Brainsbell
The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
Adeel Hail
Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.
Frances Chung
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
shakercoola
A touching and poignant survival drama about a Canadian bush pilot whose life is changed after an encounter with a sick young Inuit woman. Their challenge, to survive the harsh conditions of the Northwest Territories following a seaplane crash. People will remember the marvellous performance Barry Pepper gave as the sharpshooter in Saving Private Ryan and he is a force in this one too. His co-star, Annabella Piugattuk, gave a wonderful debut performance too, imbuing a naturalism that allowed her to display the emotional and spiritual nature of her people. Some scenes are padding, such as backstory to the pilot's psychological challenges, and there are some false notes too with Pepper's girlfriend back home. But, the power of the picture scrapes this into special territory.
Terry Davis
I loved this film, and I didn't expect to. It's not particularly well shot.The white owl metaphor makes the movie make sense.I really would have liked the film much better if she had lived, it was very hard to accept. If she had lived it wouldn't have moved me as much I suppose.But I would have been OK with that. I find myself getting upset that she sacrificed herself, and I would have rather she had lived. I guess I said that already.I find myself telling myself, its only a movie.My gosh.
Wizard-8
When I first heard of this movie years ago, I thought that this would be the movie to finally connect with a Canadian (and international) audience. It had a budget significantly higher than the typical Canadian movie, a fairly well-known American actor in the lead, and support of a major theatrical distributor. However, the distributor didn't give the movie much of a release, and did little to market it. The other day I found a DVD copy of the movie in the library and decided to finally watch it to see if I could determine why the movie got little push.It didn't take me long to start seeing why the distributor probably got nervous about the movie. While it's not an awful movie - it will do if you are pressed to find a movie and can't find anything better - it's kind of a disappointment. Despite the money spent, a lot of the movie looks more like a CBC TV drama instead of theatrical quality. The two central characters don't really spark when placed together, a lot of that being because the Inuit woman character can't speak much English. The movie also keeps cutting back to characters in civilization for no apparent reason except maybe to pad out the running time. There is some nice scenery (though it starts to look all alike after a while), and occasional excitement, but for the most part the movie feels very restrained in most departments. Little wonder then why the movie never got a theatrical release outside of Canada and got thrown away on its native soil.
Roedy Green
This movie has quite a bit in common with Never Cry Wolf. Farley Mowat wrote it. Charles Martin Smith directed this film and starred in Never Cry Wolf. The main character in both is the North. In both the hero faces ghastly ordeals. In the Snow Walker, the ordeals are much more life threatening. The same wolves appear in both.The casting is interesting. The actors looks familiar, but you can't quite place them. When you look them up on IMDb you figure out why. They are playing roles quite unlike the ones you usually see them in. That boy who looks like Michael Bublé really is Michael Bublé. The hero Barry Pepper you saw playing RFK. James Cromwell you saw in Star Trek playing the time-travelling Zefram Cochran, the inventor of warp drive. The movie would have great appeal to ten year olds because of the gross-out scenes of eating raw caribou guts, raw fish, raw groundhogs and aged Spam. It has a Disney-like old Yeller ending that might be too overwhelming for younger kids. The credits claim no animals were harmed though I was somewhat incredulous that I had not seen fish killed and three caribous butchered with pointed stakes. The butchering and raw-meat-eating scenes were so real I had to leave the room. Despite his reputation, our hero was a perfect gentleman. There was no sex and no sexual innuendo. Had they put it in, the movie would have completely put off the ten-year old audience. The mosquitoes mysteriously missing from Never Cry Wolf appear in this movie in one of the most terrifying scenes in cinema. Hitchcock eat your heart out. Oddly though they disappear without explanation. The hero starts out as a childish, petulant, self-indulgent Charlie Sheen sort of character. But the ordeal and the influence of the young girl's Inuit culture matures him. The downsides. A young Inuit girl is presented as on death's door, probably TB. Yet her eyebrows are elegantly tweezed and her face made up as if she just left some expensive shop at the mall. No matter what the ordeal she had just endured, she appeared freshly changed and clean in the next scene. It just was not believable. She marches hundreds of miles, climbs, builds fires, goes trapping and fishing, prepares skins with energy I wish I had, all while supposedly about to die.There is a ham-fisted product placement for Nestlés. The hero even sings their jingle. At least the Inuit girl stares at the chocolate as if it were poison.There is a bit of the supernatural in this movie, but not overwhelming. I don't like it when that mush is inserted into young brains. Leave it for clearly silly movies where it is clear it is not to be taken seriously. One of the culture clashes was what you are supposed to do about the possessions of the dead. Charlie, the hero, a rationalist, said you use them to survive, obviously. The girl believed, to respect the dead, you must bury them. She prevails. I found that improbable and infuriating. They were in deep trouble. This was no time for pleasantries. Charlie was too much of a chauvinist to surrender so meekly.
