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This lengthy movie is base on a true story. A very good overview has been published in Men’s Journal online and I will give you excerpts here to review the storyline: “

Fifteen years after an enigmatic 24-year-old walked Into the Wild, the site of his death has become a shrine. As Hollywood weighs in with a portrait of the young man as a saintlike visionary, has the truth been lost? Inside the strange life and tragic death of “Alexander Supertramp.” –Matthew Power

“Fifteen years have passed: 15 howling Alaska winters and 15 brief frenzied summers, and the ancient bus on the Stampede Trail still rusts in the wilderness, almost exactly as Chris McCandless left it. Twenty-two miles from the nearest road, shaded out by alder and black spruce on a moraine rise above a creek, the green and white WWII-vintage International Harvester looks surreally out of place, like an artifact from a vanished civilization. The bus doesn’t at first seem a likely time capsule of American mythology, a shrine to which people from around the world make pilgrimages and leave tributes in memory of a young man whom they see as a fallen hero. It doesn’t look to be the sort of place that would inspire a best-selling book, much less a major motion picture. But that’s exactly what it is. Fireweed and wild potato grow up in the wheel wells. On the side of the bus fairbanks 142 is still legible in paint that has been bleached and scoured by the seasons. A few bullet holes have starred the windows; whether they were fired out of anger or boredom is unclear. Other than that, the people who have made the trek out here, out of respect or superstition, have left the site largely untouched. The vertebrae of the young moose McCandless shot lie scattered. The bones, and a smattering of feathers, add to the spooky aura of a charnel ground. Inside, near an old oil-barrel stove, McCandless’s jeans are neatly folded on a shelf, knees patched with scraps of an old army blanket, seat patched with duct tape. And the bed is still there too, springs and stuffing bursting from the stained mattress, as if a wild animal’s been at it. The same bed where they found his body. It was a haunting tale, capturing the imagination of the country. September 1992, deep in the bush of the Alaskan interior northeast of Mount McKinley, in an abandoned bus on a disused mining trail, the decomposed body of a man was found by a moose hunter. The remains weighed only 67 pounds, and he had apparently died of starvation. He carried no identification, but a few rolls of undeveloped film and a cryptic journal chronicled a horrifying descent into sickness and slow death after 112 days alone in the wilderness. When the man’s identity was established, the puzzle only deepened. His name was Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old honors graduate from Emory University, star athlete, and beloved brother and son from a wealthy but dysfunctional East Coast family. With a head full of Jack London and Thoreau, McCandless rechristened himself “Alexander Supertramp,” cut all ties with his family, gave his trust fund to charity, and embarked on a two-year odyssey that brought him to Alaska, that mystic repository of American notions of wilderness, a blank spot on the map where he could test the limits of his wits and endurance. Setting off with little more than a .22 caliber rifle and a 10-pound bag of rice, McCandless hoped to find his true self by renouncing society and living off the land. But, as Craig Medred would note in the Anchorage Daily News, “the Alaska wilderness is a good place to test yourself. The Alaska wilderness is a bad place to find yourself.” No one ever saw McCandless alive again. Fifteen years later his story continues to resonate as a quintessentially American tale, and its hero has assumed near mythic status, blurring the lines between living memory and the creation of a legend. When writer Jon Krakauer first heard McCandless’s story, he later told a reporter, “the hair on my neck rose.” Krakauer’s profound empathy for his subject and obsessive research yielded Into the Wild, a heartbreaking portrait that has sold more than 2 million copies and become the authoritative version of the McCandless story, around which all discussions are framed. In Krakauer’s telling, McCandless represents the human urge to push the limits of experience, to live a life untouched by the trappings of culture and civilization. Now that portrait has been taken up by the ultimate mythologizer: Hollywood. This film was written and directed by Sean Penn and filmed on location in the many places McCandless traveled. Woven through with the timeless themes of self-invention, risk, and our complex relationship to the natural world, the enigma of Chris McCandless is once again being debated, more vociferously than ever. Was his death a Shakespearean tragedy or a pitch-black comedy of errors? What impact has the tale and its renown had on our perception of Alaska? And perhaps most tantalizingly: Did Krakauer, and now Penn, get key parts of the story wrong? ” This is a short summary compared to the 2 hour and 38 minute film. It was a haunting movie – even when you already knew the outcome. It was a sad movie because of the outcome. This is another one of those movies that makes you think. I came away conflicted. I appreciated that this young millenial student rejected his calling to be narcissistic and unproductive and struck out to find the meaning of life. Dramatized in the end is the true essence of reality in that we cannot successfully get through this world alone. We may reject the world but we should not reject human relationships. Many questions could be raised about why he didn’t look for an alternative way to cross the river and get back to society after he had survived the worst of the Alaskan Winter. Why did he not get more prepared in wilderness survival? Did he become mentally unbalanced as a result of the isolation from people or was he really potentially schizophrenic? Did he really not want to go back to civilization after he had accomplished his goal and simply gave up? One could attempt to psychoanalyze for decades but we will never have the real answer. What are the great lessons learned here? Part of happiness in living comes from the interpersonal relationships with other human organisms. Some solitude is often necessary so that we can listen to that still small voice by whatever name you want to call it. And, there can be joy in life without “stuff.” The bottom line is one must know their limits and everything must be done in moderation. See the movie. I would suspect it will speak to you. Maybe not the same way it did to me or to anyone else for that matter. I do think it speaks to us at whatever place we are in our journey of life. And like anything else, too many movies like this can be hazardous to your mental health. We all need a little slap-stick humor, vampire horror, gratuitous violence, and film noir drama from time to time.