David Ayer's adventure thriller about a former Special Forces officer and his combat dog fighting to survive after a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness.
Heart of the Beast did not win the weekend, but its first worldwide tally looks considerably stronger than its North American number alone suggests. Paramount's Brad Pitt vehicle opened to an estimated $50.1 million globally, with roughly 60% of that total coming from international markets.
David Ayer did not want Heart of the Beast to look like Brad Pitt performing beside a well-trained prop. Odin had to feel like somebody James Belmont had survived with long before the audience met either of them. That meant giving the role to a real working dog, then accepting one inconvenient fact of animal filmmaking: the dog gets a vote.
Heart of the Beast reinvents almost nothing about the survival movie, and it does not appear particularly interested in doing so. David Ayer prefers an elemental story: a wounded man, a dog also marked by war, and a natural environment that does not negotiate. Brad Pitt deliberately pares his performance back while Odin quickly becomes a genuine dramatic partner rather than a mascot. Mauro Fiore's cinematography gives the wilderness scale and Ayer makes several stages of survival feel convincingly physical, but digital wildlife, military flashbacks and an occasionally heavy hand with sentiment weaken that restraint. Whenever the film stops reaching for an effect and simply lets Pitt and the dog keep moving together, it finds something sincere.
