Nice effects though.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

This is one of those films that almost lost me due to it's terrible beginning. A crushingly slow B movie was in full play when a change suddenly took place. The undeserving husband adopted a more believable face towards survival and the wife's portrayals of frustration accurately increased. The viewer now gets to see a man and wife trapped in an unforgiving expanse, leading to some fresh turns. Interesting action along with life lessons made what could have been a run away bomb entertaining. A good, reasonably thought out ending really helped. A nice little tricky survival film that may fit your mood when the video idea well runs dry.

One of the earliest European visitors to the Grand Canyon paused at the lip and mused, "Something happened here." Not too much happens in the movie, in which we see the Grand Canyon only from the air in a few stock shots.The territory in which the film was shot -- Moab and its surroundings -- is striking in itself. There is an unforgettably long high bridge at nearby Page, dedicated to someone who died building it and "became part of the river he loved." If it weren't for the fact that a real death was involved, the dedication would be as amusing as this movie.Two honeymooners -- the slightly reckless Eion Bailey and the sumptuous and sensible Yvonne Strahovski -- hire the "colorful" old geezer, Will Patton, to take them on a mule trip to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, then, with their assent, leads them off the trail to see something no other white man has seen. They don't make it. Patton's mule is frightened by a rattlesnake. Bailey falls off his mule. Strahovski falls off her mule. Patton falls off his mule, breaks his arm and is "twice-bit by a snake." The mules run off. Patton gives up the ghost and the two lovers are left to walk their way out of the wilderness with no food, water, or supplies.Now, it's not like this plot of lost people trying to find their way back to civilization is anything new. Not if you've seen films like "Walkabout," "They Came to Cordura", or "An Eye For An Eye" -- all entertaining in their different ways. But I don't think any of the protagonists have been quite so willfully stupid as these two.I'm not counting the impossible elements like the wolves. I just mean that if any of us, with nothing more than ordinary in the upper story, were to find himself alone at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, he'd try to retrace his steps. No? If your guide went mad and died, you wouldn't forget to retrieve his knife and anything else useful from his pockets before burying the body, would you? (Would you waste time burying the body in the first place?) The writers have thrown in every cliché in the book. They've read the story of Aron Ralston, the hiker who in 2003 was pinned by an 800-pound boulder and had to amputate his own forearm with a pen knife to escape. Bailey has his foot trapped and Strahovski must cut it off. Here's how Bailey traps his foot. He falls a dozen feet or more down the face of a cliff and, at the bottom, has managed to land with his boot stuck irretrievably into a crack in the rock floor. You have to see it to believe it, and even then you won't believe it. The amputation, the deaths, are all pretty gruesome. I suppose they must be. The wince factor and the scenery are all that hold the movie together, and the photography of the magnificent landscape actually renders it dull and dark. When the writer runs out of ideas completely, he throws in a shouting match out of nowhere between the lovers, on the theory, I guess, that it's time for their argument.Strahovski is very easy on the eyes. We should have seen more of her. Her acting is professional enough, as is Bailey's. And I've always liked Will Patton, ever since he was my supporting player in the phenomenally poetic "Everybody Wins." He was an impressive villain in "No Way Out" too. Those staring eyes, that plastered-on grin, those hissing sibilants. I thought he might be the next Strother Martin. Instead, here he is playing one of those grizzled coots that became a cliché before sound was introduced.

As a veteran of nine expeditions down the Grand Canyon I was skeptical of whether one would get the feel of what the Canyon is like in its more remote areas considering that it wasn't filmed there. I'm happy to report that with the overview shots of the actual Grand Canyon coupled with what seems to have been carefully selected non-Grand Canyon sites to shoot this movie, I completely recognized the Grand Canyon I'm so familiar with. The slot canyon the honeymooning couple explored not long after the opening scenes suggested strongly to me the slot canyon at the end of Deer Creek just before the creek plunges over Deer Creek Falls into the Colorado River and other locations reminded me of some of my other favorite Grand Canyon sites like National Canyon, Shinumo Creek (near Bass Trail) and the Silver Grotto of Shinumo Wash (not technically in the Grand Canyon proper, but upstream of it in Marble Canyon, still in GCNP). So for someone seeking a vicarious look at what the more remote parts of the Grand Canyon might look like you should appreciate this film for that.(spoilers to follow)That said, the only thing I can say about the plot devices is that the only people who could be portrayed making the horrendously bad decisions might be a clueless couple from a big Mid- Western city who've never been in the wild before. They are made to make serious error in judgment after another until you almost feel as though there's no way that they had ever had any hope of getting out alive from the outset. I almost felt as though the movie makers were making a caricature of clueless city dwellers caught in the wild in over their heads.But if the bad decisions that seemed almost calculated to doom the couple weren't unrealistic enough of a plot device, the main villains of the movie were. The early days of the Grand Canyon as a park saw a program of predator elimination that resulted in an explosion of the deer population on the Kaibab Plateau that lead to a very harsh lesson in trying to control nature by artificial means as the deer population subsequently crashed. The apex predators including puma and Mexican gray wolves were all but completely eliminated from the Canyon and recent efforts to re-introduce the Mexican gray wolf have thus far not been successful. In the nine trips I've made into the canyon representing over 4 calendar months total time I've never seen or even heard the presence of wolves in any part of the canyon. Thus the lack of the presence of the animals in the Canyon makes the portrayal of a pack of vicious wolves attacking the couple very unlikely, but even less likely is the possibility that the species that might have been encountered there by some slim chance, the Mexican gray wolf, much smaller than their Canadian cousins and a rather shy animal around humans, would have chosen to mount a persistent assault on a pair of adult humans. I rate this movie a 5, an average of the superlative effort to realistically paint an accurate picture of the splendor of the Grand Canyon I love, contrasted against the abysmally misguided plot devices that doom what story there is to enjoy about the movie. There are better venues to see the Grand Canyon for its scenery and splendor, any number of beautifully shot documentaries, some of them by the GCNP itself. And if that only whets your appetite for what there is to see, go there yourself in person, that's why we have National Parks in the first place. But if you do go, take it from me that you'd have little to worry about from the so far non-existent wolf population in the Canyon.

