I must admit, I
entered into Wolf Totem with the wrong
expectations, mistakenly thinking the narrative was similar to the nature films
director Jean-Jacques Annaud has done in the past, such as The Bear or Two Brothers.
Despite the wolves being the most sympathetic characters in Wolf Totem, they are not the
protagonists, though the bigger difference lies in the treatment of the
animals. The sheer relentlessness of the brutality against nature and the title
animal makes Wolf Totem a near
impossible endurance test for animal lovers. The film is presented in both 2D
and 3D on the Blu-ray, though there are far too many scenes I would prefer to
have not seen at all, much less in 3D.
On the other
hand, the sweeping landscapes and majestic scenes of nature beg for this
enhanced presentation. This is the problem with Wolf Totem; there are just enough things right about it to make the
missteps that much more disappointing. It is possible that some of my
dissatisfaction stems from ignorance of the material, which is based on Jiang
Rong’s best-selling novel, but even that doesn’t explain the difficulty making
the human characters relatable onscreen. Many of these relationships are let
down by the screenplay, while other sequences involving the wolves are
plentiful and often redundantly bleak.
The story
follows the journey of a Beijing student named
Chen Zhen (Shaofeng Feng) sent to live for two years among the nomadic sheep
herdsmen of Inner Mongolia . Their simplistic
existence is interrupted by the famine in to the East, forcing many to begin
pillaging the land for meat. This leaves the wolves without a way to survive,
and soon they are attacking the flock instead. The domino effect continues, so
that Chen Zhen is witness to a major shift in the times during his brief visit.
In fact, over the two hours running-time covering these two years, very little
of it includes sequences of positive experiences.
The other thing
our protagonist does is take it upon himself to raise a wolf cub under the
pretense of education. While all of the other wolves are being hunted down and
mercilessly killed through a variety of unpleasant stages, Chen Zhen does his
best to keep the one in camp alive. This may sound like the set-up for any
number of ‘animal-befriend-man’ narratives, but the relationship between the
young wolf and Chen Zhen remains mostly unsentimental. Again, this is not a
film that doesn’t play to the empathy of the audience nearly as much as you
might expect. While I admire the unwillingness to manipulate emotions from the
audience, this also left me somewhat indifferent about the outcome of the
narrative.
The Blu-ray
release includes four brief featurettes, with the longest being just over
11-minutes while the shortest is 3. There is a brief profile of director
Jean-Jacques Annaud, interviews from the cast, an interview with the real Chen
Zhen in a featurette about environmental preservation, but the best extra shows
the behind-the-scenes process of training the wolves for the film’s shoot. The
3D version available is not flashy, so 2D may be sufficient for most.
Entertainment Value:
7/10
Quality of
Filmmaking: 6.5/10
Historical
Significance: 6/10
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