alambacher Movie Critique "A Cry In The Wild"Mark Griffith teams up with actor Jared Rushton to portray Gary Paulsen's novel "Hatchet".The story is about a boy named Brian Robenson who survives a plane crash and learns to survive alone while changing dramatically throughout this interesting story. The movie states very clearly how frustrated and alone Brian feels. Jared Rushton is very good at acting out Brian's thoughts and goals after he lost hope of being rescued. It is also very clear for the audience, when Brian is angry. Mark Griffith really messed a few things up like changing the sequence of events in "Hatchet". He also changes many details of the book, which are often replaced by the same black bear. Also, there are many unnecessary props including: bear cubs, a piece of metal from the plane, worms, and a glass from which the pilot drinks. It is very hard to see Brian evolving in to the new Brian throughout the movie. Actually, he doesn't. He overreacts with things like his fire going out and his hatchet falling to the bottom of the lake. There are big gaps in between scenes, like when he suddenly is very good at archery. Gary Paulsen describes very clearly how and why Brian goes and gets the emergency pack from the plane, most of this was ignored in the movie. Mark Griffith and his team change everything and put it in to a different order. Also, it seems as if they ran out of time, since most of the important events are all seen in the last 15 minutes. It reminds you of somebody pressing a fast-forward button, and all the important events which are still to come are all shown to the audience at once, right before the movie comes to a surprising end that is not written about in the book. There are parts when you expect something exciting to happen, but the result is disappointing. All in all, "A Cry In The Wild" deserves 2 from 10 stars.The movie may have an exciting theme, but the content is not very interesting. Mark Griffith did not include enough important details, though he added to many things that did not correspond to the original story too earn it another star. A first step to more stars for the movie would have been to leave out all the bear attacks and put the events in to their original order so that it would resemble the novel "Hatchet" a bit more.

kluseba This movie is a moderate budget television adaption of the critically acclaimed novel "Hatchet" written by the American author of young adult literature Gary James Paulsen. The short novel published in 1987 tells the story of a young teenager who has to survive for several weeks in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash.The main challenge of this eight-two minutes long movie from 1990 was the fact that the whole story is carried by the main character alone. Most of the novel and the movie takes place in the wilderness and features no dialogues but some soliloquies. Child actor Jared Rushton did an accurate job even though I disliked the fact that a sixteen-year old teenager played the role of an unexperienced thirteen-year old boy.Despite the solid acting, this movie sometimes feels like a National Geographic documentary that shows us incredible landscapes such as forests, lakes, mountains and waterfalls and a multitude of animals such as bears, porcupines, raccoons and wolves. This is definitely beautiful to watch but gets quickly boring.Due to the low budget, some scenes feel a little bit goofy. One can clearly see that the wild animals are trained and tame. The fighting scene between the main character and a bear in a lake even made me unintentionally chuckle.On the other side, a couple of scenes of this movie are actually filled with tension. Where the book sometimes gets too descriptive, the movie has a faster pace and the solid soundtrack helps up building some atmosphere. The sequence where dream and reality mix as the main character encounters a lone wolf is very well done and my favourite part of the film along with the campfire fighting scene. A few mildly shocking scenes in form of the eating of worms or the appearance of the pilot's ugly cadaver in the plane wreck added some spice as well.A few elements in the movie are different from the book. Some new ideas such as the covering with mud to protect from mosquitoes work very well. On the other side, the flashback scenes are a little bit redundant. The alibi side story around the divorce of the main character's parents is rather uninteresting in the novel and in the movie as well from my point of view.In the end, this short movie was quite entertaining and is worth to be watched once if you liked the book and the survival genre in general. Especially younger audiences should like this movie even though nothing beats the classic Enid Blyton movies of my childhood. Adults should rather go for survival movies like "The Grey".

marquis-jared I have read Hatchet and it's sequels multiple times now and this movie was very far off the book. In the book he was near a lake (not mountains and lake) so the mountains totally ticked me off. At one point there is a cut scene to a wolf howling (just totally random). The movie was made in 1990 and was mostly for teens, but a movie that should have closely resembled Cast Away resembled Homeward Bound more. They added many cheap scenes that took away from what the book had left the reader with. While this movie should have shown a boy forced to adapt (like the book), it more showed a boy out on a camping trip. Instead of leaving the viewer with a sense of appreciation for the wild (like the book), it left you feeling afraid to enter your own backyard. At the end of the movie, after all of the horrible wilderness things you've seen, it tries to close out with the whole "appreciation" factor, but it was like arguing one thing throughout only to change its point at the last second.I do believe that Hatchet was not justified in this movie and that a movie based on Hatchet (and Brain's Winter) should be made. Not only does the book put you in the head of a teenager (fighting teenager problems) he also deals with the secret of his mom's affair and his parents divorce. He adapts to the wild, only to find after every adaptation more hardship. It is in my mind the ultimate survival novel (for all ages) and was no where near given its dues by this movie.Therefore I didn't like the movie, because it felt as a disservice to the book, but others who didn't fully visualize the book or just want a feel good, without much thinking, it is an "alright" movie.

whitneyite1 This movie is the adaptation of Gary Paulsen's "Hatchet". It is a good representation of the movie, and very hard to find. It is good to have in school libraries, as "Hatchet" and other Paulsen books are so popular. While the cover may be misleading to those who want an "action" movie, the film is faithful to the book, which is on a middle-school, junior-high reading level. The acting is good. The outdoor scenes are great. The landscapes and weather conditions that contribute to the book's success are easily the best part of the movie. Brian, a child of a broken home, is sent to visit the father, but is involved in a plane crash when the pilot has a heart attack. Brian is stranded in the frozen wilderness for 52 days.