On its face, “Heart of the Beast” is a survival film.
In the latest effort from “Fury” and “End of Watch” director David Ayer, Brad Pitt portrays a former Special Forces operator who becomes stranded deep in the Alaskan wilderness and must fight for his life as he attempts to work his way back to civilization.
However, at the heart of the engrossing and at times intense “Heart of the Beast” is a bromance: the bond between Pitt’s Command Sergeant Major James Belmont and his best friend, Odin, the dog who was by his side during combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and who is stranded with him.
Each of these male creatures wears scars from war, both physical and mental; Odin, for instance, walks with the help of a replacement leg and finds it difficult to get a peaceful night’s sleep.
They have touched down in a picturesque part of the world (with New Zealand’s South Island playing the role of Alaska) — to be alone with each other — to fish, to hunt and, in James’ case, drink some Belgian brown ale he’d developed a taste for while overseas.
In the morning, James has coffee and cooks meat in a pan, blowing on some to cool it before giving it to his eager pal. When James tries to get in a bit of reading, the dog lets him know he’s bored.
“All right, Odin,” James says. “What do you say we go find trouble?”
Before they find real trouble, they encounter a fellow wanderer, Watkins (J.K. Simmons, “Whiplash”), who shares some wisdom with James in the evening as the latter shares his cooler. He also warns that harsh weather is coming, a warning James takes seriously, and he attempts to fly out of the area the next day.
Nature has other ideas.
Following a crash, a shaken James must find Odin — his friend was ripped from the plane before it smashed down — and then retrieve what he can for the difficult journey lying before them.
That trek will entail both unforgiving terrain of various types and wild animals of differing sizes and hostile natures.
“We’re being stalked,” James tells Odin quietly as a pack of wolves has become interested in them.
While the movie’s visual effects team created the wild creatures, Odin was brought to life through four-legged actors and makeup. According to the film’s production notes, producers conducted a “New Zealand-wide casting call” to find Odin, landing on Uber, a 100-plus-pound German Shepherd who served as a police dog before transitioning to search and rescue, and his sons Ryker, Zika and Hondo. (Zika was “best at the outdoor stuff” and swam a river with Pitt; the “gung-ho” Ryker served as the stunt dog; and Hondo was the “more unruly” one of the quartet.)
The dogs were given five weeks of training, and Pitt arrived in New Zealand three weeks before the shoot to bond with them, according to the notes.
The results are on the screen. The relationship between man and beast is entirely convincing, thanks also to “Training Day” scribe Ayer and editor Dody Dorn (“Memento”) — who consistently find just the right expression or behavior from a canine actor to convey what’s necessary at any one moment. You won’t have any trouble falling in love with Odin, just as James has.
Related Articles
- You think you know Baby Gronk? The untold story of viral youth football star’s double life.
- Comedian Carrot Top’s attempted suicide was days after accusation of sexual misconduct
- Christina Applegate shares first video since months-long hospitalization
- Josh Charles isn’t always so serious. In ‘Best Medicine,’ he’s having fun
- Presley Gerber may have suffered overdose, cardiac arrest: dispatch audio
A writer can feel like an afterthought when it comes to a film with so little dialogue, but we can’t go without a tip of the hat to Cameron Alexander. He’s making his feature-film screenwriting debut only now — after “Heart of the Beast” landed on Hollywood’s famed Blacklist of strong but unproduced scripts back in 2017.
And then there’s Pitt (“Fight Club,” “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”), who worked with Ayer on the aforementioned 2014 World War II drama “Fury” and who is steely and steady here. He clearly was up for the physical demands of the role — “It was cold and miserable on set every day,” Ayer says, “but Brad was willing to forgo his own comfort to get inside the character” — and is compelling as the only human on the screen for the vast majority of “Heart of the Beast.”
Without going into the details of the movie’s satisfying ending, it involves a brief but impactful performance by another two-legged actor, Indigenous Canadian Anne Lambe (“True Detective”).
The final moments before the closing credits roll are devoted to text offering information about real-life dogs akin to the fictional Odin, about how they’ve served their country and the help some of them need. Like so much of what has come before it in “Heart of the Beast,” it hits home.
‘Heart of the Beast’
Where: Theaters.
When: Sept. 25.
Rated: PG-13 for violence, peril, bloody/injury images and some language.
Runtime: 1 hour, 41 minutes.
Stars (of four): 3.
Original article
Comments