This film was made with a mere $82 million dollars. I'm just kidding of course, when you see it you might start wondering where about half of that money went.
There are only a couple people in this movie and Brad Pitt's performance is kind of like "Castaway" but not as isolated because he is interacting with his very well-trained dog "Odin" who he frequently and lovingly calls "Odie."
When I saw this was coming out my first reaction was that it has Brad Pitt, it has a dog, it has beautiful wilderness. That's going to make a lot of money.
I don't know if it is as much as the studios would have wanted but it has already passed the threshold in more than doubling the budget in sales, so they are probably in the green before it even hits major streaming services so yeah, this will be a good profit for those involved.
THere's not some super difficult to figure out story here. Brad Pitt plays "James" who is ex special forces or something like that and his dog Odie was also with him in the military. Brad suffers from PTSD and bad nightmares and in a sort of cute fashion, so does Odie. James is one of those guys that did OK with his money or something like that and now just wants to get out in nature and be left alone by everyone. He chooses his locations specifically because he is not going to encounter anyone else at all.
This all works fine and dandy until you crash you plane into a lake.
With most of your supplies (which annoyingly kind of come and go as far as whether or not he has them during the film) have been destroyed by water or cannot be retrieved from the sunken wreck, getting to somewhere that help can be found is pretty difficult.
This is the meat and potatoes of this film: It is a story of survival, much like Castaway was but now instead of a volleyball we have something considerably more useful: A dog. A highly trained and very loyal dog at that.
This film will pull on the heartstrings of anyone that sees it particularly if they are a dog owner / dog lover. While I haven't had a dog in many years I do have a certain space for them in my psyche and it is really amazing what this dog actor did in the film. That must have been a lot of fun for Brad. No longer will your co-stars be forgetting their lines because they don't have any.
The point I am trying to make here is that this is a good film, it was always going to be a good film, it was specifically engineered to be something that the masses were always going to like, and that is exactly what it is.
Unless you don't like dogs, and if that is you I don't want to know you, you are going to enjoy this movie. Is it trivial and cookie-cutter? Absolutely. But in the end this is the sort of formulaic Hollywood BS that I think most of us can get behind..
Should I watch it ?
I think absolutely yes, yes you should. Even though this film was CLEARLY designed in such a way to kind of guilt you into liking it, in the end I liked it, and I think you will as well.
I am intentionally avoiding spoiling the big twist here, but for anyone that has seen this film, you already know what I mean. The movie is entertaining, visually beautiful and has an Oscar-winning performance on the part of the dog. Also Brad Pitt does a decent job in this movie also.
