What makes a great outdoors movie?

Cover of Into the Wild

As I’ve sat through screenings of many an outdoors-related film, I’ve wondered what differentiates the genre from other kinds of movies, and what makes a great one. 

A film such as Into Thin Air is at the far end — much of its running time occurs in the “zone,” so to speak, although the subject itself is an extreme sport, so there’s a narrative bias to this film. You can’t get much more mighty or hazardous than a storm on Mt. Everest. 

A River Runs Through It might be described as an outdoors drama, with as much of what happens indoors, and in the characters’ hearts and minds, mattering to what happens outdoors. 

Into the Wild falls between Into Thin Air and A River Runs Through It; it’s an adventure, and tragic, also, but it relies very much on character more than on extremes of terrain or conditions.

Is Jaws an outdoors film? If it were cut in half and began with Quint, Brody, and Hooper getting on the Orca and setting off, it might be — it’s big-game fishing gone amok.

Is adventure necessary to any outdoors film, and how do you define adventure these days? I find that’s a term that can be a bit difficult to describe. Perhaps it means a naturalistic situation that always involves both surprise and discovery. I don’t know if you can put a time limit on adventure, however, as a most intense adventure could unfold in an hour. Or is that too post-modern a point of view? Does true adventure require a minimum of an entire season, a whole summer, or a whole winter? A decade? 

Must an outdoors film always include some degree of the dualism about the beauty and danger of nature? (And is that a cliche?) Grizzly Man might be the film that takes this to its truest extreme, as the man behind the camera, Timothy Treadwell, pays with his life for the effort to record the startling images of those beasts he holds to be most beautiful, dying in grasp of one that doesn’t appear on screen. 

I suppose the best definition of an outdoors film is one in which the characters have to be looking for something of themselves in nature specifically, or come away with something new about themselves that was forged in the wilds. That might be the most simple way to state it. 

But what makes a great one? Something that fulfills some Grizzly Adams version of Ars Poetica — recognition and reversal on snowshoes? 

Before I saw Into the Wild, I’d read the Krakauer book of the same title, so I knew this story wasn’t going to end well. But by the final scenes, I’d felt so much of a certain kinship and wont for experience that I very much wished, as I had when I’d read the book, that Christopher McCandless had done everything the same way and just planned it better, and not gone alone. 

So, maybe a great outdoors movie is the one that makes you say, “I’m going to go do that — my way — and survive.”