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Go on location with Brad Pitt and David Ayer for the filming of Heart of the Beast
Featurette: Paramount Pictures

Heart of the Beast
Directed by David Ayer
Rated PG-13
Endured 25 September 2026
#HeartOfTheBeast

In a twist on all the man’s best friend tropes, Heart of the Beast turns into a full-on tribute to the literal dogs of war.

Call of the Wild

Perhaps the biggest surprise about Heart of the Beast is Brad Pitt. He’s good. Really good. Instead of simply being Brad Pitt wearing different clothes, he actually takes steps to build a character, which isn’t his strong suit as he typically repeats himself from role to role.

This time’s different. It’s usually Pitt’s own tics and mannerisms forced onto a character, but here most of those telltale irritations – “Pittfalls” – are set aside.

After collaborating on the World War II movie Fury back in 2014, Pitt reunites with director David Ayer in what is also Ayer’s own high watermark after duds like Suicide Squad (the bad one with Jared Leto) and some silly action movies, including a couple with Jason Statham.

Here, they’re telling a simple story, one of endurance and survival in the wilds of Alaska. On the surface, it sounds like some sort of retread of Call of the Wild, but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear there’s a wholly different agenda afoot.

Enter a dog named Odin. He’s no ordinary dog by any stretch. He has an artificial right front leg and titanium teeth. He’s not some fantastical creature from a Marvel movie, though. He’s a war veteran. And his human companion, James Belmont (Pitt), is a Green Beret.

Shot in the head and suffering plenty of his own battle scars – physical and mental – James retired from military service and now he just wants a simple life of serenity.

Both suffer from PTSD. Their nightmares are filled with anxious shouts, screams and calamitous explosions.

Somewhere in Alaska

As the movie opens, it appears to be a dog meets girl story. Standing in the middle of a quiet road in the middle of the great wide-open space of Alaska (taking a detour to film in New Zealand), Odin has clearly endured some sort of adventure to land him in that spot at that time as a young woman in a pickup, Amber (Anna Lambe), approaches him.

Then the movie backs up to one week earlier, seemingly setting up expectations for how it’ll all end. Except it doesn’t turn out all sunshine and rainbows.

A solitary old hiker simply named Hawkins (J.K. Simmons, Whiplash) starts things off awkwardly. He appears out of nowhere, disrupting James’ peace and quiet. It’s a narrative device that allows Hawkins and James to run through some character-building (or character-identifying) conversations, with the objective to establish a little more background information about James.

It’s a really small cast – essentially three human characters with speaking roles, two or three more characters in battlefield flashbacks and Odin. Odin almost outnumbers all of them with four different dogs sharing the role to depict the canine over the years, from the early days in the flashbacks to current times.

The standard chit-chat between James and Hawkins is agreeable enough, but it’s a little forced.

Hawkins has been retired for four years. Most recently, he was a gold miner and before that a rancher. While he yearns for that mining past, he also acknowledges it’s a dirty business with shady players.

Over a bottle of really good Belgian brown ale, Hawkins manages to extract a little information about James and Odin. Their war stories. Their war wounds.

It’s helpful. It basically works.

But, the next morning, things go odd. Of all the things in the world, Hawkins leaves a parting gift for James, with a note indicating a specific passage James should read.

The gift? A copy of Frankenstein (or The Modern Prometheus). The passage is about how “the love of man had taken root in his heart.”

Going down the Google rabbit hole (always proceed with caution), a version of Frankenstein surfaces, refashioned as a graphic novel dating back to 1994 and set in New York City: The Heart of the Beast: A Love Story.

It’s an interesting subtext to slip in as a hovering thought. It doesn’t particularly work; it’s certainly a contrived narrative detail. But it is interesting. (Screenwriter Cameron Alexander has his own unusual pedigree. This is his first feature-length screenplay, but he also has a catalog of titles as a director of music videos.)

Dog Is My Copilot

As it happens, James sports a tattoo of an ancient Greek warrior’s helmet. Consider this story his own Odyssey. And Odin is his Argos.

It’s not that James is trying to trick the gods or anybody else. Hardly. He’s only looking for a quiet, simple life after his own time in war. But, nonetheless, there is a similar episodic feel to the story as James and Odin encounter one challenging situation after another.

Following James experiencing a medical emergency that leads to the plane crashing in the thick of a storm, the two set out on a new mission: to traverse 58 miles of wilderness and make it back to Kellogg Road, where it’s hoped a Good Samaritan will approach. Eventually.

Through their adventures, the pair encounter a giant grizzly with a large scar running across its face. Never intimidated, Odin stares the monster down and the bear retreats. Perhaps they’re kindred spirits with their bruised and battered bodies.

There’s a pack of howling wolves (in an effectively menacing nighttime scene), rodent bandits and many natural, environmental challenges to overcome.

While Heart of the Beast is an ambitious production and serves as another example of Hollywood’s surging interest in going practical with on-location filming, there’s quite a bit of CGI work, with some of the wildlife being more convincing than others. The end result is a type of fantasy that leans into reality.

Regardless, it’s all about the impact. The emotional resonance. As the action plays out, it’s clear this no vanity project. The sense of relentless self-determination from both James and Odin is still refreshing, even in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s ultimate spin on the theme in The Odyssey.

James is harder on himself than he is on Odin and at one point his sentiment is revealed and it lands a punch: James showed Odin war. Odin showed him love. Now Odin needs to be shown peace.

And with that, Pitt effectively takes a back seat to the dog. Perhaps this is why Pitt seems different this time around. Pitt is at his best when he is at his least vain. His best work is earlier; roles in Fight Club and Moneyball rise to the top. His roles in high-profile fare like F1: The Movie, Babylon and Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood didn’t really amount to much, no matter the sequels chatter and even his sole acting Oscar.

Here, there’s an end title card that grounds the preceding events in a fresh, unexpected fashion. It’s a tribute to the 30,000 military dogs deployed during the past 20 years. They are dogs credited with saving thousands of lives in the heat of battle. It’s an impactful, thoughtful message about heroism and sacrifice and it serves as a strong, unexpected tribute to those heroic dogs of war.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.