The Canyon is a new version of a very familiar story. It does a relatively effective job of telling that story, but does nothing with it that hasn't been done before. The result is a legitimately entertaining but ultimately forgettable movie.Nick and Lori (Eion Bailey and Yvonne Strahovski) are a young couple that have just eloped and are running away to the Grand Canyon for their honeymoon. Nick wants to take a mule trip into the Canyon while Lori's not that excited about the idea. However, the spur of the moment nature of their marriage means they never had time to get the proper permits and it seems like Nick and Lori will just have to spend the weekend having sex in their motel room (which will probably end up being the porn version of this film). That's when Henry (Will Patton), an old guide who puts the "grizz" in grizzled, offers to help them out. He claims he can get a permit and will lead them into the Canyon himself. Lori is again leery but gives in to Nick's enthusiasm for the whole thing.Though Henry seems a bit sketchy, everything starts out fine when they meet Saturday morning to head into the Canyon. Henry has all the pack mules and supplies and appears to actually know what he's doing. The trip into the Canyon is the wonderful experience Nick thought it would be and Lori even lets herself enjoy it all. In the interest of spoiling as little as possible, particularly since this film doesn't have a lot of original twists and turns, I'll just say that things go very wrong for Lori, Nick and Henry. They wind up lost, isolated, bereft and at the mercy of a Mother Nature who's in a sadistic mood. The Canyon is the old story of Man (and Woman) vs. Nature…and that tale usually doesn't end well for Man.Outside of one complaint, this is a pretty good production. The plot is logically and frighteningly plausible. The scenery is beautiful, though it's Utah and not the real Grand Canyon. The three main characters are all interesting people and the actors in those roles give fine performances. There's a real sense of tension and dread which is broken every so often by flashes of humor and defiance. This movie has all the right pieces and it assembles them in the proper fashion with enough talent and effort to make The Canyon a gripping little tragedy.I do have one complaint and it's a not a tiny one. The tale of Man vs. Nature has been around forever. This variant of people stranded in a hostile wilderness and having to survive has been done in books and movies and television countless times to varying degrees of success. The Canyon is rated R and anyone old enough to be watching it has almost certainly read and seen and heard this story many times before. When a narrative is built on that sort of familiarity, it becomes very important to either add a twist to the proceedings or add a second level of meaning to what's going on. These filmmakers did neither.There is no twist to The Canyon and the story only functions on the surface level of people in peril. I'm sure you know what I mean by twist, but let me give to an example of a story having more than one level. Nick and Lori are facing a conflict, them vs. Nature. That's the first level. A second level would be to establish some sort of conflict between Nick and Lori, a problem that is independent of their hazardous surroundings. As the story goes along, those two separate conflicts would both mirror and diverge from each other. The standard cliché is to have the external conflict exaggerate the internal conflict, such as being stranded in the Grand Canyon making the personal difficulty between Nick and Lori more bitter and divisive at first, with the need to cooperate to survive eventually leading Nick and Lori to resolve the conflict between them.But outside of a single moment of recrimination, there's no conflict between Nick and Lori in this film. It's just Man vs. Nature with nothing else going on. Watching The Canyon is like hearing a funny joke for the third time. It's still amusing but something has definitely been lost in the repetition. I'd still rather hear a funny joke for a third time than a bad joke for the first time, so I'd still recommend this movie as worth watching. Just don't expect much more than a momentary diversion.