There's a scene in The Grey (2012, directed by Joe Carnahan) that I like quite a bit. In it, Liam Neeson's character has a crisis of faith. The movie has established that Neeson's character, Ottway, is an atheist, and this particular scene tests the old maxim that there are no atheists in foxholes. In a moment of weakness, he prays for some kind of deliverance from his predicament--which, it should be noted, is really friggin' dire. When no divine intervention is forthcoming, he says, "Fuck it, I'll do it myself." This scene encapsulates the movie. The cosmos, this movie suggests, doesn't even know we exist. The wolves who are this movie's main antagonists don't care who is faithful and who is unbelieving, who is good or who is bad, who is an asshole or who is a loving family man. They know only the red of fang and claw and act accordingly.
There's another scene in this movie, too, that puts an exclamation point on this. It comes before Ottman's crisis of faith, when Diaz (Frank Grillo) finally comes to the realization that he can't go on. He chooses his place of dying, a place with a spectacular view of the mountains and forest of Alaska. It's a place of great beauty. But he winds up just as dead. The universe is a beautiful place; beauty is a meaning that we attach to it that has no relationship to its fundamental indifference to human beings.







