As "Big Game" opens, a 13-year-old boy must go hunting on his own, armed with only a bow and arrow, as part of a coming-of-age ceremony. Whatever he brings back-rabbit, deer, bear-marks him for life: this is the kind of man he is. Now that's pressure.

One of the fun things about "Big Game" is that it starts with this ceremony, somewhere in the ice and snow of Scandinavia. And while it clearly takes place in present day, I would guess that you could take the first twenty pages of the script, remove only the stage directions, and shoot this same sequence set in 1500 AD. The men would be...