The real story of the heroes of the movie Jungle (2017): plot summary, ending meaning, movie similar dramas.
Country: Australia, UK
Genre: Adventure, Thriller, Drama
Year of production: 2017
Director: Greg McLean
Actors: Daniel Radcliffe, Alex Russell, Joel Jackson, Thomas Kretschmann
tagline: “Nature has only one law – survival”
The plot of the film “Jungle” is based on the real events that occurred in 1981 with several adventurers in the rainforests of Bolivia, and generally corresponds to them. And although the picture does not contain puzzles that require explanation, or any hidden meaning, there are still a couple of details that might not be clear when viewing. Let’s break down the plot of the movie.
What is the movie about
The film Jungle begins with a short biographical note about the main character – the traveler Yossi Ginsberg. A twenty-two-year-old boy, after serving three years in the Israeli army, against the wishes of his father, instead of going to college, goes to wander the world.
Daniel Radcliffe played the role of Yossi. Frame from the film.
After visiting several countries, he arrives in South America. Yossi travels without comfort, but looks quite happy. He meets Marcus Stemm, a school teacher who also loves adventure. While in the campground, the guys became friends. They tell each other about their past. Yossi says that he promised his father to return a year after leaving, but now he is not sure whether it was worth keeping the promise. The guys are joined by photographer Kevin Gale, an old friend of Marcus. They go to La Paz, the unofficial capital of Bolivia.
On a city street, Yossi runs into a man named Karl Ruprechter. He pretends to be an experienced geologist. He incites Yossi and his friends on an exciting journey through the jungles of Bolivia in search of a mysterious tribe of Indians. If you’re lucky, you can even earn extra money, because in the local rivers, according to Karl’s description, there is gold. For Yossi, this proposal looks like the fulfillment of a dream of grand adventure. Markus and Kevin are skeptical about the idea of going deep into the dangerous jungle, but eventually give in to persuasion.
Carl shows his friends a map with a route. It is not very accurate, but the guide assures that he has a detailed detailed plan of the trip in his head. Packing things, Yossi takes with him a prayer book donated by his uncle as a talisman – he helped him survive the horrors of the concentration camp
By plane, the company gets to Apolo. The jungle journey begins. On the way, Carl talks about his philosophy. He says that people destroy nature, which they are unworthy of. In pursuit of the benefits, the majority have lost the primitive wisdom that the Indians still have.
Two days in the jungle are already difficult for friends, although this is only the beginning of the journey. At some point, the guys even lose their guide. It turns out that he deliberately got ahead of them, since there was already a small village nearby – an intermediate point of travel. Locals welcome travelers with joy and hospitality.
The role of Charles was played by Thomas Kretschmann. Frame from the film.
The next day, the heroes set out again. Passing through the river, friends try to get gold in it. And Yossi even succeeds: he finds a small grain of precious metal. Karl continues his campaign: humanity is a disease for nature, the way out is its destruction or the totalitarian power of artificial intelligence. The conductor admits that he has already been persecuted for his beliefs, and the police are looking for him.
Karl shoots the monkey, finishing it off with a butt – in the jungle it is better to save ammo. At a halt, the guide, Yossi and Kevin dine on booty. Marcus refuses meat – he is sick at the thought that only recently it was a living creature. The next day, the guy is very weak and constantly lags behind his comrades. Wounds appear on his legs, festering from dampness. At this rate, the group is unlikely to have time to find the Indian settlement before the onset of the rainy season.
Everyone understands that, given the slowness of Marcus, it makes no sense to move on. Carl offers to wait until the guy’s wounds heal and come back. However, the rest are not eager to return. Kevin gets the idea to build a raft to travel down the river. Karl is against it, but the idea is approved by the general vote.
