Movie Reviews : To Build A Fire

To Build A Fire  (1969) is a movie made by David Cobham, with Ian Hogg as the main character. A French version was made in 2003 starring Oliver Pages, and an American version, but with some changes in the story, in 2008.

The story starts with a man who is traveling on the Yukon Trail on a very cold day (−75°F, −60°C), accompanied only by a husky wolf-dog. The cold does not deter the man, a newcomer to the Yukon, who plans to meet his friends (who are referred to as boys) by six o'clock at an old junction. He walks along a creek trail, mindful of the dangerous, hidden springs, because getting wet feet on such a cold day is dangerous. The man continues on and, in an apparently safe spot, falls through the snow and gets wet up to his shins. He remembers an old-timer who had warned him that no man should travel in the Klondike alone when the temperature is colder than minus fifty.
With the wet legs, the man becomes scared and builds a fire to dry his wet clothes. He starts the fire underneath a pine tree, which is covered with snow, and keeps pulling twigs from its lower branches to feed the flames. The agitation eventually upsets the loaded boughs, which dump their weight of snow onto the fire, extinguishing it. He tries to start a new fire, aware that he is already going to lose a few toes from frostbite. He gathers twigs and grasses, then tries to light a match with his frozen, numbed fingers. He grabs all his matches and lights them all at once, then sets fire to a piece of bark and his hands. He starts the fire, but accidentally pokes it apart while trying to remove a piece of green moss. The man decides to kill the dog and to put his hands inside its warm body to restore his circulation. But due to the extreme cold, he cannot kill the dog because he is unable to pull out his knife, or even throttle the animal. He lets it go.
In a desperate attempt to keep himself warm, he starts to run, trying to let the exertion heat his body. However, he has no stamina, and soon he stops and sits down. He imagines his friends finding his dead body in the snow, then himself telling the old-timer that he was right: It was foolish to travel alone. A warmth covers him and he falls into a deep, deadly, relaxing sleep. The dog does not understand why the man is sitting in the snow and not making a fire to warm them. As night falls, the dog comes closer to him and smells death on the man. It trots away "in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers".

There are only two main characters in "To Build a Fire," the man and his dog, although some count Nature as a third character. In the story, Nature is portrayed as the antagonist—the foe against which the man is pitted for survival. However, Nature does not act deliberately—it simply is, and it is the man's own folly which causes his death.
Other characters in the story are "the old-timer", a man who tries to warn the main character of the dangers that lie ahead if he decides to continue with his travels, and "the boys", the men who the man is supposed to meet up with in the end.