This hit me on the YouTube:
With all due respect to the great Harrison Ford, fuck you.
The Call of the Wild is perhaps my favorite book. I cannot tell you how many times I have read it. Dozens at least, maybe more. It’s short, about 200 pages, and I can kill it in an afternoon.
The story focuses entirely on Buck. Human characters come and go.
John Thorton only appears in the last half to third of the book. Then, he’s killed by a bunch of Indians after striking it rich at his claim in the Yukon. Buck then kills the Indians and runs off into the woods and fully embraces the call of the wild and becomes the leader of a wolf pack.
This movie is a perversion of what I believe is one of the best American novels ever written.
Also, a CGI dog? That is just insulting.
It looks to be on the same level of abortion as the 1997 Starship Troopers movie (yemach shemo).
Call of the Wild, like Starship Troopers and Hatchet, is on my list of “if I ever had the money to start my own production company, I would make a true to the book film adaptation of it” list.
Except Starship Troopers deserves to be turned into a mini-series like Band of Brothers or Generation Kill, in order to capture all the political philosophy that makes the book as great as it is. Starship Troopers, like Dune, was a political treatise with just enough plot to make it a novel and not a manifesto.
But I digress…
I’m not going to bother seeing Call of the Wild. I hope this movie flops. And as much as I love The Fugitive and Clear and Present Danger, Harrison Ford can go to hell for this travesty.
I saw the trailer on the big screen before the last Star Wars. I thought they must have driven up to Harrison Ford’s place with a dump truck full of money and asked if he’d take it to do this.
Just plain No. I’m nowhere near as big a fan of the book and honestly don’t even remember if I read it. Just no because I have no desire to see a CGI dog movie.
Starship Troopers was required reading at my US Army Officer Candidate School course . It is on the Marine Corps Commandants required reading list. When I was an Infantry company commander, my lieutenants read it as part of professional development.
It covers the subjects of loyalty, brotherhood, Duty, obligation , courage , freedom, self governance , and citizenship , Rights vs. Responsibility, better and more compellingly than any mere textbook or manual.
The New York Times editorialized against it when it was published, it raised the ire of the Stalinists on their staff pretending to be journalists – it was too “militaristic” and even worse , it was stridently “ anti-communist”.
If I were king of Texas, EVERY high school sophomore , would read “Starship Troopers” instead of “Catcher in the Rye”. Even better, The would read it in Civics class, not in English class. Every Green Card holder seeking citizenship would read it too.
The Hollywood movie on the other hand, is an abomination and has as little to do with the book as chalk has to do with cheese- they both start with a “ch” but that’s as far as the similarity goes. Virginia Heinlein sued to stop it, but the rights she had retained when she sold it , namely the right to be “creative consultant” , in Hollywood-speak, proved to be absolutely , legally, meaningless. The producers could do anything they wanted.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll not bother with the new, PC, “Call”.
Taggart
I whole heartedly agree. Starship Troopers should be mandatory reading in high school civics across the country. That’s part of my “if I ever run for federal office” platform. I’ll tie it to Dept of Ed funding.
To be fair, it’s seldom the fault of an actor if a film is bad. Blame the producers and directors instead.
The actors just gets hired, says what’s he’s supposed to say (and often times over and over and over again), and then has to come in and pretend it’s a good film because of his contract. They don’t get that much say in what the film looks like, or what their lines are, or even a chance to back out if it’s going to be an obvious disaster (see the contract thing).
Producers and directors, though, those are the people that the ire and hate need to be directed towards. Especially the producers. That’s the rat bastard possessed by the Good Idea Fairy who turns perfectly coherent stories into utter messes.
I can imaging Harrison ford showing up for filming and saying “Where’s the dog?”
It’s hard to have a movie stay true to a book; you’ve already got in your imagination what it all looks like and then someone else comes along and your imaginations don’t match up. That’s why I rarely like movies made from books I’ve already read. The very rare exception was Frederic Forsyth’s The Day Of The Jackal; the original with Edward Fox, not the trash with Richard Gere, great book made into a great movie.
I would add “The Andromeda Strain”- the old one, not the remake; and “No Country for Old Men”.
Never read the book, I’ll have to put it on the list. The original movie was excellent, though I also do like the Bruce Willis version as well.
I would say Watchmen the movie is a good book to movie translation, and IMO the whole giant squid thing was stupid and the way the movie solved it is exactly what I thought should have been done in the comics.
Probably not as bad as Redtails – which is an execrable treatment of a great American story.
I just saw the trailer last night thinking it might be a fun movie for my son, who loves dogs, and I. What an abomination. I could hardly finish the 1:30 clip. The CGI for the dog was terrible! And this is a general release movie. I expect that in a direct to video type garbage.
Disney+ did a great movie, Togo about the sled dog who saved a village (that Balto got all the credit for). There may have been a few CGI moments in that film, but they were easy to miss.
This garbage? Please.
I reviewed Togo when it first came out. That movie was fantastic. There was CGI (the ice sheet breakup), but I didn’t see a single CGI dog.
It amazes me that Disney+ can launch a movie like that and a general theater release of Call of the Wild looks so bad.
https://gunfreezone.net/fantastic-movie-on-disney/
About Starship Troopers: I couldn’t agree more. Heinlein should be required reading.
Plus Harrison Ford has come out of the asshole closet now with his full on blasting of Trump and those who support him. Go suck an exhaust pipe, Solo.
I feel personally attacked! Starship Troopers is an awesome movie! One that held the record for the most blanks fired in a movie at one point! It is a movie that has infinite rewatch value for me! The sheer Verhoevenness of it is awesome!
Now I understand you may take umbrage with it because of the directors politics or the fact that it has nothing in the least to do with the book (which I have also read), but as a pure action movie, with effects that have aged extremely well, how could you not like it!
Even the fake Nazis and the approach Verhoeven takes at satire and criticism ultimately falls flat in my opinion as he is critiquing the book and the author and fails to convincingly or really at all show how the society is full of a bunch of big bad Nazis.
No. You are wrong on all accounts.
“No. You are wrong on all accounts.”
No you. LOL