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Into the Wild [2007] | ![Into the Wild [2007]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51c4v3n9qWL._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Director: Sean Penn
Actors: Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener
Studio: Paramount Home Entertainment (UK)
Category: DVD
List Price: £19.99
Buy New: £4.82
You Save: £15.17 (76%)
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Rating:  39 reviews
Sales Rank: 106
Format: Pal
Languages: English (Unknown), English (Original Language)
Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Region: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 143 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5014437942531
ASIN: B000YIAXJ6
Theatrical Release Date: January 31, 2008
Release Date: March 10, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Amazon.co.uk Review
A superb cast and an even-handed treatment of a true story buoy Into the Wild, Sean Penn's screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer's bestselling book. Emile Hirsch stars as Christopher McCandless, scion of a prosperous but troubled family who, after graduating from Atlanta's Emory University in the early 1990s, decides to chuck it all in and become a self-styled "aesthetic voyager" in search of "ultimate freedom." He certainly doesn't do it by halves: after donating his substantial savings account to charity and literally torching the rest of his cash, McCandless changes his name (to "Alexander Supertramp"), abandons his family (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden as his bickering, clueless parents and Jena Malone as his baffled but loving sister, who relates much of the back-story in voice-over), and hits the road, bound for the Alaskan bush and determined not to be found. For the next two years he lives the life of a vagabond, working a few odd jobs, kayaking through the Grand Canyon into Mexico, landing on L.A.'s Skid Row, and turning his back on everyone who tries to befriend him (including Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker as two kindly, middle-aged hippies and Hal Holbrook in a deeply affecting performance as an old widower who tries to take "Alex" under his wing). Penn, who directed and wrote the screenplay, alternates these interludes with scenes depicting McCandless' Alaskan idyll--which soon turns out be not so idyllic after all. Settling into an abandoned school bus, he manages to sustain himself for a while, shooting small game (and one very large moose), reading, and recording his existential musings on paper. But when the harsh realities of life in the wilderness set in, our boy finds himself well out of his depth, not just ill-prepared for the rigors of day to day survival but realising the importance of the very thing he wanted to escape--namely, human relationships. It'd be easy to either idealise McCandless as a genuinely free spirit, unencumbered by the societal strictures that tie the rest of us down, or else dismiss him as a hopelessly callow naïf, a fool whose disdain for practical realities ultimately doomed him. Into the Wild does neither, for the most part telling the tale with an admirable lack of cheap sentiment and leaving us to decide for ourselves. --Sam Graham
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| Customer Reviews: Read 34 more reviews...
 Yearning for freedom September 25, 2008
maximus (manchester, uk)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This film pulls you compellingly along and into the journey of Chris McCandless' life. Through superbly deft narrative, cinematography, portrayals and direction, you could feel exactly that overwhelming sense of wanting to be away from what he perceived as baggages of his life, and his optimistic view and infectious enthusiasm for his ultimate goal.
The total sense of yearning for freedom can be felt overwhelmingly, which makes the conclusion and final realisation, all the more moving, devastating, claustrophobic and uplifting all at the same time. How can that be you may ask, I don't know .. all I can say it's a stunning feat of highest achievement in movie making: that's why I have to give "Into the Wild" the full 5 stars!
Into The Wild September 21, 2008
Spider Monkey (UK)
'Into The Wild' is a very gentle, introspective film that had me engrossed the whole way through. Emile Hirsch's performance draws you immediately into his characters (Chris') pursuit of a free, unfettered life, in touch with nature and it's finer elements. You understand his idealism and his strong focus to achieve his aims. Sean Penn directed this film superbly, one part that stands out is when Chris goes into a big city and his feelings of disconnect and alienation. Penn manages to show these emotions (using various film and camera techniques) with real skill and you feel as awkward and out of place as Chris does. The soundtrack is awesome, with music by Eddie Vedder and it really adds to the overall feel of the film. You can really see the benefits of this type of lifestyle and a part of you yearns to follow the life Chris did and to experience life, relationships and nature on a fundamental, stripped back level. Having read the book I was aware of the general story and this film is remarkably faithful to it, there are very few deviations. In addition, I felt none of the frustrations with Chris' attitude that I felt when reading the book, being portrayed on the screen and acted so well, I understood the mindset a little more. He is shown to be more naive in the book than in the film, but this made the film a better viewing experience, they are different media after all. This film offers some insightful ideas and philosophy, but you aren't spoon fed them or have them rammed down your throat, which is a refreshing change from a Hollywood film. With amazing locations, excellent acting, top direction and an inspired soundtrack this makes for one great film and one I highly recommend.
Look Again August 7, 2008
Jeff Donovan (Dorset, UK)
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
Wow!!....This film is truly a hidden gem.
I had no expectations when I bought this film and didn't know the story, but by the end of the film I looked at life a little differently.
The images on screen along with the soundtrack works to take you into this lads life, the way he looks at things around him is a eye opener. So many people go though life looking but not seeing what's around them.
