10 Cool Movies about Wilderness & Wildness

These you gotta see!
  • Dersu Uzala - Kurosawa comes off his suicide bed as the national embarrassment of Japan, and makes a movie to redeem his reputation. What a movie! Oscar winner and probably the best thing Kurosawa ever made.
  • Walkabout - I thought "The Man Who Fell to Earth" was a piece of genius, and re-visited all of Nick Roeg's movies to see where he'd hidden himself. Walkabout turned out to be a movie about where I had hidden myself. How is it possible that I could become such an urban rat, with the planet designed as it is, still partly wild?
  • Grizzly Man - Directed by Werner Herzog. What I would like to see is Herzog spending a summer alone with a video camera among the bears. That would be a movie. But I don't think he's that interested in the "truth". I think he's more interested in exploring perception and falsehood like the rest of his German peers (not so much Wenders as Fassbinder), where the possibility of things are more fascinating than the reality.
  • Never Cry Wolf - Never mind the Disney influence, and don't begin to compare this movie with Costner and his artifice among the dancing wolves. This is as close as you can get to the field and the wolves.
  • Winged Migration - The filmmakers were so intimate with their subjects that the birds they were filming thought the filmmakers were birds.
  • Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey - Very hard to find on DVD without paying a lot. Actually four movies, filmed thirty years ago by two broke brothers traveling around Indonesia. Looking for magic, they found miracles. Their arduous probing of unknown and unmapped parts of the country takes them to insect-filled forests and an island of dragons. Amazing film.
  • Koyaanisqatsi - This famous movie by Godfrey Reggio is famously about "life out of balance" (the meaning of the Hopi title), but what "life" are we talking about? Is mankind really a cancer on the planet? The ability of this species to manipulate and destroy is undeniable. But look at the animal's capacity for improving aesthetics or inventing solutions! The planet will be better off, eventually, for the existence of humanity. Just hard to see at the moment. But in this movie there is a scene of a health provider reaching out to grasp the hand of a dying patient, jjust a few seconds long, and for me it is the highlight of everything I've seen on film; you die and ask for help, it arrives in a grasp from anther human being.
  • Last Place on Earth - Based on Roland Huntford's exquisite examination of British failure (arrogance) and Norwegian success (humility) in the race to be first to the South Pole, this series made for the BBC is an eight-hour masterpiece of tense exploration. Nature is nature, no matter how much Man wants to subject it to his whims. But there is something natural to nature, so if we wish to surf the wind or wave, nature accommodates us and we come off the ride thrilled.
  • The Jungle Book - Disney sucks. But the song "I Wanna Be Like You" is fab, and the whole scene of the temple crashing down somehow made up for the fact that this movie comes from a story by Kipling, imperialist supreme. And if I didn't list this movie, I would have listed "Finding Nemo," since it's about turtles. Disney still sucks.
  • Andy Goldsworthy "Rivers & Tides" - Very few people you can watch for hours and feel inspired every minute, and Andy Goldsworthy is one of them. Jaw-dropping imagery in this movie, balanced with his soift determination to play in the mud or turn back the waves, or pick up sticks. Why are you working like a dog, when you should be playing like a puppy?