Move over, Air Bud. The Real dogs are
here.
As I've mentioned before I do not as a rule like movies featuring animals, as they can be silly and full of sentimentalism. 2006's Eight Below is what a Disney
movie starring animals should be. It's a great adventure story, full
of beautiful scenery, suspense and emotional impact. Stories do not
get much simpler than Man vs Nature, or in this case, Dog vs Nature.
There are humans in the story, but the plot focuses on the eight sled dogs,
which act like real dogs – no cute slapstick or funny tricks. The
dogs in Eight Below are working dogs.
The story takes place in Antarctica,
where Jerry is a sled dog teamster, working for the NSF to guide
scientists around the Bottom of the World. Just before the onset of
winter, a geologist shows up at his base with a mission for Jerry and
his eight-canine crew, to ferry him to a distant location so the
geologist can search for a special meteorite. A storm is approaching
as Jerry and the team set off, and we get some fantastic landscape
shots as the dogs mush along (the film was mostly shot in Greenland,
but the scenery is just as amazing there).
Along the way, disaster strikes, as
the geologist falls onto some thin ice, which breaks, plunging him
into deadly cold water. Jerry and the dogs are able to rescue him,
but must rush him back to base, into the face of the oncoming storm.
With the weather only threatening to get worse, the base crew must
evacuate the geologist to a hospital and themselves to a safer
location. But there's not enough room aboard the plane for the dogs
as they are forced to evacuate ahead of their planned departure, but Katie the pilot (Jerry's love interest character) promises to
come right back and pick the dogs up.
The storm comes down hard, and it
becomes impossible for the dogs to be rescued. All the Antarctica
personnel are returning to warmer climes and won't be back for
months. A distraught Jerry has to leave with them, anguished that his
beloved dogs were left behind.
The second half of the film goes back
and forth between the dogs' efforts to survive in the harshest of
environments, Jerry's struggle to come to grips with what he sees as
his abandonment of his team, and searching for a way to get back down
South, even if none of the dogs have survived.
Loyalty is the major theme of this
film. Jerry is loyal to his dogs, and they to him. He says more than
once that he owes it to the dogs to return and learn their fate.
Jerry's friends (Katie, his pal Coop and the geologist) get together
to arrange an expedition which they hope can rescue the dogs. The
Eight Below are also loyal to one another, and it is their teamwork
that allows them to survive as well as they do. There are several
very touching scenes of the dogs' loyalty to one another as they
fight to survive.
This film did it right. There was
drama and suspense, but not so much that little kids would freak out. But expect at least one jump scare. The scenery was fantastic. There was
lots of emotion,both positive and negative, but the film avoids the
sentimentalism that often infects animal films. The human actors also
avoid overplaying the angst of the situation. The film runs just shy
of two hours, but never drags, and there's almost no distracting
sub-plot elements to draw you away from the main story of loyalty and
survival against the odds.
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