There is something genuinely disarming about watching Brad Pitt, one of the most famous people on the planet, fully defer to a German Shepherd named Uber in a behind-the-scenes featurette. He calls him "number one on the call sheet" and "the star of the film," and the way he says it you can tell he actually means it. That alone tells you something interesting is going on with Heart of the Beast.
The movie follows James Belmont, a retired Army Special Forces officer whose small plane goes down deep in the Alaskan wilderness. His combat dog Odin, played by Uber, becomes the thing keeping him alive as they fight their way through bears, wolves, brutal terrain, and the kind of cold that makes everything harder. It is a survival story at its core, but the featurette makes clear that the emotional engine is the bond between the man and the dog. Pitt says following Uber's lead on set and "improv-ing" is really how they shot the scenes, which is the kind of detail that makes you want to see how it actually looks on screen.
This is the second time Pitt and director David Ayer have worked together, the first being Fury in 2014, which remains one of the best war films of that decade. Ayer knows how to build tension through restraint and he knows how to get real performances out of the people he works with. The script by Cameron Alexander actually appeared on a notable list of unproduced screenplays back in 2017, so this is a story that people in the industry believed in for a long time before it finally got made. The whole thing was shot in Queenstown, New Zealand, standing in for Alaska, at locations like Mount Aspiring National Park and Milford Sound.
J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe round out the cast, and this marks the second time Simmons has worked with Ayer as well. What makes Heart of the Beast feel different from the standard late summer action release is that it seems more interested in the relationship between Pitt and the dog than in spectacle for its own sake. The trailer nods toward something closer to The Grey or Cast Away than a typical Paramount action movie. If you want to prep for this one, go back and rewatch Fury. It is on most streaming platforms and it will remind you exactly what Ayer and Pitt can do when they are both working at their best.
Heart of the Beast opens in theaters September 25.
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