Troy Hurtubise is the oddly interesting man he is today because he was attacked by a grizzly bear in 1984. Out of that came his life's dream--to build a suit of armor that would allow him to go one-on-one with a grizzly. The most compelling footage (and ripe for repeated viewing) in Project Grizzly is the crash testing of the 145-pound suit of titanium armor, chain mail, rubber, and interior air bags. Hurtubise, resembling a robotic Terminator, is thrown off cliffs, rammed by logs, hit by a pickup truck, and clubbed with baseball bats. And he cheerily considers those good days. Much of the rest of the film is tepid, with an almost absent narrative and hard-to-follow monologues by Hurtubise, who uses a fair amount of salty language. The biggest disappointment, though, is the lack of a climax--the $150,000 suit and its obsessed creator never do battle with the big G. It's a real-life Twin Peaks without the creepy dramatic payoff. --Valerie J. Nelson
Meet Troy James Hurtubise, a self-styled "close-quarter bear researcher," who's obsessed with going face-to-face with Canada's most deadly land mammal, the grizzly bear. Troy is the creator of what he hopes is a "grizzly-proof" suit of armour -- an extraordinary fusion of high-tech materials and homespun ingenuity -- and of his own hybrid mythology that is part Hollywood, part Canadian Shield. His quest takes audiences into a world both compelling and disturbing, full of contradiction, humour and fantastical vision.
Directed by Peter Lynch, Project Grizzly explores the territory between documentary and drama, where the dividing line between fact and imagination is as thin as a knife edge. In this twisted nature film, it is man, not bears, who come under the closest scrutiny.
Robo-Bear in the Rockies... Clint Eastwood meets Jacques Cousteau... Project Grizzly is a film about overcoming insurmountable odds, leaving an imprint, creating your own legend.
Login
Add tags