Grizzly Man (2005)
Directed by Werner Herzog
Follows the story of "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell and what the thirteen summers in a National Park in Alaska were like in his attempt to protect the grizzly bears. The film is full of unique images and a look into the spirit of a man who sacrificed himself for nature.
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What critics compared Grizzly Man to
In this regard, compare the film with Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), the documentary about self-styled grizzly bear activist Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by the very animals he sought to protect.
The audacity of a commitment that contains such a high potential for death brings to mind the story of Timothy Treadwell ( "Grizzly Man," a Werner Herzog documentary), another adventurer who engaged in a dangerous enterprise in a remote location.
Werner Herzog’s “ Grizzly Man ” documents the life and death of another soul who sought spiritual purity in an environment that was drawn more from Hobbes than Thoreau.
Consider Timothy Treadwell, whose video diary of life among the Alaskan grizzlies was chronicled in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man.
I couldn't help but think of another film about an idealist who got in trouble from romanticising the Alaskan wilderness, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man , but while that film was almost comically happy to indict the protagonist's idiocy, Penn clearly expects us to regard McCandless's fate as a beautiful tragedy.
Both the cruel beauty of the film and this quality of its main character call to mind Werner Herzog’s similar, and similarly brilliant, documentary “Grizzly Man,” about Timothy Treadwell, a nature lover who lived among the bears in Alaska and treated them as big fluffy pets, until they ate him.
It’s a performance that seems to take cues from both Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy and Joaquin Phoenix in The Master, although the real reference could be Timothy Treadwell in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man – another character risking his life to capture something deadly on video, well aware of both the danger it entails and the self-aggrandizement that it generates.
After such repetition, you’ll root for his beloved raptor Blue to eat him like “Grizzly Man” (2005).
Not for him the avant-garde broodiness of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, or even the metaphysical speculations of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man: working alongside cinematographers Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, he jazzes up proceedings with split screens, neo-psychedelic images, showy camera angles (one shot is taken from the perspective of an empty bottle, which Ralston’s tongue comes at like an angry lizard).
But Mother Nature is a fickle mistress and, as she has proven in other equally engrossing true-life tales such as "Grizzly Man" and "Into the Wild", she has a way of teaching a lesson to those who get too comfortable with her.
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Watching this movie reminded me of a scene from the documentary Grizzly Man, in which Werner Herzog listens to an audio recording of a man being mauled to death by a bear.
Herzog, no stranger to examining crackpots on film ("Fitzcarraldo," "Woyzeck," "Aguirre: The Wrath of God"), assembles archive footage alongside interviews with Treadwell's family, friends, and colleagues.
You already know J.K. Simmons’s ferocious jazz teacher in the electrifying Whiplash if you’ve seen Full Metal Jacket, Battle Royale or Grizzly Man (he’d be the grizzly).