User:Astrid van Nimwegen/Description of work

Annotation about the movie ‘into the wild’

The film is directed by Sean Penn (2007) and based on a book written by Jon Krakauer (1996). The book is based on a true story about a man, Christopher McCandless, who travels through North America. So the main character in the film is McCandless, he is raised in an upper class family. After his graduation, he decides to give away all his money to charity and choose to reject the luxury live he has. He starts a cross-country journey through North America. First he travels by his own car but when he lost the car in an accident he starts hitchhiking. The film shows the adventures he experience and the relationships he develops with the people he meets on his travel. It actually shows us McCandless’ process of self-realisation and the only thing he can rely on is his own person and the feeling of ‘freedom’ he tries to achieve. You see the boy become an adult influenced by the survival in the wild and you see his consciousness grow by his experiences. In the last part he camps in an old bus for a while which he discovered in the middle of the wilderness. He tries to survive and then after a while he realise that you only can be happy when you can share this feeling with others. He want to go back to his family but the water in the river is much higher then it was when he crossed it the first time. So he is stuck in the bus and becomes a sort of prisoner of his own fate. He keeps himself alive by eating plants and all things he can find in the nature but in the end he accidentally eats poisonous plants and gets ill. You see him slowly dying.