Never Cry Wolf Reviews

Never Cry Wolf looks, sounds and feels like a DisneyNature film, for the most part. A desolate location, focus on animals, minimal dialogue...though the movie never quite knows what it wants to be. Initially, there are hints of comedy, then "man against nature" drama, then documentary and so on. By not picking one genre to play in, Never Cry Wolf borders on lacking focus. Charles Martin Smith plays well against the frigid backdrop and the occasional humans he runs into, but this is really about the place and the animals. An episode of Planet Earth is, arguably, more interesting.

My parents dragged me, kicking and screaming, to this movie when it first came out. It was weird! This guy kept chasing reindeer around - NAKED!! EW! I was 10! I didn't want to see an old guy's butt! I do not remember this fondly!

I was inspired by this story, even though i doubt i could do so well on my own in the Alskan wilderness. It's a great reminder to us all that, despite the roads and commercial buildings and malls, we- humans, people, whatever you like to call us- are and have always been a part of the natural world.

Reading Farley Mowat is better than watching films based on his books, but the films are still pretty darn good.

i really liked this movie. its a great choice for people hoping to have a career in canine biology too. ^_^

This is a wonderful film. Farley Mowat is a great writer; i'm waiting to see an adaptation of "The Dog That Wouldn't Be". (Hopefully NOT done by Disney!)

Hahaha I was kind of curious to see if this was actually listed as a "movie." I just finished watching it in science class today. It's very... scientific. Unanswered questions at the end, but apparently my teacher knows everything. Anyway, this biologist is CRAZY. UBER NUTS, I'm telling you. And I don't particularly enjoy seeing his white bum. Or watching him eat hairy mice.

But I will say that for this type of movie, whatever THAT is, it was well done. I mean, it was interesting enough to keep me awake, and that is not often easy to do durring my morning classes.

The money making this movie was completely wasted

I found the lack of dialogue one of the films positives. It starts to decline around the hour mark, when the dialogue starts to pick up - but it's one of those rare movies that could have went on for three hours, and still hold my interest.

Having read Mowat's autobiographical account, i was expecting the same rib-cracking humor that Mowat imbued his story with. Not so. I found the movie to be a depressing departure from the original story.

Never Cry Wolf looks, sounds and feels like a DisneyNature film, for the most part. A desolate location, focus on animals, minimal dialogue...though the movie never quite knows what it wants to be. Initially, there are hints of comedy, then "man against nature" drama, then documentary and so on. By not picking one genre to play in, Never Cry Wolf borders on lacking focus. Charles Martin Smith plays well against the frigid backdrop and the occasional humans he runs into, but this is really about the place and the animals. An episode of Planet Earth is, arguably, more interesting.

This is superb. Charles Martin Smith is terrific as Tyler, the biologist who studies the furry friends in the middle of the Arctic. I recently read the book by Farley Mowat... While the film takes liberties with it, it preserves what made the book special and it holds up on its own.

Grossing just under $30 million at the box office, this was one of 1983's top hits. Earned an Oscar nomination for Best Sound (it should've gotten a Best Cinematography nod as well).

Heisenberg Uncertainty Wolves

I cannot help wondering if, had this movie done substantially better than it did, movies like that Liam Neeson one wouldn't stop getting made. Yes, okay, the wolves in this were all tame. You can't really film with wild wolves if you want wolves to do specific things. However, the film is based on the book by Farley Mowat, who actually went off into the Arctic to observe wolves in their natural habitat. And, yes, there were people who basically told him that the wolves would kill him just for the novelty of eating something that wasn't caribou, because of course the wolves were responsible for dropping caribou populations. What he discovered was that practically everything people thought they knew about wolves was wrong. Yet despite his findings, you still get movies made where wolves are vicious killers that stalk humans and slaughter whole populations of animals they've been in balance with for thousands of years.

