Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. One’s family makes
it worse, and you hate them, you hate them, you hate them forever – onto the 30th
generation, onto the 20th incarnation, and beyond! All hail Lilith
and Sammael! …Where were we?
Ah yes, real life sucks, so let us talk about the 2020 ‘Call
of the Wild’ film. We have discussed it last year already, when we only had
just a teaser to go on, and it was released only this month, (aka February
2020), and what can I say? It is neither ‘Cats-2019’ nor quite as bad as ‘Doolittle-2020’,
but it is certainly worse than the ‘Sonic’ movie is, and when you fail to
surpass an anthropomorphic extradimensional blue hedgehog (supposedly)
creature, then you suck.
Let us elaborate. The ‘Call of the Wild-2020’ movie failed
on several levels. One is the CGI – oh, the technical side was done marvellously,
we’re talking Cirque du Soleil quality, (a curse upon this abomination for 30
generations, for 20 incarnations!!), but regardless, you can still feel that
the dogs are CGI very easily, so there’s that, and that’s a problem: just ‘like
‘White Fang’, the ‘Call of the Wild’ is a dog novel; humans play important
roles, even critical ones, but the main characters are dogs and wolves. Considering
that the 2020 ‘Call of the Wild’ film had only CGI animals, this means that it
put itself at a disadvantage: the non-human characters just do not look real,
no matter how authentic they were supposed to be.
The human characters have their own problem. The original
novel was written in 1903, when political correctness was unheard-of, and so
all of the human characters in ‘Call of the Wild’ were Caucasian, (technically speaking),
and except for Mercedes, (played by Karen Gillian in this film) – male. So now,
we got the two Quebecois mail workers played by Omar Sy, (an Afro-American) and
Cara Gee, (an Ojibway woman). This is very politically correct and modern, but,
sadly, ‘Call of the Wild’ seems to be one of those pieces that does not do
transition to ‘modern’ too well in general. The original novel, just as its’
companion ‘White Fang’ was very, well, manly. The 2020 movie is anything but,
and seems to be going for a more balanced, modern, politically correct approach
– and instead got a pale imitation of the original novel.
Yes, Han Solo… I mean, Indiana Jones… I mean, Mr. Ford did
his best to liven the movie, and may be its’ redeeming feature, period.
(Chewbacca mutters and tells Han that you should never have a dog do a Wookie’s
job, and can we try it again, in space, this time? Han points out that that is
what the SW4 movie is for. Chewie sniffs and hugs his best friend. The end).
However, you have to admit that his current incarnation – John Thornton – is rather
manly himself, (possibly for the greater contrast with Dan Stevens’ Hal, who looks
ridiculous in an unattended manner by the movie’s standards). The conclusion
itself is also different, pause.
In the original novel, Thornton and his dogs, (except for
Buck, of course), are killed by Native Americans, and in response Buck teams up
with the local wolf pack and begins to kill them instead – this is how the
novel ends. Here, the Thornton arc is resolved in a different manner, and Buck
teams-up with the wolves in part because he gets into a relationship with a local
she-wolf, black in color. Apocryphal Lilith much?
Now, about wolves – we talked about them before, when we
discussed the AFO episode ‘Puma vs. Grey Wolf”, and the punch line
here is that wolves aren’t just stereotypical grey color, they can range from
white to black, why the great Audubon himself made a couple of paintings that
featured precisely the white and black color morphs of the wolf, (he also made
paintings of the so-called Inuit dog and Indian dog, but we won’t get into this
here), but that’s it. Wolves may be of any color, but they are still the common
or grey wolf, Canis lupus, the end.
Why give Buck’s love interest an atypical fur color? It is anyone’s guess.
Speaking of love interests… first, Cara Gee? Is she pregnant
in real life? If you look at the interview clip on the IGN YouTube channel, you
see that she is caressing her stomach and the camera is angled thusly as to
keep it out of the view. Maybe I am overreading this, but it still looks weird.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if news of her pregnancy and/or
childbirth hit TMZ or something similar.
Back to dogs and wolves… Yes, Buck is a hybrid dog to
begin with, even in the original novel, (a St. Bernard-Scotch Collie mix),
which makes himself something of a hybrid, which makes it kind of doubtful that
he and a wolf would have viable offspring. St. Bernards are a derived dog
breed, they are some of the biggest dogs around, and they are cases of
gigantism from natural P.O.V., which may create issues if they are released in
the wild. Yes, ‘Call of the Wild’ is fiction, a fairy tale, (sort of), but it
can be noted that in the original novel Buck is not interested in any female
dogs or wolves whatsoever, and there is no romance at all in ‘Call of the Wild’,
(whereas in ‘White Fang’ the situation is different). Here, in the 2020 movie,
the situation is different, and not in a good way – compared to the book, the
movie feels diminished, a disappointment. Yes, political correctness is
important, especially now, when the coronavirus, (yes, I know that it got
renamed, but let’s not get too distracted here), is bringing the worst in
humanity again, including the anti-Asians racism, (though apparently in Ukraine
the native people are turning upon each other instead – how are they better
than their Russian cousins, are again? That is right, they are not, apparently.
Ouch!), but sometimes it just does not work, period. In ‘Frozen 2’, the
socio-political agenda did not work, but it was still a good film, just different
from ‘Frozen 1’.
…Not unlike the ‘Dark Phoenix-2019’, this version of ‘Call
of the Wild’ just is not a good film, and political correctness just makes it
worse, period. It may not be as bad as real life, (cough the coronavirus cough),
but it is not very good either, both because of the CGI dogs (and scenery) and
not. Go and see ‘Sonic’ instead.
…This is it for now, see you all soon!
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