Into The Wild Analysis

These are some rave reviews by renown critics. The most interesting points are highlighted in bold:

Author: Roger Ebert in Chicago Sun-Times

Date: September 27, 2007

Source: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/into-the-wild-2007

“Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which I read with a fascinated dread, tells the story of a 20-year-old college graduate who cashes in his law school fund and, in the words of Mark Twain, lights out for the territory. He drives west until he can drive no farther, and then north into the Alaskan wilderness.

Sean Penn's spellbinding film adaptation of this book stays close to the source. He keeps journals in which he sees himself in the third person as a heroic loner, renouncing civilization, returning to the embrace of

The resulting film is a richly, spaciously rendered account of landscape and moodscape: long, wordless scenes flow into each other, as McCandless heads off in search of American freedom, hitch-hiking or riding the boxcars, taking transient jobs. The colours are the rich browns, ochres and sunset yellows I associate with the indie cinema of the 1970s.

Emile Hirsch gives a very good performance as the intelligent and candid young McCandless, an idealist and a romantic, but he is also stubborn, driven and selfish. There is something regressive and dysfunctional in McCandless, a fear of human interaction. "You're wrong if you think the joy of life comes from human relationships," is one of the last things McCandless says to Franz. The last weeks of his life appear to have been spent reading Tolstoy, and it is an incidental point of interest in Penn's film that reading is important: the solitary act of just sitting there with a book, for hour after hour.

This is a serious, personal movie about what it is to be human, and what happens when we admire nature more than humanity: does it make us less than human, or do we fulfil and even transcend our humanity? There is food for thought and food for every kind of feeling in Sean Penn's outstanding