BEFORE: This is the second of my not-really-horror films that ended up getting programmed during Shock-tober (the first was "Loving Vincent"), because Kodi Smit-McPhee carries over from "Let Me In", and where the hell else was I going to program this one, if not between two films starring Kodi Smit-McPhee? The only other actors listed in this movie have really foreign-sounding names, and they don't seem to be in any other movies on my watchlist. So, it's here or nowhere.
THE PLOT: In the prehistoric past, a young man struggles to return home after being separated from his tribe during a buffalo hunt. He finds a similarly lost wolf companion and starts a friendship that would change humanity.
AFTER: I have to say that they ran this trailer so much last year, at least in the movies that I went to the theater to see, that I felt there was almost no need to go and see it. They really gave away the WHOLE story in the trailer, so honestly, there was very little suspense here. I mean, we know from the tagline that the boy gets lost from his clan while hunting, and obviously he's going to survive. I mean, if get lost during the hunt and then dies alone in the wild, that's like a 10-minute movie, tops. The big story turning point is that he's injured and bonds with an injured wolf, and they give that up in the trailer, in the poster, everywhere. You can't even issue a spoiler alert because the tagline on the poster, that's the WHOLE 90-MINUTE MOVIE.
But they clearly set out to appeal to dog lovers, who want to know how primitive mankind went from being afraid of vicious wolves to having domesticated dogs in our houses. It's a vast over-simplification to say that all dogs could possibly be descended from ONE wolf, right? It's another even BIGGER over-simplification to say that there was ONE caveman who befriended a wolf, and therefore people today have dogs. That process of domestication probably took decades, maybe even centuries, because humans just weren't that bright back then, and training one animals takes a long time, so think about how long it takes to train an entire species. It's all speculative anyway, because there was no recorded history back then, so who the hell knows if this is how it went down? Notice that the poster says "The incredible story of..." and not "The incredible TRUE story of..."
Plus, this film would have you believe that the bonding between man and wolf/dog took place in about a week and a half, so I have to call B.S. on that. Sure, and some guy invented farming over the course of an afternoon. Making buildings out of stone and mud, give that a month. Right. For Homo not-so-sapiens? Progress was probably made painfully slow, like over 10,000 years. Yet here, shortly after rescuing an injured wolf (which he injured HIMSELF in self-defense, let's not ignore that...) Keda also invents the dog bowl, the muzzle and the game of Fetch. Suuuurrre....why the hell not?
Let's also not ignore that the hunting party here is made up of manly men, (no women allowed to hunt!) who all have either long hair or man-buns, a fair number of tattoos, and they all look like they stink to high heaven. Plus they wear fur-lined parkas that look like they came from an L.L. Bean catalog. They're not just cavemen, they're HIPSTER cavemen! Or they're millennials, but just from the 20th millennium B.C. Well. they did practically invent the Paleo Diet... The only thing missing is their guitar cases, and the way they find their way back from the hunting grounds by following the leaflets for their next gigs.
NITPICK POINT: Keda is injured and lying on an outcropping of rock, too far down for his father to reach him. This is the point in time where mankind had spears, methods of starting fire and herbal medicine, but hadn't yet invented ROPE? I find that hard to believe.
Anyway, I'm more of a cat person. One thing I didn't mention yesterday about our vacation was that our cat Data is sick, and took a bad turn while we were in Las Vegas. We had briefly considered cancelling the trip, but it had all been planned months in advance, and our cat's bad health obviously wasn't. But our cat-sitter called us when he seemed to be in failing health, and took him to the vet for us. That kind of colored the last half of the trip for us, we felt a bit guilty for going on vacation and also helpless that we couldn't do anything for him from far away. We just had to hope that he could hang on for a few days so we could see him one last time, or so we figured.
He'd become a picky eater over the last couple of months, which was very unusual for him, and then barely ate anything at all, even after the vet gave him some appetite stimulant. So he's a bit frail now, well he is 15 years old, but when we showed up at the vet on Sunday, he seemed to perk up, and I was shocked when they said we could take him home, I figured we'd have to say goodbye right there. He's back home, amazingly, and he's eating again, but since there's no chance of a kitty liver transplant or kitty chemo we know that his days are most likely numbered, and we'll have to say goodbye soon. Which is tough, because he's been my nearly constant movie-watching companion for all this time, and just a great cat all-around.
We're going to give him whatever he wants to eat, and enjoy whatever time we can still spend with him. Why not a movie about how people came to live with cats, huh? Why isn't THAT a good story? Let me point out that if this movie is to be taken at all seriously, that means that ONE WOLF sold out its entire species just to get proximity to fire and a few table scraps from the human's hunt. What a jerk. Imagine if an alien species came to Earth and offered ONE GUY a deal, to come and live in captivity with the aliens, perform random tasks relating to hunting and herding in exchange for a small amount of food, and become completely subservient to that alien race, and that guy said, "Well, damn, that sounds like a great deal! In fact, I think ALL the humans would want to get in on that, so why don't you just beam them all up!"
Also starring Johannes Haukur Johannesson (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Natassia Malthe (last seen in "This Means War"), Leonor Varela, Jens Hulten (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation"), Marcin Kowalczyk, Mercedes de la Zerda (last seen in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Spencer Bogaert.
RATING: 5 out of 10 wild boars
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