Life's just better with a dog.
— Brad Pitt
After watching ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, one lesson can be gleaned: we need more movies with Brad Pitt and a dog. He clearly has chemistry with animals. Maybe we had to wait until he was secure enough in his career to spend most of a movie wandering through the wilderness with a German shepherd. And it's good to know he's not faking the funk — Pitt has been a dog owner for decades, and by all accounts, the affection on screen isn't an act.
The ordinary bond between a man and a dog is profound enough on its own. But James and Odin are old war buddies, and that's a connection that's harder to fathom. I think of a 1999 Discovery Channel documentary, WAR DOGS: AMERICA'S FORGOTTEN HEROES, about Vietnam-era handlers forced to leave their dogs behind at the end of deployment, when military dogs were still treated as equipment and many never came home. The men interviewed were gruff and weathered, and one after another they cried on camera over dogs they'd lost. HEART OF THE BEAST is built on that same grief: two creatures who went to war together and came home changed, with only each other left to prove any of it happened.
Pitt plays James Belmont, a retired Special Forces soldier whose plane goes down in the Alaskan backcountry with his combat dog, Odin, aboard. There's little dialogue, so the story is told through what you see, and almost anything I describe would ruin it. That makes this review more about my reaction than the plot. Every review is about feelings, but this one admits it. One spoiler, and the first scene beats me to it: the dog lives. I knew that. I had a pretty good idea what trials were coming. None of that protected me from the movie. The interesting question isn't really what happens next. It's why something this simple, and this easy to anticipate, hit me the way it did.
For a movie about two war veterans, one of them a dog, it barely explains the war. What backstory there is arrives over a beer with Watkins, a former gold miner played by J.K. Simmons. He pitches his tent next to James's and hopes that's all right, then takes a second beer from the cooler and hopes that's all right too. Simmons has a type I'm starting to notice: confident characters with a bit of hesitancy underneath. It works here. When Watkins asks about the titanium in Odin's mouth, James gives a flat, matter-of-fact explanation, then drops the darkest part like it's nothing. The flashbacks do the opposite. They're so chaotic that you never find your bearings or follow the fighting. All you really understand is that James and his dog went through hell together, which turns out to be plenty.
When James talks, it's mostly to Odin. He introduces Odin like a prizefighter, the king of all three-legged creatures, and puts double portions to a vote. When a nightmare rattles Odin, the reassurance is in the plural: "We're not there anymore." Odin holds up his end, and the two of them keep saving each other. Pitt's ease with the dog has preparation behind it: David Ayer says Pitt arrived in New Zealand early, worked with the dogs, learned some of the handling himself, and got to know Uber, his primary canine co-star. I remember watching MEGAN LEAVEY (2017), about a Marine and her bomb-sniffing dog, and thinking there wasn't enough dog. Nobody will have that complaint here.
What got me was a blanket. At one point the movie gives Odin a nylon Army camo blanket. I once laid the same kind over my own dog while she slept, sick with an illness we couldn't identify and weren't sure she'd get over. She did, and she slept with that blanket every day afterward. The movie knew nothing about that, and it didn't need to. It only had to put the blanket in the frame and let me do the rest.
Knowing the dog lives only protects you from the plot. The blanket carried the part where I didn't know if my own dog would pull through, and no opening scene can spoil that. Ayer has said his biggest battle was embracing how simple the story is. I'm glad he won it. I went in expecting a mom movie, and I probably would have been perfectly satisfied with one. They didn't have to make it this good. The dog lives, and I'm still not over it.
Final Verdict: 92 out of 100
Sidenote:
