHING REAL! I NEED IT NOW, NOT LATER! Do something and I’ll believe in you until the day I die, I swear. You faulty prick, fraudulent motherfucker. After his last companion dies, in a particularly pointless fashion, drowned in a river when his foot gets stuck under a rock, Ottway climbs onto the bank and looks up at the sky. In the end, the only one left is Ottway, who had been ready to take his own life just hours earlier. Some believe that there must be some meaning in their survival, a proposition which seems increasingly dubious as those same “survivors” are later killed by the wolves. Throughout the movie, the survivors argue about the meaning of their circumstances. In addition to the wolves, which are at their heels (quite literally), the survivors have to contend with the elements, including a blizzard, lack of food, and the terrain, including one heart-stopping leap off of a cliff. They start with eight survivors and, as they move deeper into the forest, they gradually lose one after another. Rather than wait in the open for a rescue that is not coming, the group follows Ottway into the forest. The pack attacks Ottway, who survives, and then starts picking off other survivors. They crash in what they soon learn is the hunting ground of a large pack of wolves. The plane goes down in the Alaskan tundra. Ottway then gets on a plane with several other workers for the oil company.
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