Checked out the new film version of the classic Jack London novel The Call of the Wild. I say that like I even remember the book… I did read it when I was young but can’t remember a thing about it besides dogs and the north. Put a gun to my head and ask me if I’m remembering White Fang and I might not make it out alive.
So White… I mean The Call of the Wild is about a big family dog that gets kidnapped and sold to be a sled dog during the Yukon Gold Rush. He adapts poorly for awhile, goes through multiple masters, and finally adjusts to the new normal. He hears the call of the wild, you might even say.
So the biggest deal with this movie is that, at no time that I can see, are there ever any real dogs on screen. Every single dog – including the main dog – is CGI… and noticeably CGI. It’s not necessarily bad CGI work at least, but it’s not convincing either.
I mean, dogs are pretty trainable… we’ve been doing it for a long time. But I guess the film makers wanted to make sure their dog actors did exactly what they said at all times. Which actually makes the dogs even less believable. They don’t speak at least… but they are clearly more intelligent than they probably should be and they perform actions in a way that draws focus to how artificial they are. It’s a distraction realizing a particular dog interaction isn’t something they could easily train a dog to do, if that makes sense. Plus they sometimes DO botch the effects. The main dog’s scale seems off sometimes and there’s some bad mixing with the human actors occasionally.
The human in the movie do have decent screen time. Harrison Ford is top billed human and does (ultimately) get the lion’s share of the work. At first, it seems like this is another paycheck gig for the guy but he ultimately comes around and gives a good performance. It is weird though that he spends four movies acting against an 8 foot tall alien dog person who is actually performing with him… and then one movie with an artificial CGI dog that was never on set. That the alien would feel more real than a dog is just odd.
So is the movie actually any good? I’d say it’s good enough, with the specter of the fake dogs constantly hovering over it. I can’t say how accurate it is to the book, but it seems like most of the adventure bits would match. They are… pretty good scenes. I’m not championing anything that happens in the movie but it does work in a kind of old-fashioned Disney kind of way (and the movie studio in the opening credits is “20th Century Studios”… rebranded from 20th Century Fox and ultimately a Disney property).
So, yeah, this is a decent action/adventure movie about sled dogs and the great outdoors. You might find it more compelling, exciting, or sad than me and that’s fair. It’s a good enough product with one major glaring issue that might not bother you (those fake doggos). But it’s a nice attempt.
Score: 76