Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Follows the story of "Grizzly Man" Timothy Treadwell and what the thirteen summers in a National Park in Alaska were like in his attempt to protect the grizzly bears. The film is full of unique images and a look into the spirit of a man who sacrificed himself for nature.
Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man is a remarkable documentary that transcends the genre. The plot — built around Timothy Treadwell's self-shot footage and his ultimate death by the bears he loved — is genuinely gripping and philosophically rich, with Herzog layering his own worldview against Treadwell's in fascinating tension. Cinematography earns a 4 both for Treadwell's own astonishing, sometimes breathtaking footage of bears in the wild and Herzog's careful editorial framing of it. Novelty is exceptionally high: the film is utterly singular in conception, blending a nature documentary, a psychological portrait, a meditation on death and delusion, and Herzog's idiosyncratic narration into something wholly unique. Acting (applied here to the documentary subjects and interviewees) is solid but uneven — Treadwell himself is mesmerizing if erratic, while some interviewees feel peripheral. The ending, while conceptually strong in its restraint around the audio tape, doesn't fully resolve the film's themes with the same force as what precedes it, landing slightly below the bar set by the rest of the work.