The Call of the Wild Review

From 20th Century Studios… not 20th Century Fox… comes another confusing production with “The Call of the Wild” that Disney inherited when they purchased Fox. We’ll get to all of the confusing production stuff here in a bit, but the first thing that caught my eye was that name 20th Century Studios. I was hearing buzz that Disney was rebranding Fox, but to see that new logo caught me off guard. If I’m not mistaken, “The Call of the Wild” is the first movie to officially display the new name and logo. Disney has also switched Fox Searchlight to Searchlight Pictures, so I guess the idea is to phase out the Fox name since the two studios are no longer affiliated with the current Fox Corporation that’s not owned by Disney. So I guess that makes sense, but my brain is going to have a hard time getting used to that. I never used the full name of 20th Century Fox. It was just Fox. But now that Disney is phasing out the Fox name, am I supposed to use 20th Century as the short name? Or simply use the full name of 20th Century Studios? Neither of those are connecting in my brain at the moment, so I will apologize to Disney for being rebellious and still call this Fox. Sue me. But whatever name you want to call this studio now, they have a movie out and it’s time for us to discuss it.

“The Call of the Wild” started off as a novel by Jack London, published in 1903. The novel takes place in the late 1800s, during the gold rush. The central character is a dog named Buck that is a St. Bernard-Scotch Collie mix. At the start of the story, he is a happy dog living with an owner in California, but after a series of events, he gets stolen and sold as a sled dog in Alaska. It’s one of those stories where the dog passes hands through several different owners as he slowly becomes adjusted to living solely in the wild rather than in a domestic situation with an owner. But that’s the book. For me personally, I wasn’t 100 percent sure what this specific adaptation was doing based on all of the trailers because the marketing focused heavily on his time with Harrison Ford and I wasn’t even able to determine what the time period of this was. So I’m not sure what Disney was really thinking with this marketing or if they really cared much for this adaptation. “The Call of the Wild” is a book that I have read. I don’t know when. My guess is that I read it during grade school at some point, possibly for school. The details are vague in my mind. I just know that when I saw it on the schedule about a year ago, it piqued my interested because it sounded like something that I was familiar with.

 The pleasant surprise for me when I actually dove into the movie was that they actually did follow the novel fairly closely. Yes, my specific experience with the novel is a bit vague, but thanks to the fact that the internet exists, I familiarized myself with the story, thus reminding myself why this actually is considered a classic novel. So the fact that this is a movie that follows the source material is a positive thing. It’s not just a random thing with Harrison Ford hanging out with a dog in the wilderness. The movie is about this dog named Buck and his experiences being taken from his home and learning to adapt to his circumstances. Harrison Ford shows up briefly in the first half of the movie, but isn’t really part of the story until the second half of the movie. Now in compared to the novel, this is a more condensed version of the story. In the novel, Buck goes through several different hands before being united with John Thornton, who is played by Harrison Ford in the movie. But in this movie version, there’s a few different characters that are combined into one and thus there’s less owners that Buck has throughout the movie. And I thought that worked just fine. The writers here did a great job of cutting out what they needed in order to write a story that flowed well.

A perfect adaptation of the novel, in terms of including everything, would be something that would either be really long or would be one of these 8-10 episode Netflix miniseries. And that could be fun if the execution was done well, but I think this was a solid adaptation from book to screenplay. There was just enough stops along the way for the journey to mean something and for there to be progression for Buck, but at the same time it was concise enough to flow well as a solid movie. I also think that each point along the way came with great acting that really sold the drama and emotion here. And I’m not just talking about Harrison Ford, who was fantastic in this movie, but Buck’s other owners were also really well acted. I especially liked his sled dog team owners, Perrault and François, played by Omar Sy and Cara Gee. In fact, as great as Harrison Ford was, I personally enjoyed this first half of the movie a bit more. Omar Sy as Perrault was such a loving and caring owner. With Buck being in such a rough transition period in terms of just being taken from his home, Perrault did a fantastic job of helping him reach his potential and that’s the point of the movie where there was the most character development.

There was also some interesting drama among the team of dogs at this point. The lead sled dog was a Husky named Spitz, who was mean and aggressive. Once Buck got settled in as a member of the team, he slowly gained more respect among the other dogs, which caused Spitz to get jealous that Buck was starting taking over as the leader of the dogs. Eventually it builds up to a confrontation between Spitz and Buck which was fairly intense. However, there is a giant elephant in the room here that I’ve dodged because I’m not really that interested in writing up the same exact review as everyone else on the internet. But the drama between the dogs isn’t as intense as it could be because all the dogs are CGI and the CGI is quite bad. This has been a popular point of conversation surrounding this movie and I’m personally a bit conflicted. I think this is something that adults and critics will be bothered by, but in terms of this being a movie directed at family audiences, I honestly don’t think family audiences, especially younger kids, will care at all. Younger kids might have more of a problem with the movie keeping their attention as this is not necessarily a movie directed at kids specifically, but if they enjoyed all of the other recent dog movies, then they’ll probably love this one.

