Into the Wild

Sean Penn is a talented guy. Surely he is talented enough to treat this subject matter with more style. The movie is long-winded to the point of frustration. It is overblown, the way people trying SO hard to say something important often end up blathering incoherently. It is largely irrelevant, in so far as the real subject is McCandless' naive, ignorant and completely foolish treck into the Alaska wilderness. The movie takes too long to get there, and when it does, it makes the same, laughable mistake as the book: It indulges itself in the grotesque beatification of a young, privileged fool who was too stupid to get himself out of a jam. The real story is a tragedy, plain and simple; no hero, no irony. McCandless' story should have been told from the perspective of his blind naivety and childish idealism. It should not have been sugar-coated tripe about his heroic achievements -there were none. Imagine how much better this film would have been if Penn had stepped out of the formulaic Hollywood box and told the REAL story. -Or does he not realise that tragic figures are not always heroic?