The film version of Never Cry Wolf is largely faithful to the book by Farley Mowat but does make key changes that give the film a different overall effect. The adaptation is very well done, and director Carroll Ballard substitutes stark imagery for the effective prose of the book in order to convey much the same love of the outdoors and concern for what man might be doing to the environment, however unwittingly.
Never Cry Wolf is the story of one isolated man, a scientist, facing a world he did not understand until he found himself in it. In both, the central character is sent to the Arctic wild by the Canadian government to prove that wolves were decimating the herds of caribou in that region. In the book, the central character is Mowat himself, for he was assigned to this task. He finds that the wolves are not the "evil" predators he has been led to believe but that they have personalities and character of their own. Mowat is sent to the wild by a government that believes it is necessary to kill the wolf to protect other species, but Mowat finds this a questionable premise once he has encountered the wolf packs and experienced the life of the wild. Mowat also finds that the rationale has been promoted by sport killers, hunters who may have their own agenda and whose view has been accepted because governments, which are far from the wild, see hunters as more knowledgeable:
Governments listen. Most, if not all, provincial and state departments of fish and game are little more than Trojan horses of the sport-killer lobby (Mowat vii).
In the film, the main character, who is named Tyler rather than Mowat, has a somewhat more direct experience of the fact that man is the problem in the wild rather than the wolves. Tyler not only experiences the reality of the world of nature but delves more deeply into himself, finding a certain primitive element in himself which he translates as inherent in all human beings. For Ballar...