Into The Wild

Into the Wild recounts the life of Christopher McCandless, a real-life student-athlete at Emory University, as told by his sympathetic sister (Jena Malone as Carine McCandless). In rejection of a materialist, conventional life, and of his parents (William Hurt as Walt McCandless and Marcia Gay Harden as Billie McCandless), whom McCandless perceives as having betrayed him, McCandless destroys all of his credit cards and identification documents, donates $24,000 (nearly his entire savings) to Oxfam, and sets out on a cross-country drive in his well-used but reliable Datsun towards his ultimate goal: Alaska and, alone, to test himself and experience the wilds of nature. He does not tell his family what he is doing or where he is going and does not communicate with them thereafter, leaving them to become increasingly anxious and eventually desperate.

Along the way his automobile is caught in a flash flood and he abandons it to hitchhike after burning what remains of his dwindling cash supply. For a while he works on farms with a crew led by Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn) but leaves after the farmer is arrested. He ends up at the Colorado River and when he is told that he may not go down by canoe without a license, he acquires a Perception Sundance 12 open-water kayak and, followed by the river police, paddles downriver eventually all the way into Mexico. There his kayak is lost in the river and he crosses back into America, thereafter traveling via freight train to Los Angeles.

Along his travels, he encounters and makes friends with many unconventional but good people, such as a hippy couple (Catherine Keener as Jan Burres), a farm owner (Vince Vaughn), a Danish couple, a girl at a hippy commune (Kristen Stewart as Tracy Tatro), and a retired but lonely leather worker (Hal Holbrook) who offers to adopt and be a grandfather to McCandless. With each meeting, McCandless has an opportunity to settle down but each time he chooses to move on in his quest for a meaning to life, believing that only in the wilds of Alaska, will true knowledge be found. He is repeatedly encouraged to contact his family but refuses to do so.

Nearly two years after leaving his family, McCandless crosses a stream in a remote area of Alaska and sets up camp in abandoned Fairbanks Transit bus, the "Magic Bus", used as a shelter for moose hunters. Initially McCandless is exhilarated by the isolation, the beauty of nature around and the thrill of living off the land as the spring thaw arrives. He hunts and gathers, and reads books, and keeps a diary of his thoughts. However life becomes harder; his supplies start to run out and although he kills a moose the meat is spoiled by flies and maggots. He realizes that nature is also harsh and uncaring. Ultimately on his journey of self-discovery he concludes that true happiness is to be found in sharing, and in the joy of realisation seeks to return from the wild to his friends and family.

However, to his despair McCandless finds that the stream that he crossed has become a violent torrent and he cannot return; he is trapped by nature. He is forced to return to the Magic Bus but now as a prisoner; having previously insisted on being self-sufficient he is no longer in control of his fate and can only hope for help from the outside. As his supplies run out, he is forced to gather and eat roots and plants. He has a book to help him to distinguish edible from inedible, but he confuses similar plants and is poisoned. He slowly and painfully starves to death. In his final hours, he continues to document his process of self-realisation and his demise. Some two weeks after his death his body is found by moose hunters.