The Call of the Wild is a Bizarre and Terrible Movie

The Call of the Wild. Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios.

While watching the new movie The Call of the Wild, questions flew through my body like the wind after an alpine snow. Questions like, how much money did they have to pay Harrison Ford to get him to appear in this porta-potty of a movie? Or, questions like did they have to pay Harrison Ford so much money that they actually ran out of money for others things like digital effects and rendering? Then, there were the deeper, more esoteric questions, like why does this film exist? And why did someone think it would be a good idea to make it? Then there were just some kind of tangential questions that piqued my curiosity, like didn’t the filmmaker know you should never make Harrison Ford do a voice-over?

All in all, the mystery posed by these questions, the unfillable void in our collective human knowledge created by the very existence of this film, was far more compelling than what was on the screen. So let’s get right to the point. What is this movie?

The Call of the Wild is a piece of Americana. It’s based on a turn of the century Jack London novel about a super smart and precocious dog named Buck who goes deep into the Alaskan wilderness and has a bunch of adventures. I know nothing about this book, because if I am going to indulge in literature about pets I prefer it be about vampirical vegan bunnies. My guess, though, is that the novel was meant to romanticize the rugged mythos of the American frontier, filtered through the adorable lens of a dog onto whom we, as human-readers, could project all of our shit.

I mean, if you can get behind it the idea of this film is not terrible. Americans love a good anthropomorphic dog story. Beethoven and Homeward Bound still occupy an important place in my formative years and helped shape me into the rock-ribbed Republican I am today. While watching Beethoven’s 2nd in the Marina Del Rey cineplex in 1993 I remember a small earthquake struck Los Angeles, but at the time I wasn’t sure if it was actually an earthquake or it was merely a manifestation of the joy I was experiencing watching all those puppies on the screen.

But even if you can get behind the idea of The Call of the Wild, the film will actively work to lose you. Why? Because it’s a case study in poor budget management. I don’t really know what went wrong behind the scenes, but something went really, really wrong. The director, Chris Sanders, is no slouch - he made Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon! So, unless Dreamworks was going to great pains to cover up his incompetence, it’s hard to square that with The Call of the Wild. He surely knows how to make an animated film, and how to budget for one?

But clearly at some point along the way they ran out money while making The Call of the Wild. The film apparently had a $125 million budget. And I should mention that they didn’t use no stunt dogs for this film - Buck is, like Gollum, 100% pixels. When it calls for very realistically rendered close-ups of Buck’s face, those are often quite good - he can emote, he looks realistic. But pretty much every scene in between looks terrible. Cartoonish. Indescribably bad. Horrific. Like a car accident, but inside your visual cortex. Like the time I walked in on my grandma taking a bath.

What happened? I don’t know. This movie only creates questions, never answers. It could be they wasted all that cheddar making those super detailed facial expressions during key scenes, then farmed out the interstitial stuff to a low-cost Ukrainian VFX company. It could be the studio demanded changes after everything has been rendered so they had to get bargain-basement effects after the fact. It could be they just spent all their money hiring Harrison Ford, for reasons that are entirely unknowable. While this movie, such as it is, cannot answer these questions the yawning chasm they create within the human quest for knowledge will forever make this film an important historical artifact when the anthropologists of the future try to figure out why our society collapsed.