For 13 years, Timothy Treadwell spent his summers on the Alaskan Peninsula, living among wild bears and, for the last five years, videotaping his life there. His winters were spent touring elementary schools and making television appearances, in an effort to educate people about the plight of the animals he loved. This continued until October 5, 2003, when Treadwell and his girlfriend were attacked and killed by a bear.

Using Treadwell’s footage as well as interviews with his friends, family, and local authorities, director Werner Herzog crafts a fascinating documentary around his favorite themes: obsession, madness, and man’s place in nature. Herzog, who has an active role in the film, empathizes with Treadwell, even though their worldviews are on opposite ends of the spectrum.

Addressing the camera, Treadwell, who had no formal training with animals, saw himself as a “kind warrior” who was there to protect the bears from poachers, developers, and others who would do them harm. But others saw him as a deluded kook, suffering at least from a naiveté about his role in the bears’ lives. (When Treadwell waxes poetic about a fresh pile of bear dung, it’s hard to disagree with them)… (Barnes & Noble)

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Grizzly Man could easily have been sensational and exploitative, but in the hands of Werner Herzog, it becomes something extraordinary. Herzog was granted exclusive access to over 100 hours of video shot by amateur naturalist, wildlife advocate and troubled loner Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers in Alaska’s Katmai National Park, where he grew to know and love the grizzly bears that lived there.

He was also killed by one of them, in October 2003, along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, and that seemingly inevitable fate informs every minute of Herzog’s riveting combination of Treadwell’s video with his own expert filmmaking and unique vision of nature and man.

Whereas Treadwell was a naïve nature-lover and social outcast whose sanity was slowly slipping away, Herzog is a pragmatic mythologist who views nature primarily in terms of “chaos, hostility, and murder,” and the disparity of their vision results in a magnetic attraction that makes the sum of Grizzly Man greater than its parts.

We come to admire the dreamer, the idealist, the failed actor and recovered alcoholic man-child that was Treadwell, and we equally admire the seeker of truth and wisdom that is Herzog. They belong together, in some world beyond our world, where visionaries join forces to create life after death… (Amazon)