Mark Reviews Movies: THE CALL OF THE WILD (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2020

It's easy enough to understand why the filmmakers of The Call of the Wild would do what they have done. In this movie, there is no real dog (There aren't any real animals at all, in fact—or at least it appears to be so).

Buck, the hero of this adaptation of Jack London's tale about a dog that goes from the comfortable life of a pampered pet to the frozen wilds of Alaska, is a wholly computer-generated creation. The reasoning is sound enough: The dog of the story has to endure many hardships and much abuse, and if filmmakers can get around having to put a real animal in harm's way (even if it is all staged and overseen by people who care about the dog's safety), why shouldn't they?

You have to give them some credit for the thought and the fulfillment of that rationale, but that's about where the credit ends. The technology implemented for this movie isn't at a level to make the digital dog convincing, and the creative choices underlying that use of technology are inherently flawed. We know we're not watching a real dog, because the visual effects aren't up to snuff, and even when those effects come close to fooling us, the filmmakers ruin the illusion by ensuring that we know we're not watching a real dog.

This dog is no dog—and not just because it's a complex amalgamation of ones and zeroes. Director Chris Sanders, whose previous work in animated films might have influenced this thinking, has turned the dog, first and foremost, into a character. The dog clearly thinks and visibly emotes, through contortions of its face that don't appear natural. The movie's Buck isn't merely a digital copy of a dog, moving and looking like a real animal. It's a character, whose motives and feelings are communicated through gestures and facial expressions. This is a performance of sorts, and it doesn't gel with the stark, naturalistic nature of the material.

In a different story (or, perhaps, even in a different version of this particular story), this decision to skirt the line of anthropomorphizing the dog might have been the correct one. This, though, is London's story, about the cruelty, greed, and stupidity of humankind, as seen through the eyes of a dog that gradually decides to embrace its wild, ancestral nature.

Everything else about the movie, save for some other shoddy effects work (the obvious green screens, for example) and some comic relief (which would seem like a requisite for an ordinary "kids' movie with an animated dog"—just not this story), approaches the material with a serious mind. Since the dog—of the story about a dog embracing the wild because it's in his nature and more appealing than human nature—isn't convincing as a dog, though, it inherently undermines the potential of this movie to tell its story properly.

That story follows Buck, a St. Bernard mix, as he's abducted from his posh life in the South, sold on the black market, and shipped to Alaska, where he's taught the "law of the club" and bought as a sled dog for a Canadian mail route through the Yukon. Buck meets assorted humans along the way, including postal workers Perrault (Omar Sy) and Françoise (Cara Gee), who gain affection for the dog as he becomes the team leader (He must battle the semi-domesticated wolf that leads the other dogs when Buck arrives). After his stint with the postal service, Buck and his other sled dogs are enlisted to help a trio of gold-rushers, led by the foppishly villainous Hal (Dan Stevens), who's willing to risk the lives of a married couple (played by Karen Gillan and Colin Woodell) to find a bounty.

The most important human in the story, though, is John Thornton (Harrison Ford, who also narrates Buck's emotional journey, making the dog's "performance" redundant), who has come to the North to drink away the pain of losing his son. John helps Buck on a couple of occasions, and the dog returns the favor by helping John with his alcohol addiction (Buck sits on a bottle, in one of those incongruent moments of comic relief) and joining his new master on a trek to a spot off the map.

There's a sturdy core to this story, mostly because screenwriter Michael Green, in staying true to the episodic structure of London's book, sees Buck's evolution (or de-evolution, perhaps) as a reflection of the people he encounters. This isn't, after all, just a story about a dog. It's about how people can be cruel or kind, as well as how those choices affect the order of the natural world—and how, in the bigger picture, nature is not something easily tamed or mastered (In one of the movie's better scenes, John, overlooking a grand scope of forest from the top of a mountain, observes that he and all of humanity are essentially a footnote in the history of the world).

Then, though, there's the digital dog at the heart of The Call of the Wild. It's such a distraction that it removes us from the story's simplicity and purpose.

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