Rafting on a homemade raft is going well, but only up to the first difficult section. Marcus nearly falls into the water. In a dangerous situation, a quarrel breaks out between Kevin and Carl over where it is better to row. Having got out on the shore, they continue to swear. Kevin tells his friends that it looks like the overconfident Carl is actually very scared because he can’t swim. The guide refuses to continue the journey on the raft and decides to go back to the city. He is joined by Marcus, who realizes that he will be a burden to his friends.
The company is reconciled, but still divided. Carl gives the guys an encouraging parting word and guidelines for their further journey, and together with Markus turns back. Yossi and Kevin continue on the raft.
Alex Russell as Kevin, Daniel Radcliffe as Yossi, Joel Jackson as Marcus, Thomas Kretschmann as Carl. Frame from the film.
Despite the fact that the rowers were given strict instructions to get ashore in advance, they fail it. A stormy current carries them into a dangerous narrow gorge. The raft hits a rock in the middle of the river. Kevin swims to shore and asks his friend to throw him a machete to cut down a vine and throw it to save him. But the idea fails – Yossi falls into a turbulent stream. Exhausted, having received a head injury and almost drowning, he hardly gets ashore. Climbing higher, Yossi takes cover from the rain that has begun. The next morning, the guy sees a backpack belonging to him float by with crockery jingling on stones and several valuable items inside, and catches it. Probably, the movement of things was delayed by stones.
Yossi rushes in search of a partner. After some time, he comes to the place where the raft collided with the rock, but Kevin is not there. At the top of the cliff, he leaves a note and some supplies for a friend, while he continues on his way to his intended destination.
A few days later, Yossi continues to wander alone through the jungle. Modest food supplies are running out and the hero has to eat what he finds. One day, while taking out edible fruits, he stumbles upon a snake and crushes its head with a stone.
At night, Yossi has visions of Marcus. This sudden vision allows you to see the jaguar in the thicket. With the help of a homemade flamethrower (lighter and spray), Yossi drives away the animal.
During the day, the hero discovers that the bump on his head, obtained by hitting a stone in the river, has become larger. In addition, the day before, he noticed that a parasite had clearly settled inside. Yossi, having opened the bump, pulls it out with tweezers.
Frame from the film.
The hero comes across a small tree, part of which seems to have been cut down by a man. Later, he sees a bird’s nest with eggs. After apologizing to the unborn chicks, Yossi eats the fetuses. It turns out that the hero reached a point that was marked on Karl’s map as a village called Kuriplaya. Yossi sees abandoned household utensils and huts – the settlement is clearly abandoned by people. Now the guy will have to go to Rurrenabak – about 120 kilometers.
At a halt, the guy discovers that his legs are in even worse condition than Marcus had. But it is necessary, overcoming pain, to move forward.
Yossi stumbles upon the footprint of someone’s boots. But then he sees the shell from the eggs he ate the day before and realizes that the shoe print belongs to him – he lost the right direction and just made a circle.
While Yossi continues the hard way, starving, in pain and spending the night in the pouring rain, Kevin finds salvation – he almost reached the settlement along the river on the wreckage of the raft.
After recovering, Kevin tries to organize a search for a friend. The authorities even give him a plane for this. But in vain – from a great height it is not possible to see the missing person. The authorities see no point in creating a search detachment: two weeks have already passed – the guy is unlikely to be alive. Kevin begs the fisherman, who knows the river better than anyone else, to keep looking.
Yossi keeps moving. He meets a wild girl. After a while, the guy realizes that this is just a hallucination caused by stress and hunger.
Frame from the film.
The hero falls into a quagmire. He is almost completely sucked in, he loses his backpack and talisman-prayer book. Yet Yossi manages to get out, clinging to a branch. Half delirious, he crawls forward. To recover, the guy touches a tree with painfully biting fire ants. This partly sobers him up. The strength is only enough to get to the river bank. There he folds the first letter of his name – “Y” (Yossi) from logs. The hero sees a turtle on the shore and, intending to kill it for food, swings. But something stops him – the guy releases the animal. Yossi looks at the starry sky with hope. He has a vision in the form of a moth, which had appeared to him before.
