Timothy Treadwell moved to LA transfixed on the hope of becoming a star, but got "eaten alive" by the decision makers in the entertainment industry. He then went to Alaska to make what happened to him figuratively in LA a horrible reality by taunting grizzlies until one finally took his bait and killed him. The only surprises were that it took 3 years to accomplish his dance, and that he tragically took someone (an innocent woman) with him. Ironically, in his death, director Herzog came along and made him a posthumous star in what is a most compelling movie about man's relationship to nature.
Treadwell emerges not as a sympathetic environmentalist, but as a narcissistic, compulsive, and mentally imbalanced wacko hell-bent on self-destruction. Not that he isn't sympathetic; he is. But he is so obviously wrong that one cannot leave the theater thinking he got what he deserved.
Imagine a common housefly with a microscopic video camera flying around someone's house, pretending to be at one with the humans, filming its exploits for the other flies. The fly buzzes all around the humans, showing how the humans won't hurt it so long as it doesn't give its ground. When one of the humans tries to shoo the fly away, it tells the human it loves it. Sooner or later the hairy little pest is going to get swatted, and rightly so. Well, If I were a grizzly bear I'd feel about as sorry for Treadwell as a human would about that fly. Treadwell had to know this, and yet he deludes himself into thinking that he was somehow immune to the irrefutable laws of nature in which there are predators and prey and never the twain shall meet.
In the end, the bears probably hurt him less than the Hollywood producers who years earlier led him on with false hopes; the producers being far more dangerous than grizzlies, especially in their native habitat.
Treadwell emerges not as a sympathetic environmentalist, but as a narcissistic, compulsive, and mentally imbalanced wacko hell-bent on self-destruction. Not that he isn't sympathetic; he is. But he is so obviously wrong that one cannot leave the theater thinking he got what he deserved.
Imagine a common housefly with a microscopic video camera flying around someone's house, pretending to be at one with the humans, filming its exploits for the other flies. The fly buzzes all around the humans, showing how the humans won't hurt it so long as it doesn't give its ground. When one of the humans tries to shoo the fly away, it tells the human it loves it. Sooner or later the hairy little pest is going to get swatted, and rightly so. Well, If I were a grizzly bear I'd feel about as sorry for Treadwell as a human would about that fly. Treadwell had to know this, and yet he deludes himself into thinking that he was somehow immune to the irrefutable laws of nature in which there are predators and prey and never the twain shall meet.
In the end, the bears probably hurt him less than the Hollywood producers who years earlier led him on with false hopes; the producers being far more dangerous than grizzlies, especially in their native habitat.