The Snow Walker Movie Analysis Essay

909 Words4 Pages

"The Snow Walker " is a tale of adventure and survival. A story about how the main characters are going to survive in Northern Territories of Canada after a plane crash. Set in the 1950s, it features an arrogant white pilot, Charlie Halliday, who was bribed with walrus tusks into taking a sick Inuit girl to a big city hospital. He is an ignorant racist. At the opening scene of the movie, we can see how he scoffed at being called "Brother" by an Inuit. He is sexist and fancy of himself as a man's man. We get the sense that his “girl in every port” lifestyle is driven by a “you only live once” attitude. But things change in a crisis. Problem with an aircraft engine, force Charlie to make a crash landing only yards from the shore of a lake. Luckily both of them unharmed during the crash. The radio is broken, crash place unknown to others as he made derivation …show more content…

It is a love that Kanaalaq almost innately possesses, as she selflessly and wordlessly feeds, clothes, and heals her companion, no questions asked. Later in the film, these qualities come to the fore as she shares the story of how her mother left her starving family so that her children could have her share of food and how she herself bit her own wrist to let her dying sister drink her blood. Kanaalaq laughs as she tells this last bit, marvelling at how she “tricked” Tarqeq, the moon god, by saving her sister’s life. When Charlie and Kanaalaq find a wrecked plane containing a partly burn corpse but also a trove of tools and weapons, he does not understand, at first, why Kanaalaq refuses to go near any of the dead man’s belongings. Instead, she builds a funeral cairn for the body and buries his tools with him. Later Charlie begins to see that people and objects have more meaning. Kanaalaq’s self-giving love extends even to the dead. She is willing to sacrifice a chance for survival to ensure that the unfamiliar dead man will be safe in the