On the nineteenth day, Kevin and the fisherman sail to the place that Yossi reached the day before. However, neither one nor the other attaches importance to the logs folded in the form of a letter. Already sailing back, Kevin suddenly notices a dirty, wounded and exhausted friend – the rescue mission was a success.
In the ending, we see how the locals look at the surviving Yossi as a miracle.
The credits in the final tell about the further fate of the real prototypes of the story told. According to them, Yosssi and Kevin returned to La Paz, hoping to find Marcus and Carl there. But it turned out that they never arrived. Kevin searched for them for weeks, but to no avail. No one else saw the missing. It also turned out that Carl was really wanted by the police. It wasn’t the first time he’d led travelers on a hike. And the wild Indian tribes he promised to show them didn’t really exist. Nobody knows Karl’s true goals.
The surviving friends continued to travel, both becoming writers. Yossi also took up charity work, helping the locals of the village in which he found salvation.
The meaning of the film Jungle
The essence of the film “Jungle” is quite simple. This is a story about willpower and the real danger that rash acts committed under the influence of a thirst for adventure can entail. There are practically no details in the content of the picture that require a solution. The only thing that may require interpretation is the image of a moth. This is a reference to Henri Charrière’s book The Moth, which inspired the prototype of the protagonist of Jungle. The point is that Yossi, just like the character in this novel (unfairly sentenced to life imprisonment), was able to not break in terrible conditions thanks to willpower.
The plot of the film corresponds to real events. There are only a few minor differences. Although Yossi’s memoirs are perhaps more meaningful.
Jungle Ending explanation
Interpreting the meaning of the ending of the film Jungle, one can also say that there is no subtext in it. Salvation happened – the main character received a lucky ticket. And, judging by the real future life of his prototype (by good deeds and following the spirit of adventure, already safer), he tried to justify this. It hardly needs any further explanation of the ending.
Frame from the film.
What happened to Markus and Carl
As for the fate of Marcus and Karl, vaguely described in the credits, one can only guess about it. There is very little data on the prototype of the latter. From the Times newspaper clipping, you can learn that Karl Ruprechter was previously known to the Bolivian authorities as the man who abandoned the tourist in the jungle. But apparently that story ended well. In addition, according to the article, he was wanted by the Austrian police and Interpol for participation in radical leftist groups. He fled to Bolivia on a fake passport. However, it is not a fact that all this is not a rumor or fiction of journalists.
What is known about Marcus is that he never returned home – Yossi met with his family after a futile search. Moreover, the parents of the missing person after a while began organizing another search mission – with the help of members of the Seventh-day Adventist sect. But she did not give any results.
After a long time, Yossi Ginsberg returned to the place of his salvation, Rurrenabak, where he heard many stories that the rogue Carl was alive and well. However, no real evidence of this was found either.
For some reason, the version that Carl killed and ate Marcus on his way back to La Paz is very popular on the Internet. Although she has the same right to exist as hundreds of others, and stands out only for her extravagance. Perhaps (Yossi Ginsberg leans towards this) Carl died in a fall from a cliff or as a result of a tree falling during a storm, and Marcus ended up unable to reach civilization on his own.
Frame from the film.
Similar films
- “Moth” (USA, Spain, Czech Republic, 2017): one of the adaptations of the very novel that inspired the prototype of the protagonist of the “Jungle”.
- “Into the Wild” (USA, 2007): a real tragic story of a desperate traveler.
- 127 Hours (UK, US, France, 2010): A rock climber goes to the mountains and gets trapped.
- “Touching the Void” (UK, US, 2003): A documentary about the incredible story of a climber’s survival in the mountains.
- “Outcast” (USA, 2000): the main character survives a plane crash and ends up on a desert island.
- “Life of Pi” (USA, Taiwan, 2012): an Indian young man gets into a shipwreck and gets to land on the same raft with wild animals.