The main character here is called Tyler (Charles Martin Smith), for some reason, but he is doing exactly what Farley Mowat did. The government is funding a study about why caribou populations are dropping, and it involves sending a man so far from civilization that he goes by plane. Alone. Into the great Canadian wilderness. He is ridiculously ill-prepared; to my mind, this should have been done in stages so that he'd have shelter that first night in the wilderness. Certainly he didn't need crates and crates of asparagus or the bassoon. Definitely not the light bulbs, given that he didn't have a lamp, much less electricity to turn it on with. Eventually, "Tyler" begins to observe a wolf couple he dubs "George" and "Angie." He is found himself by Ootek (Zachary Ittimangnaq), with whom he does not share a common language but from whom he learns a great deal. For one thing, the Inuit know a lot more about wolves than the white men do.

The science of the movie is actually a bit dubious. Not all lupine researchers agree with Mowat's conclusions that wolves live on smaller mammals; quite a few insist that they do indeed mostly hunt larger animals. It's also true that Mowat was never alone out there and that the nonfictional nature of his story is in considerable doubt. I've even found evidence of a human death from an unprovoked wolf attack. Though just one. However, to me, it's perfectly obvious that the problem of dropping caribou numbers is much more likely to be caused by something new to their environment, or else how would caribou numbers have been that high in the first place? Wolves are a part of the ecosystem in every area to which they're native, and if the ecosystem is faltering, it is almost certainly due to something humans have done. Because that's what humans do. It would be counterintuitive for a species to drive its main food source to extinction, and the problem humans tend to have with that is that they can't hunt as much as they want to, which is not natural to the ecosystem.

What is also true is that humans are a social animal, and that is perhaps one of the most compelling things about this film. "Tyler" is all alone out there, even if Farley Mowat never was, unknown miles from another human and in an environment for which evolution did not prepare him. It isn't exactly easy on the wolves, either, but wolves have been bred for temperatures like that. Humans just have big brains with which to figure out other solutions. Most of the film does not feature dialogue; it is excerpts from Tyler's journals. This is a silent, vast, unfamiliar landscape. The Inuit survive here (and I'm sorry, but I hear that word in Paul Gross's voice), but Tyler is completely unprepared for it. It is so cold when he is first dropped off that his beer freezes, and that is not an environment for which humans are evolved. Yet it is also starkly beautiful, and it is not merely Tyler who is entranced by it.

I think probably the reason this movie did not do as well as it might have is that we want to see wolves as vicious killers. We want to blame them for the decrease in caribou; we do not want it to be our fault. It's funny to me that it's considered unusual, even wrong, if you don't like dogs, but it's weird if you don't fear wolves. The two are genetically indistinguishable, but it's the ones which live in our homes which are important to us, even if far, far more people are killed or injured by dogs than wolves. We don't want that to be true, just as we don't want to believe that it is those humans we know who are far more of a danger to us than strangers are. It makes us feel safer, even if we aren't actually all that safe at all. Unfortunately, wolf populations around the world are paying for our blind faith. Whether wolves live on mice or not is hardly the point. The point is that we don't want wolves to kill the animals we want to kill, even if wolves hunt in a more ecologically sound way than humans do.

A wonderful movie that makes you think long after you watch it. The stillness of the wilderness, the society of the wolves, the inuits' mythology add up to a great work of art. The soundtrack is superb, how the basoon playing interacts with the howling of the wolfs is simply brilliant.

Never Cry Wolf looks, sounds and feels like a DisneyNature film, for the most part. A desolate location, focus on animals, minimal dialogue...though the movie never quite knows what it wants to be. Initially, there are hints of comedy, then "man against nature" drama, then documentary and so on. By not picking one genre to play in, Never Cry Wolf borders on lacking focus. Charles Martin Smith plays well against the frigid backdrop and the occasional humans he runs into, but this is really about the place and the animals. An episode of Planet Earth is, arguably, more interesting.

The greatest story of man's connection with nature I have ever seen, questionable facts aside.

Watching this movie again, it's even better than I remember it from my childhood.

A film that was on the crest of the environmental movement before it became what it is today, politics.

Great movie, beautiful Canadian scenery, sad reality of human ignorance, Farley Mowatt is inspiring.

It's been 20 years, easy, since I've seen this, but much of it came back to me during last night's screening, and i think I enjoyed it, or, perhaps, appreciated it, more than I did when I was younger. I'm convinced the first hour was meant to be silent and the narration was added afterwards. That first hour is almost completely visual storytelling, and the narration is pretty inconsequential.