The Grey

Before we cut out for the long weekend, let us bring you one more "best of 2012" list.  Today, we share with you Paul Doro's picks.  Again, another writer who has been contributing to Shock for some time and I think you'll dig the diversity that he brings to his list.  Read on! - Ryan Turek, Managing Editor

The box office hit, The Grey, is coming to Blu-ray Combo Pack with UltraViolet, as well as DVD, Digital Download and On Demand on May 22, 2012, from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.  

Starring Liam Neeson, The Grey is directed by Joe Carnahan and also features Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo, James Badge Dale Joe Anderson, Dallas Roberts and Nonso Anozie.

The Grey Blu-ray Combo Pack delivers the film in perfect hi-def picture and perfect hi-def sound and features bonus content including deleted scenes and feature commentary by co-writer and director Joe Carnahan and editors Roger Barton (Transformers: Dark of the Moon) and Jason Hellmann (G-Force).

It was a tight race all weekend, but Chronicle - the found footage thriller - came out on top at the box office with $22 million.  That's an impressive debut for newcomer director Joshua Trank and stars Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan and Alex Russell.

Could a sequel follow?  It's possible.  Trank and writer Max Landis have a trilogy envisioned.  

After the jump, find out how The Woman in Black - another film which made its debut this weeked - fared.

According to Q, if you break down a narrative you will find at its heart seven essential conflicts: man against man, man against nature, man against himself, man against God, man against Society, man caught in the middle, and man and woman. Any one of these is more than enough grist for a storyteller's mill, and has been the root for our most archetypal narratives.

Or you could go the other way and try to jam as much of that as you can into one plot, the way Joe Carnahan (The A-Team) has done in his modern Jack London-like adventure, The Grey.

John Ottway (Liam Neeson) is a master at going his own way and has done so for probably his entire life, as far as we can tell from the small snippets we get at it. A soldier, or possibly even a mercenary or terrorist (we'll never know for sure), in his early life, in the loneliness of middle age he now finds himself a professional killer of a different stripe tasked with keeping wolves and other predators from attacking oil field workers in the frozen wasteland of northernmost Alaska. A place, in Ottway's estimation, fit only for men who have discovered they can't live in the civilized world. That's an assumption which will be tested for him and a small group of oil workers who survive a plane crash and must make their way through the elements away from a pack of territorial wolves and back to safety.

Open Road Films has released a new Red Band trailer for The Grey, coming to theaters this Friday, January 27. Director Joe Carnahan's thriller Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, James Badge Dale and Nonso Anozie. Check out the trailer after the jump!