Into the Wild tells the adventures of Christopher McCandless, a top student at Emory University and an athlete. After graduating, McCandless decides to give $24,000 of his savings account to OXFAM and later burn all the money in his wallet. He hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wild. During his adventure, he encounters several unique people that change his life before he faces the dangers of wilderness.
If you like adventure you would love this
movie.
Synposis
Freshly graduated from college with a promising future, 22 year-old Christopher McCandless instead walked out of his privileged life and into the wild in search of adventure. What happened to him on the way transformed this young wanderer into an enduring symbol for countless people. Was Christopher McCandless a heroic adventurer or a naive idealist, a rebellious 1990s Thoreau or another lost American son, a fearless risk-taker or a tragic figure who wrestled with the precarious balance between man and nature? McCandless' quest took him from the wheat fields of South Dakota to a renegade trip down the Colorado River to the non-conformists' refuge of Slab City, California, and beyond. Along the way, he encountered a series of colorful characters at the very edges of American society who shaped his understanding of life and whose lives he, in turn, changed. In the end, he tested himself by heading alone into the wilds of the great North, where everything he had seen and learned and felt came to a head in ways he never could have expected.
Production Status: Released
Logline: Based on a true story of top student and athlete Christopher McCandless, an Emory graduate, who abandons his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness where he met his untimely fate.
Genres: Action/Adventure, Drama and Adaptation
Running Time: 2 hrs. 20 min.
Release Date: September 21st, 2007 (limited)
MPAA Rating: R for language and some nudity.
Distributors: Paramount Vantage
Production Co.: River Road Entertainment, Linson Films, Clyde Is Hungry productions
Studios: Paramount Vantage
Financiers: Co-Financier: River Road Entertainment
U.S. Box Office: $18,427,795
Filming Locations: Los Angeles, California USA, California, USA, Alaska, USA
Produced in: United States
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Into the Wild (1996) by Jon Krakauer is a best-selling non-fiction book about the adventures of Christopher McCandless. It is an expansion of Krakauer's 9,000-word article, "Death of an Innocent", which appeared in the January 1993 issue of Outside. Krakauer intersperses McCandless's story with a discussion of the wilderness experiences of people such as John Muir and John Menlove Edwards, as well as some of his own adventures.
Krakauer first went to Alaska in 1974 and has returned there twenty times since. He spent two years carrying out the background research work for this biography.
The book has been adapted into a movie of the same name directed by Sean Penn with Emile Hirsch starring as Chris McCandless. The film's U.S. release date was September 21, 2007.
Chris McCandless grew up in Annandale, Virginia, and died at age 24 in a wilderness area of the state of Alaska. After graduating in 1990 from Emory University, McCandless ceased communicating with his family, gave away his savings of $24,000 to OXFAM and began traveling, later abandoning his car and burning all the money in his wallet.
In April 1992, Jim Gallien, an Alaskan, gave McCandless a ride to the Stampede Trail in Alaska. There McCandless headed down the snow-covered trail to begin an odyssey with only fifteen pounds of rice, a .22 caliber rifle, a camera, several boxes of rifle rounds, some camping gear, and a small selection of literature—including a field guide to the region's edible plants, Tana'ina Plantlore. He took no map or compass. He died some time in August, and his decomposed body was found in early September by moose hunters.
The book begins with the discovery of McCandless's body inside an abandoned bus (location [show location on an interactive map] 63°51′36.13″N, 149°24′50.62″W) and retraces his travels during the two years he was missing. Christopher shed his real name early in his journey, adopting the moniker "Alexander Supertramp". He spent time in Carthage, South Dakota with a man named Wayne Westerberg, and in Slab City, California with Jan Burres and her boyfriend Bob. Krakauer interprets McCandless' intensely ascetic personality as possibly influenced by the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and his favorite writer, Jack London. He explores the similarities between McCandless' experiences and motivations and his own as a young man, recounting in detail his own attempt to climb Devils Thumb in Alaska. He also relates the stories of some other young men who vanished into the wilderness, such as Everett Ruess, an artist and wanderer who went missing in the Utah desert during 1934 at age 20. In addition, he describes at some length the grief and puzzlement of McCandless's family and friends.
McCandless survived for approximately 112 days in the Alaskan wilderness, foraging for edible roots and berries, shooting an assortment of game — including a moose — and keeping a journal. Although he planned to hike to the coast, the boggy terrain of summer proved too difficult and he decided instead to camp in a derelict bus. In July, he tried to leave, only to find the route blocked by high water. Toward the end of July, after apparently remaining healthy for more than three months, McCandless wrote a journal entry reporting extreme weakness and blaming it on "pot. seeds." As Krakauer explains, McCandless had been eating the roots of Hedysarum alpinum, a historically edible plant commonly known as wild potato (also "Eskimo potato"), which are sweet and nourishing in the spring but later become too tough to eat. When this happened, McCandless may have attempted to eat the seeds instead. Krakauer theorizes that the seeds contained a poisonous alkaloid, possibly swainsonine (the toxic chemical in locoweed) or something similar. In addition to neurological symptoms such as weakness and loss of coordination, the poison causes starvation by blocking nutrient metabolism in the body.
According to Krakauer, a well-nourished person might consume the seeds and survive because the body can use its stores of glucose and amino acids to rid itself of the poison. Since McCandless lived on a diet of rice, lean meat, and wild plants and had less than 10% body fat when he died, Krakauer theorized he was likely unable to fend off the toxins. Roots of wild potato were used extensively by Aboriginal people, eaten both raw and cooked and used as a licorice substitute. Inuit hunters eat wild potato roots while hunting. However, when the Eskimo potatoes from the area around the bus were later tested in a laboratory of the University of Alaska Fairbanks by Dr. Thomas Clausen, toxins were not found, because there was no fungus on the seeds during this test, which contains the poisonous alkaloid.
In the most recent edition of his book, Krakauer has slightly modified his theory regarding the cause of McCandless' death. He believes the seeds of the wild potato had been moldy, and it is the mold that contributed to the seeds' toxicity. The exact cause of the young man's death remains open to question. McCandless may simply have starved to death, a theory backed by the fact that McCandless' body weighed an estimated 67 pounds at the time it was discovered.
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