The Grey

Joe Carnahan’s film comes from Ian MacKenzie Jeffers’s story “Ghost Walker”; Jeffers co-wrote the screenplay. Bradley Cooper was cast first, for a much younger man; the part went to Liam Neeson and the film aged with him. None of it was shot in Alaska; British Columbia stood in. In the first week it was 40 below and Carnahan and Dallas Roberts came away with frostbite. The wolves, though, are mostly animatronic puppets and computer animation. It did buy four wolf carcasses there, two as props and two eaten by the cast; PETA and WildEarth Guardians called for a boycott. The real decision is the ending. Carnahan shot a version where Ottway fights the alpha wolf and cut it rather than wreck a working film to show a man fighting a wolf. After the credits a short shot shows Ottway lying across the wolf, which is still breathing. Marketing turned the poster line “Live and die on this day” into “Live or die on this day”, unwilling to tell the audience yet that he dies. A good fit if you take the screen going black just as the promised wolf fight starts as a choice, not a loss. Not for you if you expected attacks; most of the film is men at a fire talking about dead fathers and belief.