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Rating:  - just awful!
Chris is of those people who have had everything handed to him on a silver platter. He graduates from college with honors, no debt and $25,000 left in his college fund account. When his parents offer to put him through Harvard Law and buy him a new car he has a tantrum claiming that he wants nothing to do with their materialistic ways and donates his $25,000 to charity. He runs off to hitchhike and live off the kindness of strangers for a number of months (they feed him, clothe him, employ him, he uses their running water and appliances, etc.). During this time he meets many people who are impressed by his brilliance and insights. All this time his parents are wondering where he is, how he is, and if he's okay, but so is his loving teenage sister. He's decided he's going to go to Alaska to live in the wild so he takes a backpack and wanders around.
He does foolish things like shoots a moose (which weigh anywhere from 600-1800 pounds) for food (it's just him) and all the while he's grumbling about selfish, greedy people and living off the land while living in an abandoned bus with a bed, wood stove, etc. He eventually dies by eating some poisonous berries (he thinks it's the fruit of one plant when it's really another).
Five minutes into the movie, the protagonist shows himself to be spoiled, selfish, and immature and never lets up. The phenomenal soundtrack is the only thing that saves this disaster.
Rating: - Into The Self Indulgent
"Into the Wild" provided nothing more than the story of a boy in a man's body. Idealistic, self indulgent, inexperienced and incapable of coping with the vicissitudes of real life, he ventures into the wild. Before doing that he sends twenty-four thousand dollars to charity and burns his pocket money. Then he becomes a drifter, dependent on others, having to earn money to get supplies to go into the wild. Not sensible. Once in the wild, he lives in an abandoned bus, murders an innocent moose he doesn't have the experience to butcher properly, can't cross a swollen river to get back to civilization, mistakenly eats the wrong plant and dies an agonizing death on the bus. This film was boring. The protagonist's idealism, inexperience and eccentricity are annoying. My only feeling for anyone in the film was for his poor parents and sister. The loss of a child is a penance few bear well. The agony of not knowing where he was for two years is, as any parent can empathize with, a slow, agonizing torture. He rejected his parents and their lifestyle and in the end he achieved the highest revenge he could: he left them with a void for the rest of their lives. The sort of self absorption, selfishness, meanness and recrimination does not rise to an art form. There is nothing noble in what that boy did.
Rating:  - Best Film of the Decade
There's not much to criticize in this film, it's almost flawless, a seamless piece of art. It's the composite of the True story of Christopher McCandles, The Jon Krakauer novel, the screen play directed by Sean Penn and the sound track By Eddie Vedder. I've never heard a better cohesiveness between a soundtrack and a screenplay than in this movie, it's haunting. Sean Penn uses a chapter format sequence for the movie in the sense of the Krakauer novel and the literary prowess and potential of McCandles himself who may quite possibly have become a great writer had he not encountered the profound and inadvertent course of advents that culminated in his fate. The performances by all the actors were great and the Eddie Vedder songs are powerful. A must see film for anyone who loves dramas about "push the envelope" type personalities.
Rating: - boring
This movie is soooo slowww, with nothing really going on. I found it boring and turned it off after 30 minutes.
Rating: - An existential odyssey
Into the Wild will not be to everyone's liking. Some people will dislike the protagonist, Christopher McCandless, and others will find the movie's pacing to be slow. Yet, I was fascinated by and even a little envious of Chris's dogged attempt to find meaning in life and his disregard for other people's expectations. Like the ascetic monks who would wander into the desert to find enlightenment, Chris was determined to find the answers to spiritual questions by renouncing all worldly things and, ultimately, all contact with other people.
Jaded by the shallowness of America's consumer culture and the poisonous dynamics of family life as he grew up, and inspired by writers like Tolstoy, Thoreau, and London who praised simplicity and being connected to nature, Chris decides after graduating from Emory University to give away his money, break off all contact with his wealthy family, and take off on the mother of all road trips. He does not get far before his car is damaged in flash flooding, so he abandons the automobile and makes the remainder of his journey by walking, canoeing, hitchhiking, or sneaking onto freight trains. Chris travels to various places in America and Mexico and plunges into new experiences, new friendships, and a new romance. Drawing him onward is the lure of his "great Alaska adventure" in which he would live alone in Alaska's big sky country. Along his circuitous route to Alaska, he breaks the hearts of many people he leaves behind, including a lonely old man, Ron Franz (played by Hal Holbrook, in a touching performance), who offers to adopt him. Although Chris shows his fondness for Ron, Chris keeps him at a safe emotional distance by saying that happiness cannot be found in human relationships.
[SPOILER ALERT] After Chris at last makes his way into the Alaskan backcountry in April, he makes a series of mistakes (not properly preserving his wild game and eating poisonous berries) that bring him to the brink of death. At last experiencing the most profound type of solitude--that of an isolated person confronting his imminent end--Chris concludes that a happy life is one shared with others, not one spent alone. The viewer is left to ponder the question of whether, if Chris had recovered, he truly would have reintegrated into society or whether the "call of the wild" would have led him back onto his solitary path. In other words, even if Chris did not want to die alone, it's unclear whether he would have wanted to live alone.
Raising perennial questions about whether society improves or spoils its members, whether happiness is found in social settings or in confronting nature alone, whether a person should live by uncompromising ideals or should make his peace with society's numerous and serious flaws, whether someone who so completely rejects society's shared ideals is a genius or a madman, and whether Chris was running away from his problems or engaging in a necessarily private spiritual quest, Into the Wild gives the thoughtful viewer much to think about. Yet, the movie also engages the viewers' emotions by showing Chris's desperate yearning for a pure and intensely lived life and the fragile and combustible dynamics of human relationships. For viewers who are more interested in a mature and contemplative film, Into the Wild is highly recommended.
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