The film will effect you; and at the end it haunted me for a couple of days after and to a point still does. Buy or borrow this film it is a must see film. Not a bockbuster but a film that will touch your soul.
 Wildly overrated July 21, 2008
Demob Happy (London / Grenoble)
2 out of 14 found this review helpful
`Into the Wild' is an apaptation of Jon Krakauer's bestselling true story about Christopher McCandless, a middle-class graduate who dropped out and hit the road in search of "ultimate freedom" in Alaska. Sean Penn's treatment of the story is an embarassingly self-righteous and romanticised interpretation that says much more about the director than McCandless himself.
Alot has been written about the film's `beauty', and the cinematographer has done an impressive job aestheticising the American landscape. But a film about a fatal underestimation of the of `the wild''s inherent inhospitability warranted a less classic, National Geographic style approach and something a bit more brutally honest. However, the whole film panders to McCandless's (aka Alexander Supertramp) portenteous diary entries - written in neat block capitals as to be nice and clear for the viewer - about being an "aesthetic voyager", as well as his sisters estimations that everything he said "had to be said". Thus McCandless is the Byronic hero (a quote from Lord Byron even opens the film) dispensing, but never receiving, graduate-level literary wisdoms to everyone he meets in the same breath as denouncing his university education as a pointless and oppressive fraud.
`Into the Wild' is crawlingly obsequeious to Chris, it's two-and-a-quarter hours padded out with slow-motion action shots of him canoing the rapids (against the will of the petty bureaucrats who try to stop him!) or showering au naturel, and montages of him compensating for his solitude by making himself laugh with his own wacky jokes. All this as Eddy Vedder, late of Pearl Jam, provides a soundtrack of textbook "alt" country, all husky baritone and rootsy acoustics; all the bland aural signifiers that say `America', `Big Landscapes', and `Open Road' with the subtlety of a Route 66 juggernault.
An interesting counterpoint to this film is Werner Herzog's fascinating documentary `Grizzly Man' about the similar Timothy Treadwell, who suffered an even grizzlier fate (pardon the pun) in Alaska. The difference between the two films is startling: whereas Sean Penn idolises McCandless with all the slobbering sycophancy of a teeny-bopper, Herzog creates a complex portrait of a man ultimately deluded into believing he had an affinity with bears because he was in fact running from something, probably himself. When questioned - quite astutely, and by a man nearly three times his age - what he is running from, Penn's McCandless tells him to make "a radical change of lifestyle".
In another scene he offers an almost girlfriend the pearliest of wisdoms, "If you want something, just reach out and grab it"; a parting shot gratefully and tearfully received. Elsewhere his presence heals the rift in a marriage whose protagonists are given sympathetic portraits not afforded to McCandless's parents. These ageing hippies, like the elderly widow he befriends in the later stages of the film (who even offers to adopt him), are impelled to act as surrogate parents to Chris, but somehow end up being fathered by him - at least in Into the Wild's interpretation of the story.
No such sympathy of portrayal is afforded to Chris' real parents, who are persistently blamed for all the ills of a materialistic, oppressive family life and thus a materialistic and oppressive society. Chris's sister provides a merciless tirade against their parents - who are not given a voice to defend themselves - in monologue through several stages of the film. It is sweetly spoken but nonetheless hectoring vitriol that at one point reminds us that the McCandlesses are not worthy of our compassion - despite their bitter sorrow at Chris's disappearance - because it was really rather their fault that he had left in the first place. Maybe the McCandlesses were not very nice people, but nobody deserves to lose a child and the appropriation of the film's voice by an apparently vengeful family member leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
One particularly embarrassing scene witnesses Chris scale an Alaskan peak as the camera spins around him, arms aloft in a kind of unironic Di Caprio-King-of-the-world moment. Scored by some quasi-spiritual yodelling, it's dizzyingly sycophantic, as if Chris had invented the mountains themselves. Other scenes, including Chris joining a would-be-but-underage girlfriend on stage at a traveller camp concert, are so cringingly mawkish you don't know where to look.
But it is Sean Penn, much more than Chris McCandless ("I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one"), who is to blame for this patronising and self-important movie. Having wrote and directed the screenplay, Penn takes full responsibility for this massively imbalanced portrait which refuses to countenance the notion that perhaps McClandless was a troubled, self-destructive soul, by turns both victim and victimiser of his family. By idolising him, it makes short work of Chris' ultimate delusion, that he fatally underestimated the wilderness he so romanticised. The film is like being locked in a room with Penn - presumably taking a break from preaching people about the evils of the world or awarding the Palme D'Or to films he considers politically righteous - for over two hours; and you can't get a more damning verdict than that.
Confused July 14, 2008
Trionon (London, UK)
0 out of 11 found this review helpful
The cast is quite good, the concept is somewhat doubtful with the elements of some tedious moralizing in places. It's no masterpiece and that unfortunate young man is no hero or adventurer, just a very confused individual possibly too egocentric and suffering some mental problems. and I was not moved or touched, nor found it easy to empathise with him but just kept thinking - what a waste and more importantly - why did he have to do this?
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