The Grey may very well be the best argument for never setting foot in Alaska. The film presents the nation's largest state as a desolate, inhospitable place where terrain, weather and animals all conspire to kill any and all humans as quickly and gruesomely as possible. It's a land made up of jagged peaks and drifting dunes of snow, where blizzards can come and go in the blink of an eye. The deadliest features of The Grey's Alaska are the wolves. They're territorial and stealthy, and unlike us fleshy humans, they're built to survive in the subzero temperatures of Alaska's mountains.

It's in this desolate environment that we find our hero, Liam Neeson's John Ottway, a sharpshooter hired by an oil company to protect the workers from the packs of wolves that also call this place home. Ottway hates the men he works with, who are, in his words, "not fit for society."

They're a group of drinkers, brawlers and criminals, and the quiet, introspective Ottway is the only one standing between them and the vicious predators. Luckily for them, Ottway hates himself just as much. He's suicidal, and the duty to protect these men is the only thing keeping him alive at this point.

It's in this cheery state that we find Ottway boarding a plane to Anchorage, Alaska, with the rest of the rig's crew. However, not long after takeoff, a sudden storm brings the plane down in one of the most terrifying crash sequences ever put to film. Ottway wakes up to find himself tossed from the wreckage, with only six other workers left alive.

Struggling to find food and shelter in the barren mountains, it soon becomes clear that they've crashed right in the middle of a wolf pack's territory. It's not long until the wolves begin to attack the survivors' meager camp, and it's up to Ottway to lead them away from the pack's territory in a desperate bid for survival.

This is, of course, much easier said than done. The wolves in The Grey are probably matched only by Jurassic Park's velociraptors in their cunning, tenacity and seeming omnipresence. They have an almost supernatural ability to appear anywhere, fading in and out of the fog and announcing their presence with a ghostly chorus of howls.

They work incredibly well as villains, giving a face to the cold, relentless danger bearing down on these men, who are facing down the threat of starvation and death from exposure as well as being eaten alive as they try to scramble down the mountain and back to civilization.

With all this in mind, it goes without saying that The Grey is a pretty bleak movie. Putting aside Ottway's self-loathing, it's made clear early on that barring a miracle these men have very little chance of making it off the mountain alive. But director Joe Carnahan is skilled enough to avoid making this a simple celebration of people's suffering. Instead, The Grey shows just how much inner strength can be drawn out of even the most hopeless situation, as Ottway and the crash survivors band together and put everything they have into this one desperate attempt to get to safety.

They might live. They may very well die. But either way, they're going to fight for their survival, and they're going to fight together. In this way, The Grey differs from other famously bleak works like The Road, which come off as having a nearly pornographic interest in seeing just how much it can make its characters suffer.

Another point in the film's favor is how well the characters are fleshed out by the actors. Ottway begins the movie feeling nothing but contempt for his coworkers. But as they come together after the crash and begin to face down the wolves, the workers are softened. We get a look at who they actually are, and begin to see that these are all people—with lives, families, hopes and dreams. It's this depth that keeps the film interesting.

A lesser movie would have made these characters one-dimensional types whose only purpose was to be picked off by the wolves. Instead, The Grey makes its characters likeable and believable, which makes it all the more terrifying when the wolves show their faces.

I'm going to admit that when I first saw advertisements for The Grey, I was less than impressed. It looked like just another mediocre action movie, the kind that tends to be released just after the holiday flood of films aiming for the awards season.

Instead, I found a surprisingly deep, wonderfully tense study about people on the fringes of society finding the strength to stand up to even the most hopeless of situations with dignity.