Starring: Liam Neeson
Rated: PG-13 for violence/disturbing content including bloody images, and for pervasive language
Warning: this review contains major spoilers of this movie. Read at your own risk.
No matter who you are or where you live, everyone is searching for answers to life’s questions. One of the most stark examples of this is Joe Carnahan’s latest film The Grey, which stars Liam Neeson as John Ottway, who leads a band of survivors of a devastating plane crash across the Alaskan desert back to civilization. During their trek, they must survive man-eating wolves, the harsh Alaskan elements, and the effects of their own worldviews. It’s as brutal as it sounds; beauty is an outcast in this movie; besides the bleak and grainy 16mm film stock, there is little style to the film, which was probably a conscious choice of the director, but still makes it very uninteresting visually. More importantly, the battle of worldviews between the characters ends in a way that is contradictory and confusing.
Towards the end of the film, Liam Neeson's character (who earlier claimed to be an atheist) looks to the heavens and screams at God to reveal the purpose of this senseless world around him, and begs for Him to show him something real. When God is silent, Ottway curses and mumbles that he will do it himself. We are then given a climax of the film, devoid of meaning and connection to the earlier events, which devalues the internal and external plot the characters have been going through. It's one thing to say "life is meaningless" but it's an even darker thing to say "even the search for meaning is purposeless." First off, it never deals with the fact that, if the search is purposeless, why are we searching for it? (As C.S. Lewis explained, our search for purpose proves that there is a need for purpose.) Furthermore, this is contradictory because Neeson (and the film) can't escape the search and plot; Ottway claims he doesn't believe in God yet still cries to the heavens. They claim that life is meaningless, yet they still fight for survival and to find meaning. They even fail to see how the plot of the film shows a purpose-driven and sovereign hand, from their survival of plane wreck to Ottway's failed attempt to commit suicide in the back-story of the film. There is a difference to say "I can't see the purpose" and saying "there is no purpose", but The Grey lumps the two together, which is incredibly unfair. Among it's many other faults, The Grey failed to really think through it's own story; the sovereignty and meaning of life is written in every frame, even if the characters failed to realize it.
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