There is a cardinal rule about doing almost anything in the wilderness: never go it alone.  This is true for nearly any outdoor activity, from climbing the highest mountains to a simple hike through the countryside.  I also like this advice as a Catholic since, as followers of Jesus, we always have a companion.  Plenty of people go solo anyway, and walk away from the experience with their limbs and lives intact.  Faith works differently.  It is the stories about those who buck these guidelines who get movies made about them.  Without Christianity directly involved, this is the subject of today’s movie, Apex.

The Apex towards which Sasha (Charlize Theron) and her husband, Tommy (Eric Bana), are climbing is Norway’s Troll Wall.  We meet them in the middle of their ascent, waking up from spending the night suspended from the side of the rock.  Sasha is the motivated one, always pushing her limits, whereas her husband is preaching caution.  Despite her desire to get to the top that night, he convinces her that incoming weather will make it too dangerous.  As they are going down, the wind begins flinging ice and stone off the face.  Some of the debris connects with Tommy and he tumbles unconscious.  He is dangling with only Sasha keeping him from falling to his death.  However, she cannot support both their weights, and eventually she has to let him go.  We then move ahead five months and Sasha is in Tommy’s native Australia driving through the Outback.  Her destination is the more jungle-like areas of the Land Down Under, specifically Wandarra National Park, to camp and do some white-water rafting.  Upon arriving and signing in with the park ranger (Aaron Pedersen), she is warned about being in the middle of nowhere by herself.  The word of caution is underscored by the bulletin board, which features a rash of recent disappearances in the vicinity.  She goes ahead anyway, stopping at a gas station before heading to her destination.  While in the store, she is accosted by a couple hunters who are clearly trying to mess with an unescorted woman.  They follow her to the register, but are warned away by Ben (Taron Egerton).  Sasha is receptive to the friendly face, and Ben offers some tips on getting to where she wants to set up camp.  After a day of driving, she gets to a stopping point to rest, but is rattled by the same hunters she had seen earlier.  She takes refuge in her van and eventually they go away.  In the morning, she gets out her kayak and heads out on the river.  She spends the day kayaking before pulling over to set up her tent for the night.  She is awakened by strange bird calls and twigs snapping.  Unzipping her tent, she notices that her pack is gone, which contained her food and cell phone.  With seemingly little choice, she carries on down the stream and eventually spots a path leading deeper into the woods.  Taking it, she finds a crudely built hut and it appears that Ben is living in it.  He is hospitable, bringing her food and water, and they begin to converse.  The alarm bells are set off for her when he talks of the bravery she displayed the previous night with the hunters.  He had been watching her, claiming to have been doing so her for her own protection.  She tries to get up to leave, and this is when he throws out her backpack.  He informs her that it is full of food, and that she now has until the end of a song to run before he comes after her.  Naturally, it takes a moment for it to sink in that she is about to be hunted because who expects to be confronted with such a situation?  A few seconds later, she is running for her life.  During this initial chase, he fires a few arrows at her that narrowly miss her before she takes to the water and braves a few rapids without a flotation device of any kind, though she does hit her head on a rock.  By the way, get ready for a few of these sequences.  At length, she is able to put enough distance between them in order to assess things.  On the other side of the river, she spots smoke from a fire and is hopeful that it might be someone who might help.  As she gets closer, though, it is all a set up by Ben.  What he does have there is a canoe, and she tries to sneak in to use it.  Unfortunately, a trap closes on her leg and she is captured.  Following a night strung up like game, she is taken to a cave a few miles away.  It turns out to be an abattoir where he has been keeping the victims we saw on the bulletin board in the ranger station.  There is also the suggestion of cannibalism, and I will not say anymore on that subject.  Call it Christian restraint.  She does not show restraint, though, when he comes in close for a taunting hug and she bites off a chunk of his ear.  It is the window she needs to jump into the nearby sluice, and he goes after her.  Because they are tethered to one another, it makes navigating the surging water difficult, and he is knocked unconscious.  She manages to get them to a bank, but he awakens before she can bash his head in with a rock.  Still, she does break his leg and they pass out for the night.  With the rising of the sun, she convinces him that he will not survive unless they work together to scale a rock wall on the other side of the river.  In the middle of the ascent, she manages to untether him.  He falls to his death, but she must now free climb the rest of the way.  She makes it to safety and is able to alert the authorities to Ben’s predations.

The final scene in Apex is Sasha on the beach having survived the ordeal.  Her last act is to throw Tommy’s compass in the water.  This is an interesting moment from a Catholic point of view.  Earlier, it is suggested that while the device serves a navigational function, it is referred to as a moral compass.  It is God that provides that for Christian, and the more one grows in faith and their relationship with the Almighty, the more it will point to “True North” in all situations.  She gets frustrated with it because he is holding it when he first posits that maybe they should give up their climb.  The film would call this instinct, but however you frame it, it is significant that she would discard it at the end.  Arguably, had she followed it in the beginning, she might not have had to fight for her life.  Further, she basically admits her mistake to Ben on their final night together.  Pointedly, in talking about the events that led to Tommy’s death, she says that she did not listen.  That phrase caught this Catholic’s ear because it is one of the ways we describe a life of Faith.  It is not an easy technique to learn.  How does one listen to God, who is always trying to guide us onto the correct path?  The challenge is that it looks different for everyone, and can change from moment to moment.  Because it is hard, so many people give up and lose their faith.  This is sad, and we can see this to a degree in Sasha.  She thinks she can go on alone and does not listen to anyone who tries to tell her otherwise.  Being attentive to God does not always involve voices booming from Heaven or shafts of radiant light.  It can be as simple as a park ranger saying how dangerous it is to go solo into the wild.  With a heart turned towards God, we can come to interpret these signs in the correct way.

I interpreted Apex as being a decent movie.  One of the pitfalls to enjoying survival films is that we often second guess the choices made by the characters, and I confess to doing that a couple times with Sasha.  I also did not appreciate some of the gore.  Luckily, none of this is too over-the-top, and it is a solid and thrilling bit of cinema.