Heart of the Beast

Director David Ayer ventures into Jack London territory with Heart of the Beast, about a retired Special Forces Officer who heads into the Alaskan wilderness with his combat canine, also retired. It’s an original story by screenwriter Cameron Alexander, whose pages made the Black List of the best unproduced scripts in 2017. With its classic Man-versus-Nature conflict reminiscent of The Call of the Wild, the film updates its premise by highlighting the service of military dogs trained to detect enemies and locate mines. The dog in question is a German Shepherd named Odin, played by Uber (and other stand-in dogs). Odin has seen battle alongside his partner, James Belmont (Brad Pitt), and it shows: his snout is scarred, his mouth has titanium replacements for his knocked-out teeth, and after losing his front-right leg, he wears a prosthetic. Odin is a fighter in every sense of the word, and he’ll need to be for what the movie has in store.

“Whaddya say we go find some trouble?” James says to Odin. They arrive on a secluded Alaskan lake in a small seaplane, surrounded by snowy mountains and dense forests. And it’s almost as though James is asking for it. But really, the elder soldier only wants a quiet getaway of bird watching and fly fishing—a peaceful antidote to their combat experience. That dream is initially interrupted by an encounter with a mountain man, played by J.K. Simmons, who reflects, “There’s nothing like the quiet of Nature.” The moment is ironic, of course, because his presence has disrupted James’ quiet. But also, in my screening, someone’s phone rang at this moment. You couldn’t write a better scene to capture the drawbacks of moviegoing today. In any case, James and Odin soon take off to avoid a storm, during which James has a cardiac event and crashes into a different lake. Miraculously, they both survive, but they’re stranded with over 50 miles of rough terrain between them and the nearest road. 

Fortunately, the film opens with a scene from a week later that shows Odin survives the journey, so dog-lovers like myself won’t have to worry for the entire 101-minute runtime about whether he’ll survive. James, however, must chew aspirin to keep his heart pumping—this while carrying a heavy backpack of supplies across a treacherous landscape. Under different conditions, James would have no problem making the journey, but he’s weak from multiple bodily traumas and moving slowly. And cuts to Odin’s worried eyes suggest the dog knows he’s hurting. Ayer uses clever editing and animal reaction shots to build the rapport between his two main characters. But it’s also apparent that Pitt and Uber have a bond. 

One of the more recent movies about a man and his dog in the wilderness, 2020’s The Call of the Wild with Harrison Ford, featured a cartoonish-looking CGI pooch. Most of Heart of the Beast is refreshingly authentic thanks to Uber, a good boy whose screen presence is augmented with some growls and worrisome whines obviously added in post-production. During a sequence involving a computer-generated bear and another involving a pack of digital wolves, the animals, including Odin, have been rendered with VFX. For such a grounded, naturalistic movie, these scenes break its spell and feel like they belong in another production. Fortunately, with Queenstown, New Zealand, standing in for Alaska, the setting is consistently gorgeous and doesn’t require any help from the effects department. 

Ayer avoids his usual amped-up aesthetic, seen in his decidedly masculine features about the LAPD, soldiers, and superheroes (I include the director’s two Jason Statham actioners in the last category). While most of Heart of the Beast has a steady pace and clean lensing by cinematographer Mauro Fiore, the director and his editor, Dody Dorn, embed dream sequences into the mix, showing that both James and Odin suffer from PTSD—memories of their time in a conflict zone rattled by gunfire and explosions. The tactic is a bit overused and, curiously, James and Odin’s nightmares share the same blend of disorienting imagery and sepia-toned colors. Elsewhere, Ayer handles scenes of peril with an assured hand, delivering survival-movie suspense and some gruesome wounds that made me squirm and gasp. 

There’s a lot that works about Heart of the Beast, particularly for those who love animals. By the end, the story can feel slight—its lesson, if one exists, wrapped up in a postscript about the life-saving effort of combat animals. The film might have worked better with a prologue of James and Odin in battle, as opposed to jittery flashbacks. As is, both the point and Pitt almost seem like afterthoughts, with Ayer’s camera more often trained on Uber. That got me wondering how someone like Pitt spends months on a shoot, befriending someone like Uber. How do you step away from that relationship to your next project without a broken heart? Maybe you don’t. Regardless, Ayer delivers a workmanlike production and makes a star of his canine lead, whose screen presence is enough to recommend.