Me personally, I was more distracted with the fact that Buck had a lot more human qualities than he should’ve. If the filmmakers are going to decide to use CGI dogs, they should make them all act like dogs. Buck’s facial expressions, many of his reactions and a lot of his actions were very human. The biggest example of this came in the second half of the movie when Buck seemed to be super concerned about Harrison Ford’s drinking problem. And he took his bottle of alcohol away from him towards the beginning of their partnership, which made no sense. A normal dog wouldn’t have any knowledge about what that drink was or why it was bad for a human to drink it. Little things like this happened the entire movie. Thus Buck reminded me a lot of Scooby-Doo in the way he acted. Granted, Scooby-Doo’s humanlike characteristics work because it’s a comedic take of a dog that is not going for realism. So it works. Everyone loves Scooby-Doo. But “The Call of the Wild” is trying to be a serious drama about a dog going through a lot of hard experiences, so it becomes tonally conflicting when you have a cartoonish, humanlike dog in a movie that’s otherwise trying to be super realistic. And if they hadn’t relied so heavily on CGI, they wouldn't have had that problem.

The other thing that makes this super confusing is that the decision to have such a CGI-heavy production rose the price tag on their movie significantly. The reported production budget is $125-150 million, which is insane because this movie was never going to come close to that. In looking at our recent four dog movies, “A Dog’s Purpose” was the biggest earner with $64.5 million domestically and $205 million worldwide. The other three, “A Dog’s Journey,” “A Dog’s Way Home” and “The Art of Racing in the Rain,” averaged $30.3 million domestically and $62.1 million worldwide. “The Call of the Wild” is off to a great start compared to all four as it opened to a surprising $24.8 million when it was expected to open to $10-15 million, but still. The general rule of thum is that a movie needs to at least double or triple its production budget given that said budget doesn’t include marketing costs and the studio doesn’t get back 100 percent of the box office earnings, especially not internationally. So “The Call of the Wild” might need to make at least $200-300 million worldwide to be a success after their choice of using CGI. The other four movies used real dogs and their production budgets averaged out to be $18.5 million.

Yes, I realize that this movie has a higher percentage of dangerous scenes included in it, so I feel like the filmmakers decided that they weren’t going to even attempt to put their trained dogs in any sort of peril in order to avoid any sort of controversy. And when you have dogs leading sleds, dogs fighting other dogs, and dogs going up against bears and wolves, that all makes sense. But I feel like there are filmmaking tricks with these animal movies that allow them to pull off scenes that appear to be really dangerous, yet the animals were never in any sort of harm. I don’t know what these tricks are, but I do know that animal movies have been made for a long time. Heck, this exact book has been adapted several times throughout history, beginning as early as the silent film era in the 1920s, and all of those adaptations didn't have the technology available to CGI all of the dogs and they made out just fine. Rather, my conclusion is that they felt a bit lazy and didn't want to put in the effort of training dogs doing the necessary filmmaking tricks to pull this off, so they just CGI-ed everything, which was an expensive lazy decision. I think they saw movies like "The Jungle Book" and decided to follow suit. And that's an unfortunate decision that compromised the quality of this film.

Did all of the CGI dog stuff ruin this film for me? No, it didn't. As I said, this is a well-written, well-adapted movie with some great sequences, great acting and great character arcs. I think it captures the spirit of the novel in an appropriate way that makes for an enjoyable experience. And all that makes this a bit frustrating because this could've been a great movie that lived up to the legacy of a lot of the excellent animal-led movies that have graced the screen over the decades. But that lazy decision to CGI all of the animals holds back this movie's potential and also cost them big time in terms of profitability at the box office. And I think it's funny that they decided to play it safe and not figure out ways to film certain sequences with real animals, because they also played it safe in terms of the danger in the movie. The original novel is a lot more intense and honest with what happens to certain dogs in the story. The movie could've portrayed that brutality since all the dogs were CGI, but they decided not to. They also changed the novel's villains in the final act from Native Americans to a mustache-twirling white dude who had significantly more depth and character progression in the original novel. So there's plenty of kinks in this movie's armor, but I'm still giving it a 7/10.