Heart of the Beast

I just got back from watching Heart of the Beast, and I feel like I should write this now while the movie is still completely stuck in my head.

When my mom first told me we were going to the movie theater, somehow the first thing I got excited about was not even the movie. It was Coca-Cola. I honestly haven’t had a full Coca-Cola in what feels like months, maybe years, so for some reason I was extremely hyped about getting one. I know. We were going to see a giant Hollywood movie starring Brad Pitt, and I was thinking about the drink. But whatever. That was part of the experience.

The movie stars Brad Pitt as James Belmont, a former Special Forces soldier, and honestly the other main character is just as important: Odin, his German Shepherd and former military combat dog. Odin might technically be a dog, but he basically feels like the second human lead of the movie. The real German Shepherd who mainly plays him is named Uber, which I learned afterward. The whole movie is really about James and Odin and the fact that they have already been through war together before this story even begins. 

James takes Odin flying in a small plane over Alaska, but James has a heart problem, something goes wrong while they are in the air, and the plane crashes in the wilderness. And I will tell you something: planes do not work very well after they crash.

From that point on, the movie basically becomes the two of them trying to survive together. They are injured, freezing, exhausted, surrounded by wilderness, and they still have an insanely long distance to travel before reaching a road. There are rivers, wolves, injuries, and a lot of moments where I thought, okay, there is absolutely no way they are getting out of this. But somehow they keep going, mostly because neither one of them is willing to leave the other behind.

And that is probably why the ending bothered me so much.

Spoiler warning. James eventually realizes that he is not going to make it. He writes a note, puts it in Odin’s gear, and tells Odin to finish the mission and go toward the road. Odin does not want to leave him, but eventually he follows James’s last command. James dies, and Odin reaches the road, where a woman finds him and reads the letter James left behind. She eventually takes Odin with her. 

I understand what the movie is trying to say. James’s final act is basically making sure Odin gets to live even if he doesn’t. That is actually really sad and really beautiful. But sitting there in the theater, something about Odin getting into another person’s car at the end just didn’t completely work for me. I know James told him to go. I know Odin was obeying his last command. But emotionally I still kept thinking: Would a dog that had gone through war, PTSD, a plane crash, wolves, freezing water, and basically an entire life with this person really be able to leave him like that?

It immediately made me think about the true story of Hachikō, the dog in Japan who kept returning to the train station waiting for his owner even after his owner had died. He waited for years because, as far as he understood, his person was still supposed to come home. That story has always been one of the things that makes me think dogs understand loyalty in a way humans sometimes don’t.

So when Odin finally leaves James behind, I know logically why he does it. James literally tells him to survive. But part of me still wanted Odin to stay. Maybe that would have made the ending even sadder, and maybe that is exactly why the filmmakers didn’t do it. Still, that was the one part where my brain kept arguing with the movie instead of just watching it.

Other than that, I honestly loved it. Brad Pitt was great, Odin was probably even better, the scenery was huge, and the survival parts actually made me nervous. It didn’t feel like just a movie about a man and his dog. It felt more like a movie about what happens when two living things have depended on each other for so long that neither one really knows how to exist without the other.

So right now, literally just after watching it, I’m giving Heart of the Beast 4.9 out of 5 stars.

The missing 0.1 is entirely because of that ending.

And yes, the Coca-Cola was also very good.