Tracks (2013)
Directed by John Curran
Accompanied only by her faithful dog and four camels, an Australian satisfies her craving for solitude by embarking on a solo trip across the desert from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean.
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What critics compared Tracks to
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee (“Dallas Buyers Club”) from a screenplay by novelist Nick Hornby, the 1995-set film is an episodic outdoor solo trek in the vein of “Into the Wild” and the recent “Tracks.”
It’s reminiscent of two other recent films, “Into the Wild” and “Tracks.”
Back in September, Mia Wasikowska starred in Tracks , an adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s memoir about her solo trek across the Australian desert in 1977.
Wild is the third movie to be released this year about a woman who goes solo walkabout; there was also Tracks, based on another desert-hike memoir, and the underseen Redwood Highway.
Still, the film could face some competition from John Curran’s equally accomplished “Tracks” (set to open Sept. 19 Stateside), this year’s other adaptation of a bestselling woman-in-the-wilderness memoir, and it remains to be seen whether it can improve on the modest commercial performance of films like “Into the Wild,” “127 Hours” and “All Is Lost.”
One of the things that make Cheryl more complicated and compelling than the heroine of “Tracks” (this year’s earlier woman-schlepping-across-the-desert movie) is that, along the trail, she experiences every encounter with men as fraught with erotic possibility—or trepidation.
Think Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless in Sean Penn’s 2007 epic Into the Wild, giving his inheritance away to charity and hiking his way to Alaska, or the forthcoming saga Wild, with Reese Witherspoon making her way up the Pacific Crest Trail on foot from the Mexican border to Canada.
So it's like Into the Wild, but terrible, scored as a child or James Horner would score it and directed like a not-on-purpose horror film in the way that people who've never seen any horror films...or other films...shoot in locations like these.
Nor is it a mystery… like, say, the similarly themed Into the Wild , the true story of Christopher McCandless, who starved to death (for reasons still not fully understood ) in the Alaskan wilderness because he was woefully unprepared for life off the grid.