Man vs. nature. Whoever wins, audiences do too. The popular genre pits human beings against the environments and conditions they have spent thousands of years evolving away from, stranding city-dwellers in the wilderness, the icy tundra, or natural disasters that test who they really are, and what they are willing to do to survive.
And yet, man vs. nature movies can be thoughtful too. This weekend’s release, Wild, stars Reese Witherspoon as a woman who has lost control of her life, but who finds inner peace after conquering a 2,000+ mile nature trail. With that in mind, we challenged our resident film critics – William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold and Brian Formo – to come up with their picks for The Best Movie Ever in the man vs. nature genre. They could picking a ripping thriller, a meditative drama, or anything in between.
Find out what they came up with and scroll down to the bottom of the page to vote for YOUR pick for The Best Man vs. Nature Movie Ever! And come back every single Wednesday for another installment of CraveOnline’s competitive criticism series.
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Brian Formo’s Pick: Letter Never Sent (1960)
The best man vs. nature movie ever is a 1960 Russian film that’s only recently seen the light of day thanks to Francis Ford Coppola’s efforts to restore the only print that in North America. It’s streaming on Hulu. It was name-dropped by future Star Wars director Rian Johnson as a source of inspiration for his upcoming far, far away galactic films. It’s Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letter Never Sent.
Kalatozov is perhaps most known to cinephiles for his gorgeously lush and poetic propaganda art film I am Cuba. And Letter Never Sent, too, has some anti-capitalist undertones. Mother Russia sends a team of four geologists to retrieve diamonds from a remote Siberian forest. Amongst the small group there is a love triangle, inherent jealousy brewing and the individual concerns of a married man who is away from his wife. But when a forest fire traps them they must co-operate to survive.
Letter Never Sent is one of the most beautiful films ever made. The camera spins to expose their isolation from every corner. It zooms through myriad tree branches to show the immense threatening tinder as the flames grow. Images are briefly overlaid to tenderly show the diamond hunters losing their individualism as they come to share one eye, one viewpoint. And they look out for each other. For Russia.
Witney Seibold’s Pick: Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)
A common cry of the modern age is that the world is growing ever smaller. Thanks to the increasing speeds of travel technology and ease of access to global information, the Earth now may appear to be an easily-traversed place. Unless, of course, you try walking it. Or exploring it. Or going to places with few people in it. Or actually experiencing it first hand. Despite that oft-repeated axiom of modernity, Earth is still an awesomely vast, ineffably complicated, scary, difficult, and terrifying place. It’s also loaded with paradises, placid pockets of joy, and a level of beauty that the human mind can only barely comprehend. Humankind is a child of Earth, and we have no choice but to stand in terror and awe of the system that produced us.
There is one filmmaker who has made several excellent features about humanity facing the terror and the awe of the natural world, and that is Werner Herzog. Herzog has made several films, both fictional and documentary, that take place in challenging an inhospitable environments, telling tales of humans unable to face the chaos and indifference of nature. Indeed, some of Herzog’s movies are essentially tales of their own making. Fizcarraldo, for instance, is about a madman trying to haul a boat up over a hill. The only way to film that was to actually haul a boat up over a hill.
Herzog’s masterpiece, however, is his 1972 film Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Set in 1560, Aguirre tells the tale of a group of Spanish conquistadors (led by madman Klaus Kinski) who are in search of El Dorado in the jungles of Peru (where the film was shot). As the conquistadors continue their dogged quest, death and madness set in. By the end of the film, the conquistadors have been quite literally replaced by monkeys. This is not an adventure film about tension, however. It’s about the inevitability of of nature’s dominance over man. There is a scene, for example, wherein a raft is caught in a whirlpool. People row furiously to escape, but cannot. The next day, the raft is in the same place, but everyone has died. In the struggle of humanity vs. nature, Herzog seems to declaratively posit, nature will win without even thinking about it.
William Bibbiani’s Pick: The Edge (1997)
When I think about man vs. nature stories I tend to to think about yellow-paged young adult novels about young boys taming wolves or fending for themselves with only a single sharp implement to their name. There is a fantasy or, depending on your point of view, a nightmare to be found in tales of human beings trapped in an environment that wants to kill them. As deadly as the elements can be, we still like to think that the deadliest natural creation of all is man him- or herself, even after centuries of conditioning to survive in environments where the scariest thing imaginable is taxes.
With that in mind, my pick for the best man vs. nature movie is Lee Tamahori’s The Edge, written by David Mamet. Sir Anthony Hopkins stars as a wealthy old man with a beautiful young trophy wife, envied from just a few feet away by the sexy, handsome Alec Baldwin. When a bird strike crashes Hopkins, Baldwin and Harold Perrineau in the wilds of Alaska, they are forced to brave the wilderness to survive.
And you would think that The Edge would depict the billionaire fogey as a hapless fool, or as someone with a valuable lesson to learn about what it takes to be a “real” man. And you would be wrong. The adventures are beautifully filmed and the bear attacks are terrifying, but what makes The Edge stand out is its clever rethinking of how man survives in nature. It is not the strapping caveman alpha who thrives in the wild, it is the thoughtful man who actually bothered to study. Physical strength is a necessity but without Hopkins’ intelligence no one would have been able to survive the dangers that Mamet and Tamahori lay before them. Man defeats nature, as much as he can, by using his evolutionary advantage – his brain – and not through sheer, punishing physical endurance.
Hopkins and Baldwin are at their best here, and Tamahori films it all with equal parts grace and brutality, but the real star is Mamet. The writer of Glengarry Glen Ross once again explores issues of masculinity but in an environment that offers boundless thrills and entertainment, not just firecracker dialogue. Although there is, of course, plenty of that too.
