Yes, I know it was because of the storm in the Pyrenees but are storms there so violents that can kill one grown man? Is not the storm itself that can kill one person ( unless is a tornado ) but landfills, floods, falling trees a.s.o., seemed he died from hiphotermia but neither seemed could happen in such a place. Opinions?
People die because they follow common sense over the wisdom of experience. Take the chilean desert for example. Would you bring wool and heavy clothes? Of course you would not. It's a desert! Well. You'd die in the night when the temperature reaches -5 degrees. Also if you go to The Andes you can get severe sunburns if you don't have sunblock. The woods to the south of Chile are also another friendly deathtrap. The Andes give you perfect orientation, there's a lot of fresh water, and the vegetation is not too thick... You can even find berries and rabbits. But if you are really unlucky a Puma will kill you if you wander into its domain. Oh, and if you manage to get away, those berries will kill you. They were tasty but poisonous. :(
What I'm saying is that if a storm doesn't kill you back home, it doesn't mean a storm in another country will not, even if there's less rain, no lightning, and just soft wind.
It doesn't matter how Daniel died, and it's better not to know. The movie wouldn't be so appealing if he died doing something stupid (which of course, he did. Otherwise there'd be more dead people and the cops would have explained how it was not his fault to comfort the grieving father). My theory? He tried to take a shortcut, got disoriented and died of dehydration just a few kilometers away from the main road.
The conditions that caused his death are not important. The movie is about death, grief, the people thrown in our path, and how we deal with all of it. I thought it was a very inspirational film!!
It did kinda look like he had wandered off the trail. I had assumed he was simply caught in a storm in the Pyrenees based on what the Gendarme said. Remember he was hiking light so may have been ill-equipped for a sudden, severe storm in the mountains. But there was also a small part of me that wondering if Daniel didn't choose to wander off, get lost and die...???
Not being one of the writers, I can't speak as to how a fictional character died :), but three years ago, a couple of weeks before I started walking the camino myself, the was a guy caught in bad weather who died. The visibility was so bad, he wandered off the edge of a cliff he didn't even know was there.