The Yossi Ghinsberg Survival!

Jungle is directed by Greg McLean and adapted to screenplay by Justin Monjo from the book written by Yossi Ghinsberg. It stars Daniel Radcliffe, Joel Jackson, Alex Russell and Thomas Kretschman. Music is by Johnny Klimek and cinematography by Stefan Duscio.

Film is the retelling of real incidents when in 1981 Israeli adventure Yossi Ghinsberg entered deep into the Amazon Rainforest and found hell waiting for him.

People keep doing it, these adventure types going into treacherous Mother Nature territory to explore and discover the untapped world - only to find misery, while some are never seen again. Greg McLean mixes adventure and horror perfectly, which when coming from the director of Wolf Creek and Rogue comes as no surprise. It's standard formula in narrative drive, man meets new friends in beautiful surrounds, it's all very jolly and daring, and off they go in search of wonderment.

Of course, as is often the case, these stories can sometimes end in utter distress, Ghinsberg was a very lucky fellow to come out alive and tell his amazing story, which is in turn compelling and excellently performed by the cast. As problems begin to surface, the group dynamic begins to facture, with one particular character highly dubious in motives intent. The terrain gets steadily worse, then they got to eat of course, and as bodies begin to wane, decisions on a survival course of action take precedence. Then it's over to high peril for Ghinsberg who has to try and salvage body and mind in the hope that he might somehow escape his jungle nightmare.

Once the pic turns its entire focus on Ghinsberg's solitude, things become a little repetitive and much of the chilling danger begins to ebb away. Yet we are willing him to survive, to stay hooked in as we grasp for a semblance of good news to come out of an otherwise dark tale. Clearly from Ghinsberg's perspective, the real man himself, there was a yearning to be a better man, for better or worse, but the film is a little out of focus for an in depth portrayal of Yossi, with this blend of survival horror and characterisation not quite working. That said though, this still comes as highly recommended viewing, as does further reading on the incidents featured here. For come the closing credits, as real people are shown in photos, and their actual fates written in type, you know there has been no titillation here. 7.5/10

**Not even that bad**

_Mild spoilers:_

Four douche bags hike into the jungle, one of them Hairy Potter, and not one of them has a significant reason to do so. Immediately the viewer is rooting for the wilderness to take them out one by one, but unfortunately we don't even see that happening.

This wasted opportunity could have been so interesting, with survival action like building a shelter, cooking water, making fire, finding edible food, fighting predators, fighting each other, finding the killer, getting the girl... Instead we are presented a "true story", boring, dragged out and without a climax of any sort. Instead, we get a monkey shot off a tree, clobbered to death and eaten above a pre-made camp fire without even taking it apart. Unbelievably Hairy Potter's actor lost weight for this garbage.

Acting, camera, score, action scenes and computer generated images are all top notch. Cannot save the movie from a mediocre 2.5 stars though. If a true story is boring, get inspired. Don't just re-enact it.

28 October 2017

I am migrating my reviews from a different site which has become simply garbage. TMDB looks awesome and I look forward to be a part of it.

_Jungle_ is certainly not my worst film of 2017, but I think it might just be the most disappointing. I'm a **massive** fan of Greg McLean, and the trailer had me proper on board with _Jungle_. Unfortunately, the end result was something capable of capturing my interest only once, and for no longer than a couple of minutes.

_Final rating:★★ - Had some things that appeal to me, but a poor finished product._

**Jungle, is not a place for humans anymore as thousands of years ago!**

A much better, in fact, one of the best biopic about the survival in the wilderness. It is an Australian film about a young Israeli named Yossi, who went for a trekking in the Bolivian jungle with three others, but had got lost and fought for survival. It's 1981, the rainy season is just a corner away, but the four went to find a lost Indian village. After everybody got separated, the remain story told from Yossi's perspective, how he faced the nature's challenges to keep alive and make safely to the human civilisation.

The film was very good compared to what the trailer and teaser hinted out. Radcliffe is getting better with his every new film. With performance like this, surely everybody would accept him in the coming days. So we could see him in big projects, in big roles. Good writing and direction, but it was based on the biographical book of the same name. The film was entirely shot in Australia, but you can witness the real South American atmosphere. Something what bothered me was, Yossi an ex army man, so this kind of survival skills is taught in the army camps, yet he was scared and struggle like a normal person. Overall, it is a good film to go for it.

_8/10_

**I hope to find someone that is able to give me a compelling reason to see this Class V movie, that every where else I look both critics and viewers agree that in that is either pure crap and in the best cases below a 5 out 10 (in my time that mean an F).**

_**Despite all, here in Tratk.tv it has an outstanding 72% from 1.2k people out of 8.1k watchers, meaning that at least 15% of the people that watched think is it quite good.**_

**I am open to be convinced and surprised.**

Thanks,

abetancort

**~~————~~**

This is why I think the movie must be crappy, besides the apparent consensus in the opinion of critics and viewers.

The producers and the studio actions and inactions for a movie that wasn’t produced under contracts with an streaming platform, tell a story. And it starts that they knew (or at least feared) that the movie was going to tank in the US if it was shown on movie theaters, and I think that it was before the even did the test-focus screening. And with the results of test-screening they wost fears were confirmed.

To cut their loses they decided to minimize their investment in promotion and distribution. The movie only had meaningful theatrical releases in UK and Germany where Daniel Radcliffe “still” has unconditional of following from his roles as Harry Potter.

Looking forward, the producers and the studio, in light of the very weak prospects for the US and almost every first tier market, had forecasted that they would probably not even get to recover a significant percentage of the distribution and promotion investment they had to made for a proper theatrical release in any other first tier market, and much less in the US.

The sound decision was clear, they had to stop throwing good money over bad money with the hope to transform the bad money (bad investment) into good one. And they clearly did it, they put their engines all flank speed aft and decided to release the movie in the US, the world largest movie theater market, and in any other first tier markets using Internet platforms (no distribution cost) and without any promotion.

In the rental-video heyday this type of production would have been referred as Class V movie, “a movie that couldn’t make to movie theaters, out of it crappiness, and it could only be released directly to rental outlets within the catalog, a package offering”).



**Thanks again to help me decide if I give a chance to this movie.**