Review: PROJECT WILD THING, A Well-Grown, Multi-Layered Doc

He's armed with business cards, brochures, t-shirts, and a website. Yes, he's got the statistics to convince you why staying inside and staring at screens will kill you faster versus how being in Nature (capitalized, since it's a product now!) can help us all live longer. But in his wisdom and well-intentioned grandstanding (the actually two mesh quite well), he knows that nothing gets to viewers like a personal story. Project Wild Thing, a title better suited for a YouTube promo, is one of the best such efforts in a while. As Bond's quest topically stair-steps (upward or downward? You be the judge!) onto different levels of sociological and internal realization, it never stops being enlightening, thought-provoking, and entertaining. 

Documentaries about their documentarians have an understandably bad rap. When one seeks out a doc about obesity and fast food or the perils of American gun culture only to instead be met with the crusading shenanigans of Morgan Spurlock or Michael Moore (respectively), the notion of showmanship trumping the proposed topic is too often the takeaway. This, even as these guys undeniably entertain us. The trend has taken off like a runaway train, the engine of personality propelled by a wide variety of topics. 

Yet, lest we forget the fundamental personal aspect of filmmaking, we can't discount the effective qualities of this packaging style when it's successful. To summarize what Bible Quiz director Nicole Teeny told me last year in regard to her own terrific doc, the film as it's created is inherently part of the one creating it - why run away from that? 

David Bond, the director of and ultimate subject of Project Wild Thing certainly seems in agreement. But Bond, unlike so many others, understands what his part is amid the whole of his film. Project Wild Thing comes to us as an activism doc seeking to communicate the message that kids, now more subsumed by indoor, digital lifestyles of screens, computers, and more screens, really need to get outside more. Maybe A LOT more. 

It's a worthwhile message, put forth by Bond's gimmick of appointing himself the official "Marketing Director of Nature". He proceeds to spend the 80-plus minute running time looking to communicate the benefits of sunshine and the great outdoors in a manner similar to how Apple, Coca-Cola, and Volkwagen dominate the landscape. He narrates, speaks to the lens, and meets with a wide array of experts all willing to help him out, ranging from high-level creative advertising experts to grizzly outdoor extremists. They work hard (one gets the impression we're seeing just a fraction of it), and come up with logos, catch phrases, billboards, and posters for what becomes the interactive multi-pronged initiative "Project Wild Thing", ready to take Bond's native Britian by storm! The film showcases their great message wrapped up in a clever presentation, but Project Wild Thing doesn't stop there. That is just, in a sense, the outer packaging for the doc. 

Project Wild Thing is, on vital another level, a most approachable and most concise case study in the ways and truths of marketing, advertising, branding, and messageering. Along with Bond, we come to see that Apple, Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, et al don't just visibly dominate our world, they've become a woven integration within it. How did this happen? And how can nature itself - the greatest beauty and restorative component of our physical reality - as it's come to be deemed boring and even prohibitively dangerous, compete with these inescapables?? 

Does this dichotomy mean that Apple, Coke, VW and the well-branded mega-entities are inherently bad? That is not the point. Perhaps ironically, Bond spends much time isolated, on the computer. Additionally, much of his advertising on behalf of Nature involves demanding individuals' further interaction with screens and websites. This gives way to yet another layer of the film, Bond's own realization of the nature of his Nature mission. The final strain may be a little forced, just a hair trite, but is nonetheless forgivably "real."

With Project Wild Thing, both as a mission and as a movie, David Bond does a tremendous lot with blessed little. That we get to know him amid it all is not at all a bad thing. Project Wild Thing is definitely a movie worth getting out for.