Premise: A dog named Buck is taken from his California home and brought North to work as a sled dog where he eventually awakens his true wild nature within.
It's funny the way our minds remember things. My first thought when I think about this movie is nostalgia for the "before times". It's a 2020 movie but from before COVID shut everything down. I actually looked at this movie the other day before I watched it and thought "We were so young then". Which, what the hell does that even mean?! How am I waxing nostalgic about The Call of the Wild? That's the effect of some of these big world events though. Certain things get coupled to that time. I'll always remember how Glitter and Donnie Darko were tanked by 9/11, for example. The Call of the Wild has its own weird legacy. It's going to be a top 10 movie of 2020 in the box office, because it came out just early enough in the year to make a little money. But. its release date, Feb 21, was right as we were all starting to hear about this Corona thing, so it sits in a sort of limbo in my brain. I'm going through my top 2020 movies list right now, and it's insane to me to think that this counts toward the same year that I saw Tenet in an empty movie theater, Mulan on Disney+ for a fee, and Wonder Woman: 1984, Christmas day from home.
This isn't a very good movie, but it is the movie the filmmakers intended to make. I don't know the novel well, but the movie's story matches it in the broad strokes. It aims to make Buck to dog very playful. The CGI Buck never looks real but he does fit in the world of the movie, which always looks slightly too picturesque. It really is a nice bit of animation. I can't tell you how many of the other sled dogs were real or how often, so that's a feather in their cap. The cast is weirdly stacked. Bradley Whitford early on. Dan Stevens as a heel. Karen Gillan spent 90% of her role sitting on a dog sled. I have no idea why Harrison Ford opted to do this. That man's filmography for the last 2 decades is truly bizarre.
I think the big, but perhaps necessary, mistake of the movie is that it made Buck too fun and playful. To make him an engaging central character, they had to humanize him, which directly conflicts with a story about a dog answering the call of the wild. So, by the end, I didn't really believe where the journey of the movie took him. I'm also just a softy with dogs, so I was really sad that he wasn't able to get back home to California, where he lived a life of luxury and warmth.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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