Into the Wild
Sean Penn | USA | 2007
148 min

“It should not be denied that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations. Absolute freedom. And the road has always led west.”

Frustrated by society and the pressures of life, Chris leaves it all behind when he graduates. He gives his college fund to charity, packs a few things, and hits the roads, moving from one place to another. He doesn’t even tell his family. His final goal is Alaska, desiring to live alone and away from everything and everyone.

The need to be a fugitive from your own life must have cross a lot of people’s minds, and I’m going to randomly guess that it is especially prominent in guys. Many times, I have fantasized about it. Imagine letting go of it all. Car installments, google news, interest rates, morning traffics, lost sales, quarterly budgets, pay raises, family, impressing people, fads, real estate prices, economic boom, economic crash, facebook friend requests, internet slowdown, car accidents, fines, alarms, weekdays, weekends, and a billion other nuisances. I can see myself leaving Dubai and going to Iran and living in a small house beside a small village, with just books, blank papers, and a river beside me.

I know I’ll never do it and if I do it, I probably won’t like it. Chris does it and it is the perfect escapist fantasy for me. Chris escape does not end well and his family is hurt due to his disappearance, but his journey still strikes something in me. One of the most poignant scenes for me was Chris being denied rafting down the river without a permit. I know things like this are for our safety but there is tragic about it. We live in an era full of boundaries to protect us from ourselves, but at the same time, there is death all around us. If human life is so important to limit its freedom, then why are we allowing thousands around us die due to war and poverty?

There is beauty in adventure and there is beauty in escape, and for the duration of the movie, I liked following Chris. It was a great distraction before I had to go back to the numbness of my life.

“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ’cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild”