MovieChat Forums > Into the Wild (2007) Discussion > Lousy effort, Mr Penn.

Lousy effort, Mr Penn.

posted 9 years ago by ArielBL
4 replies | jump to latest

Over 2 hours of preachy drivel.
I guess Sean Penn was aiming for a life/death/universe saga - but can he do 'deep?"
Honey, you were married to Madonna.

As for Jon Krakauer (author) ... who can forget the tragedy on Everest '96? People dying, others trying to save them ... while Jonny slept soundly in his tent with oxygen. Lucky he's a fiction writer.

This wasn't an epic tale of a young man seeking nirvana - just a patchwork of must-have stereotypical scenes:

Parents who argue ... oh no!
Deep, poetry-lovin' sister who keeps interrupting the movie with insightful soliloquies. Filler.
Hero burns money, then works for money ... 'cause he's deep, you see.
Meets lots of really nice people, no bad ones.
The aged hippies are wonderful.
Vince Vaughn and rednecks are wonderful.
Old guy is wonderful ... wants to adopt him and leave him the Leather ... even tho' the hero forced him to climb up a hill. Heart condition? No problem, ya gotta look at the scenery.

Even the bear is wonderful and refuses to eat the hero.
Or maybe he found self-indulgence unpalatable.

Lots of cloud scenes, hills, rivers, bugs, flowers, sound tracks, slow mo' ... on and on ... I'm giddy.
It was all over the place. Kinda wished he'd had sex with misery guts, Stewart, just for some light relief.

This was a poorly made, sorry tale of a narcissistic, privileged man, with lofty, childish ideals.
But neither Theroux, London nor Dostoyevsky could help when he munched on a bad leaf. So much for veganism.
And somehow, a slow agonising death was turned into a thing of beauty by Penn, because the hero was looking at a cloud (yep, another one).
Maybe Sean was channeling his divorce from Madonna.

To quote MP, he wasn't the Messiah, just a very naughty boy. RIP

[–] u-ozselcuk 9 years ago

Thank you, sir. I thought I was the only one having those thoughts.

"I hate it when people make their board signatures indistinguishable."

[–] AfroGeek 9 years ago

I liked this movie, but totally agree with you. Even that little montage at the end showing how all the characters he encountered somehow had their lives improved by their brief experiences with him was like a cap on the corniness of it all.

The image of discarding all ties and roughing it across the country and getting into all kinds of silly adventures is appealing and romantic, and Penn placated the armchair adventurers this movie was aimed at.

The idea of a kid with essentially daddy issues projecting his pissant problems onto society in general and turning it into a grandiose excuse for essentially running away from home in your mid 20s.

Take out the ham-fisted feel-good stuff and inject some darker foreshadowing about the characters naivety, and you've got a classic film. I liked some of the techniques Penn used though, he did a great job of moving the story along, and would love to see other works of his after his storytelling gets a little more "mature."

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Project Mayhem ID: In life I am ur432978. In death, I have a name. My name is AfroGeek.

[–] jharmon64 9 years ago

I can't disagree.

Poorly executed film.

4/10

[–] thepartydjz 9 years ago

I'm glad I found this thread. I really wanted to like this film but it just seemed to end up being a collage of unimpressive scenes. Does he actually eat food? A little realism and less "dreamism" would've helped this film a great deal. And WAY too much music, every scene transition was musically oriented and it didn't really add to the screenplay.