BEFORE: Bradley Whitford carries over again from "Three Christs", and now I'm falling further behind - not on my movie watching, just on my posting. "The Call of the Wild" is my Monday movie, which I started watching late Monday night, but because I had to work Tuesday morning, afternoon and night, (umm, yeah, I started another gig but it's freelance, just a couple hours twice a week, entering film festivals for a friend) my posting may lag a little behind in the days to come. Because, why not burn that candle at both ends, and also in the middle? Feeling exhausted is one way to feel alive, right? RIGHT?
I tried to work this one in last December, but, funny story, I kind of ran out of December right there at the end. It was a choice of either linking to this one for the final film of the year, or another Christmas movie, and I went with the Christmas movie - so it took me almost four months to reschedule this one, not too bad, all things considered. But it's been on my DVR since January 2021, so it's past time to clear it.
THE PLOT: A sled dog struggles for survival in the wilds of the Yukon.
AFTER: You may notice that there's no listing for the dogs in the credits of this film - usually if there's a lead animal, they mention that animal's "real" name, as if dogs have real names, but you know what I mean - starring "Fluffy" as "Marmaduke" or whatever. But I realized right from the get-go that there were no real animals in this film, so this is largely an animated film, or a mixture of live-action and animation, or whatever you want to call that. It's a hybrid, a mutt of sorts - not animated enough for most people to think of it as an animated film, but it is. \
It's probably not cheaper these days to use CGI dogs instead of real dogs, but it probably solved more problems than it created - an important part of Jack London's story is showing Buck being beaten by cruel men to learn his place, and you just can't do that these days. If there was any hint of animals being beaten on set, or if a film didn't run that disclaimer at the end, there would be a boycott for sure. Another advantage of using CGI dogs is being able to get the exact right performance from all of the dogs, really, it's just programming - and plus, you don't have to pay or even feed the CGI actors. I guess you still have to feed the programmers - sorry, digital artists - though.
To me, this is a double-edge sword, though - the expressions that Buck gives the camera are almost TOO good. Forget that, they ARE too good. I know that dogs are lovable, but most of them are not great actors, because they don't understand the human concepts behind complex emotions, and here the digital Buck gives us everything we need from him, so yeah, that's great but it's also fake as hell. And Buck is a BIG dog, he's like half St. Bernard, so he should be HEAVY, and leave imprints in the mud and the snow, and remember what I said about BIG things after watching "Geostorm" and "Greenland"? Big things move slower, it's just the way things are, and here Buck is a big dog who also moves very quickly, and in my mind, that just doesn't 100% work. His movements needed to be slightly slower than the other dogs, just because he's bigger, more muscular, there's more to move around, so he can't be as fast. When they showed the CGI bear, that bear moved more slowly than, say, a wolf, and the same principle needed to be applied to Buck, or else I'm always going to be aware I'm looking at a CGI dog.
That being said, I'm glad somebody took on Jack London's classic story, for the first time since like the mid 1930's, the version with Clark Gable. (OK, I stand corrected, I guess there have been a few adaptations over the years, but are they even worth watching?) It's an important story about the Gold Rush in the Yukon territory and Alaska (before it was a state). There's a lot of sadness and cruelty in the story, sure, but there's sadness and cruelty in life, and we've got to deal with it at some point. They took some liberties with the story, cut some of the adventures short, conflated a couple of tales into one, but I actually think this works BETTER than the novel, and I rarely say that. In the Jack London novel Buck works as a sled dog for the post office, then for a couple of cruel prospectors who don't know how to work a sled dog team properly. He's saved by John Thornton, and outdoorsman, but the rest of Buck's dog team stays with the clueless prospectors, and we presume that they all fall into the river and die, because they ignored Thornton's advice.
In the novel, Thornton and Buck go prospecting with Pete and Hans, and encounter trouble with a tribe of Native Americans. But in this film, Thornton and Buck go prospecting alone, and one of the clueless prospectors survived, and comes looking for them out in the Alaskan wilderness. Jack London probably wishes he'd thought of that wrinkle, it's an interesting callback that also simplifies the second half of the story - why introduce new characters so late in the game?
This film encountered some bad luck - it was due to be released at Christmas time in 2019, but that release got delayed after the acquisition of Fox by Disney, and rescheduled for February 2020. Yep, the pandemic struck again, it only got a few weeks of release before theaters all shut down for several months. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, I found a lot of meaning in Buck's story - he was separated from his family and forced into a new career as a sled dog. Then when the telegraph replaced the mail delivery, he was out of work again and had to pull a sled for prospectors. How many of us also had our careers changed by the pandemic, I know I got forced into a new line of work, so I feel the symbolism in Buck's story.
John Thornton is also forced by tragedy to live apart from his wife, he doesn't feel he can return to her after the loss of their son. Buck also went through several masters, and even when he became the leader of his own pack, he still returned from time to time to the places he'd lived before, just to remember the fallen masters. There's poignancy all over this story, you just have to feel for it.
If I've got a NITPICK POINT here, it's the fact that in the novel, I think Buck was the only member of the sled team who wasn't a husky - there's a reason why they use huskies to pull sleds up in Alaska, they're sort of bred and built for it. Here there was only one husky, the lead dog, Spitz, and the rest were a mix of breeds. I know WHY they did it this way, so we can tell all the dogs apart, but it's just not the way that sled teams work.
Also starring Harrison Ford (last seen in "Spielberg"), Omar Sy (last seen in "Inferno"), Dan Stevens (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Karen Gillan (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Jean Louisa Kelly, Michael Horse (last heard in "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron"), Micah Fitzgerald, Adam Fergus, Colin Woodell, Cara Gee, Scott MacDonald, Brad Greenquist (last seen in "Pet Sematary"), Aria Lyric Leabu (last seen in "Replicas"), Salem Meade.
RATING: 6 out of 10 gold nuggets
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