Wow. What a great movie. A deep satisfying feeling of mother-nature overwhelms me when watching this epic story.Nature is the movie. We're A part of it, not apart from it. Wolves are truly beautiful animals. They alone lifts this movie to the stars.The main characters does a wonderful job, delivering great and moving performances.The monologue, which is presented trough the main characters diary(and his voice), is deep and satisfying. And the dialog with the Inuits is also great.10/10

This would be a perfect movie to take your ten year old nephew and his friends to. You know, because it is a true story, the hero will have to prevail, yet he is subjected to gross ordeal after ordeal: a terrifying plane ride, having all his belongings unceremoniously dumped on the ice, being given nothing but asparagus to eat for a whole season, being sniffed by wolves, being inundated by mice, eating mice, dunked in ice cold water, drinking wolf-pee tea, getting caught without clothes, moose beer, abandonment...There don't appear to be any special effects. Whatever ones there were were done so well you don't experience them as that. Only once in the caribou scene, did I notice some cinematographic sleight of hand. There was an unexplained total lack of mosquitoes and blackflies.There is very little dialogue, though there is plenty of fish-out-of-water interaction between the hero, Brian Dennehy representing commercial interests, and the old and new Inuit. This where the humour comes.The landscapes and the wolves are, as expected, breathtaking. Our hero looks a little too clean, well muscled, well groomed and freshly clothed, even at the end of the movie, but Disney, after all, had a hand in it. I would not take younger kids to see it because the ending is a little too sad, in the Disney Old Yeller tradition. It is a good movie about pluck, fearlessness and just picking yourself up and carrying on no matter what happens.The message is that predatory wolves actually help caribou populations by culling the sickest and weakest animals. Poachers do the exact opposite. Though they don't say it, the same applies to cod and seals.

Never Cry Wolf begins with a quiet sense of loneliness, a series of images. From place to place, you feel your eyes wander to the things you see around you. There's no big surprise, no big action sequence or dramatic turn of events. Only a slow realization, like with Tyler, of just what you're getting yourself into. His voice fades into the mix, if only to let you wander in on his thoughts. He has no grand statement to make. Only questions and hopes.One of, if not the first thing that you notice is the music of Mark Isham. Perhaps driven by youthful bravado (this was his first film score), Isham eschews any traditional dramatic production. Instead, he goes for an alternating mix between wavering uncertainty and pounding passion. His soundtrack over the title sequence plays like some proposed music designed to remind one of the craters and the mountains of the moon. A beautiful and terrifying sense of the alien, of the unknown. The music is as much a part of the soundtrack as the animals and dialogue. Indeed, at one point, it plays duet to Tyler's oboe.Rather than having a heroic and dashing explorer (who must not only find himself in the wilderness, but also lose the old version of himself), Tyler is a quiet man who has no current self-awareness to lose. In the end, this makes Charles Martin Smith essential to the role. It is Tyler's personality, his confusion, his social status, and his emotional state that can only be played quietly. As a character, Tyler has no grand statements to make, only visions and revelations of truth. Internal and otherwise. Smith plays him perfectly. Not long after the introductory scenes, Tyler finds a pilot who can take him to where he needs to be. Rosie (played by Brian Dennehy) doesn't seem exactly stable, but it's likely his only option. Dennehy plays the role with his usual crazy-eyed gruffness, yet without some of his usual sideways winks at the audience. The other two main roles in the film - Inuit natives played by Samson Jorah and Zachary Ittimangnaq - are even more understated personalities than Tyler. The depth of their specific acting talents (if acting is took to mean acting unnaturally) could be up for interpretation. But, instead of giving them actions and dialogue beyond their range of experience, they simply live their respective characters' lives for the screen. Ootek and Mike don't have wide character arcs like Tyler does. They are already in their natural environment, and no longer experience the initial resistance and friction that Tyler is becoming familiar with. Ootek goes off into the wilderness to live in the silence, but Tyler is only just learning to silence his thoughts.And it is in those thoughts that we are given a window into Tyler's development. Any change in perception or understanding that might seem either too personal or too inconsequential to share in a conversation, we are given privy to through Charles Martin Smith's narration. Farley Mowat's writing is the core of Never Cry Wolf. He writes from a humorous standpoint, as concerned with the great fears and mysteries of life as he is with those things that mildly amuse him. Each sequence is given the full weight of feeling and realism, because they all hold equal - yet utterly different - strengths and beauties. The weight of this reality comes into a nude scene which occurs later in the film. It does a rare thing in cinema - to explore the beauty of humanity in nature. Pure and unrestrained.Hiro Narita does amazing work as the cinematographer, also doing his first feature film work like composer Isham. As a photographer myself, I am in awe of his ability to make the otherwise ordinary truly stunning. In quiet passages, it is his skill capturing the little corners of Tyler's life that move things forward. In a film with such truly beautiful cinematography, it would be nearly impossible to criticize any lack of judicial editing. Any extra running time would simply be more time to admire Narita's work. But without the direction of Carroll Ballard, I have doubts that Never Cry Wolf could have been such a pure success that it is. Other films such as this have gone down well-traveled and over-used structures of the so-called 'wilderness movie' - all of which Never Cry Wolf steers clear from. There's no unrealistic animal behavior for the sense of 'cuteness', and no comic relief that isn't arrived upon naturally. Also, there is careful avoidance of the old 'Magic Indian' cliché so common in films which depict native cultures. Spirituality is a large factor in the life of the Inuit shown here, but they do not have the ability to appear and disappear at will, or to bend the space-time continuum. This is a bizarre characteristic of nearly all films about the native population that is thankfully not repeated.The commitment to truth and understanding of the relationship between nature and human nature in Never Cry Wolf is what makes it one of the truly great films of all time. It shows what can happen when all is given to a single goal, when a great director finds the perfect cinematographer, composer, and lead actor for a film, and leads them through the process of making a motion picture. This is what cinema is all about.Also Recommended -Days of Heaven (1978), The Black Stallion (1979), Vigil (1984), The Snow Walker (2003)

i DO wish movie makers would stop throwing in the odd German shepherd to pad out the wolf numbers. they stick out like the proverbial 'dog's balls'. apart from that, this is a fine movie particularly for anyone interested in Farley Mowat's adventures. the fact that it is a Disney movie i find quite encouraging - the Disney studios obviously once had no compunction about making a decent movie. scenery is marvellous, the few characters are sympathetically presented and the movie seems free of the abominably cheesy elements which typify Disney movies. though Mowat was a singularly driven person, this is not the main theme of this movie and i for one am thankful for that. well worth watching and stands the test of time well.