‘Heart of the Beast’ Has a Very Good Doggo, But Its Survival Thrills Are Far Too Tame
Director David Ayer’s new movie constantly removes almost any sense of peril from the wilderness.
At its core, Heart of the Beast argues that dogs are the best, and there is simply no disputing that. It’s as true as the sky being blue or water being wet. People are so protective of dogs that there’s a whole website, DoesTheDogDie.com, informing viewers ahead of time whether or not a pooch makes it to the end of the movie. So on the one hand, I can appreciate director David Ayer basically telling the audience up front, “This dog will be fine.” But when making a survival thriller in the wilderness and our only two characters are a military dog and a former special forces officer, there’s not much you can throw at them that’s harder than being a combat veteran in Iraq. As much as we care about the dog, you’d have an equally successful movie if it was just the dog playing catch or rolling around. Survival becomes an afterthought.
Former Special Forces officer James Belmont (Brad Pitt) has taken his dog Odin (Uber) on a propeller plane to relax in the isolation of the Alaskan wilderness. Both are haunted by the trauma of the time they served in the military, but they rely on and trust each other. While attempting to fly away from a storm, James suffers a heart attack and crashes the plane. Both he and Odin manage to survive the crash, but now they’re in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness and must find their way back to civilization.
I don’t know if it’s a spoiler to tell you what happens in the first two minutes of a movie, but if you really want to go in ice-cold, stop reading.
The opening scene is Odin coming out to an open road and stopping a car. The driver asks where he came from, and then we cut to a new scene with the title card “1 Week Earlier.” Ayer is telling us, “At the very least, you know Odin will make it back to this point I’ve established. The question mark is what happens to James.” And no offense to Brad Pitt, but once I know the dog is fine, the human is a bit of an afterthought. My dog could leave me to the elements, and I’d be like, “You know what, I get it. SUCH A GOOD BOY.” And while we know that Odin won’t up and abandon James, the human’s fate hanging over the movie isn’t a particularly strong hook when he’s already so capable.
If you’re going into a wilderness survival story, you need at least one person who sucks at being in the wilderness. When Tom Hanks crash-lands in Cast Away, he’s a FedEx analyst with a bad tooth. He’s not a former Special Forces guy. I love competence porn as much as the next guy (Apollo 13 is one of my favorite movies), but the movie doesn’t throw anything at James that he can’t immediately solve. He can quickly orient his way out of the wilderness. If his arm breaks, he can splint it back together with a medical kit Odin has on his harness. I’m sure the character is in plenty of pain, and he’s throwing back as much aspirin as possible to ward off his heart going kablooey (apologies for the medical jargon), but the movie doesn’t let any threat land. Nothing can be lost because we know Odin will make it to a certain point, and the movie won’t casually discard its human A-list movie star.
This leaves Heart of the Beast feeling a bit listless. I could watch Odin being a good dog all day, but as a story, the stakes are constrained by the limited cast and the unique knowledge of the characters. It would be one thing if Odin was a former military canine now paired with some goober, and it’s all up to the dog to save a guy who doesn’t know how lucky he is to have this pup at his side. But as a buddy picture between Odin and James, this plays like their latest mission with a broad smattering of “war trauma” on top as the illusion of a backstory. And while there’s nothing wrong with a mean, lean survival thriller, there’s nothing particularly mean in Heart of the Beast beyond the injuries James incurs and then remedies. This leaves the movie as little more than a PSA for why military dogs are great, and hey, you’ll get no argument from me about dogs. But for a survival thriller, Heart of the Beast seeks to make the audience as comfortable as possible.
Heart of the Beast opens in theaters on September 25.
