Released on Oct. 6, 2011, this R rated movie was directed by Daniel Nettheim and stars Willem Dafoe in the lead role along with Frances O’Connor, Sam Neill and Callan Mulvey.
The movie’s about a mercenary hunter, Martin David, who’s been hired by a biotech company to travel to Tasmania to “collect samples" from a Tasmanian Tiger. In other words, he’s supposed to kill one, possibly the last one in the world, and bring back tissue samples from the dead animal. He travels to an area where there have been two reliable sightings of the supposedly extinct animal. He tells the locals that he’s a university professor there to study Tasmanian Devils.
When he’s not out tracking the Tasmanian Tiger, which looks like a hyena with tiger stripes on its back, he boards in a cabin owned by a single mother and her two kids. Their father went missing in the bush eight months earlier under mysterious circumstances. David also finds himself in the middle of a conflict between local loggers and protesting environmentalists, who are holding up their work and paychecks. When David doesn’t find the Tasmanian Tiger in a timely manner, the sinister biotech company, Red Leaf, sends in another mercenary and bullets fly.
This movie, while it wasn’t a blockbuster, was cool on a number of levels. First, I was surprised to learn that the Tasmanian Tiger is a real animal, that is, it was a real animal until it went extinct in the 1930s. It was native to continental Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea. Intensive hunting, diseases, nonnative dogs and loss of habitat are all believed to have contributed to its extinction. Interestingly though, sightings of the animal are still reported, and there have been nearly 4,000 sightings of the animal since the late 1930s. The Tasmanian Tiger is also called the Tasmanian Wolf, and it was a carnivorous marsupial.
The movie also seemed extremely realistic. Shot almost entirely in Tasmania, it featured scenes shot at Battery Point, Hobart International Airport, Mount Wellington and the Upper Florentine Valley. The scenes showing Dafoe setting traps and tracking the wanted animal were also well done and edgy. I read somewhere that Dafoe studied under an outback survival expert to prepare for the role. It showed.
Nettheim wrote the screenplay for the film, but the movie was actually based on a 1999 novel of the same name by Julia Leigh. “The Hunter” is one of two novels written by the 42-year-old Leigh. Her other book is called “Disquiet.” In addition to being an author, she’s also a movie director and screenwriter.
In the end, how many of you have seen “The Hunter”? What did you think about it? What was your favorite part? How many of you have read Leigh’s novel, “The Hunter”? What did you think about it? Let us know in the comments section below.
For more information about the movie, visit its official website at http://www.thehuntermovie.com/.
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