I never disliked Brad Pitt.
I always thought he was a good actor, and there are plenty of movies with Brad Pitt that I really like. But for whatever reason, I never really thought of them as Brad Pitt movies. They were movies with Brad Pitt in them, usually surrounded by other major actors and other significant characters.
Something has changed.
Maybe he’s gotten better as he’s gotten older. Maybe I’ve changed. Maybe the movies he’s making now are simply aimed more directly at people like me.
Whatever it is, between F1 and now Heart of the Beast, I suddenly find myself looking forward to Brad Pitt movies in a way I never really did before.
Pitt plays James Belmont, a former Special Forces soldier who heads into the Alaskan wilderness with Odin, the combat dog who served alongside him in the military.
Then their plane goes down.
What follows is, on paper, a pretty familiar survival story. James is injured. They’re a long way from civilization. The weather is bad, the terrain is worse, and the Alaskan wilderness has no shortage of ways to kill you.
None of that is particularly original.
A man trying to survive in the wilderness certainly isn’t. A man trying to survive in the wilderness with his dog probably isn’t either.
But strangely, almost nothing about Heart of the Beast feels recycled while you’re watching it.
A lot of that comes down to James and Odin.
This isn’t a guy who happens to own a really good dog. These two served together. They went through things together. They saw things and did things that both of them are still carrying around, and the movie establishes pretty quickly that their relationship goes well beyond owner and pet.
James loves Odin.
Odin loves James.
And more importantly, they trust each other.
That matters once the survival part of the movie really gets going, because Heart of the Beast never treats Odin like a furry sidekick who gets trotted out whenever the movie needs an emotional moment. He is James’ partner. Sometimes James is taking care of Odin. Sometimes Odin is taking care of James. There are stretches where one of them simply wouldn’t make it without the other.
That gives a fairly basic survival story considerably more weight than I expected.
The movie also understands that you don’t need to constantly manufacture bigger problems when the wilderness is already doing a perfectly good job. There are injuries, brutal conditions, wildlife and plenty of moments when a relatively small mistake could turn into a very large one.
It feels dangerous without feeling like the filmmakers are working through a checklist of disasters.
And Pitt is really good in it.
If you like survival movies, Brad Pitt, dogs or even Alaska, Heart of the Beast is easy for me to recommend. But the reason it works has less to do with whether James and Odin can survive the wilderness than with how quickly you care about the two of them surviving it together.
The plane crash, the injuries and the Alaskan wilderness give the movie its danger.
James and Odin give it a reason to matter.
I went into Heart of the Beast expecting a pretty straightforward Brad Pitt survival movie.
What I got was a movie about a man and his dog who have already been through hell together and aren’t particularly interested in leaving the other one behind.
Turns out I’m exactly the audience for that.
