"Eight Below" gave me a clue why I tend to dislike animal movies even though I love animals in real life. Like most movies of its kind, it makes the animals seem a bit too much like people. That misses the point of what drives us animal lovers.
The beginning of the film, sort of a prologue, concerns a professor (Bruce Greenwood) searching for a meteorite in Antarctica. He is guided by a scientist (Paul Walker) with a team of sled dogs, as a storm approaches. It is almost obligatory in a movie like this for there to be a sequence where a character falls into the ice. Here we get two such sequences in a row, the second a lot more interesting than the first. It is the second that provides the movie's best line: "Don't tread water! Grab onto the ice! You'll freeze to death slower than drowning!" The manner in which the rescue takes place makes the film momentarily seem like "MacGyver on Ice."
When the research team gets evacuated, they're forced to leave the dogs behind because the plane has only enough room for the people. That begins the main section of the film, where the dogs fend for themselves for months, while the human characters try to get back to Antarctica but experience some setbacks. This story is based loosely on real events, portrayed in an earlier Japanese movie. Nobody knows how the real dogs survived on their own in the icy wilderness, and so both films are largely speculative. "Eight Below" offers little insight, however, instead taking the easy route and showing the dogs acting like human beings.
There's a scene, for example, where the dogs are stalking a flock of birds that always fly just out of their reach. The dogs then huddle together like members of a football team and devise a complex strategy which I doubt even the smartest dog in the real world would be capable of planning. I'm not saying that dogs are too stupid to pull such a thing off. As Stephen Jay Gould once put it in his foreword to a "Far Side" gallery, "Animals have intelligence different from ours; they are not just primitive models of our achievements." That's the kind of insight that's missing from "Eight Below." It doesn't attempt to explore how the dogs might have survived by behaving like dogs, even though such an approach would have been more enlightening.
Worse still, the adventures of the dogs are constantly intercut by the boring exchanges of the human characters on their way back to the base. Walker is the moral center who really loves the dogs, Greenwood (a dead ringer for Sam Neill) is the foolhardy explorer, Jason Biggs tries unsuccessfully to provide comic relief as the team's goofball, and Moon Bloodgood is there for a romantic subplot with Walker. There isn't much passion in any of these relationships; they exist to fill space whenever the movie wants us to take a breather from the dog scenes.
The technical direction of the dogs is impressive, making me wish there was a special award for this sort of thing. Not only are the eight dogs easy to tell apart (even a pair of identical twins are distinguished by a scar), each one has a different personality. Through their body movements and the tones of their barks and whimpers, we always understand what the dog characters are supposed to be thinking. But it's basically a story of people in dog suits.
I suppose that we all anthropomorphize animals to some degree. It's part of how we're able to relate to them on any level. But for me at least, there should be an element of mystery, a sense of encountering a mind very different from our own. That's the area where "Eight Below" sorely fails. But then, that may explain why I like cats more than dogs.
The beginning of the film, sort of a prologue, concerns a professor (Bruce Greenwood) searching for a meteorite in Antarctica. He is guided by a scientist (Paul Walker) with a team of sled dogs, as a storm approaches. It is almost obligatory in a movie like this for there to be a sequence where a character falls into the ice. Here we get two such sequences in a row, the second a lot more interesting than the first. It is the second that provides the movie's best line: "Don't tread water! Grab onto the ice! You'll freeze to death slower than drowning!" The manner in which the rescue takes place makes the film momentarily seem like "MacGyver on Ice."
When the research team gets evacuated, they're forced to leave the dogs behind because the plane has only enough room for the people. That begins the main section of the film, where the dogs fend for themselves for months, while the human characters try to get back to Antarctica but experience some setbacks. This story is based loosely on real events, portrayed in an earlier Japanese movie. Nobody knows how the real dogs survived on their own in the icy wilderness, and so both films are largely speculative. "Eight Below" offers little insight, however, instead taking the easy route and showing the dogs acting like human beings.
There's a scene, for example, where the dogs are stalking a flock of birds that always fly just out of their reach. The dogs then huddle together like members of a football team and devise a complex strategy which I doubt even the smartest dog in the real world would be capable of planning. I'm not saying that dogs are too stupid to pull such a thing off. As Stephen Jay Gould once put it in his foreword to a "Far Side" gallery, "Animals have intelligence different from ours; they are not just primitive models of our achievements." That's the kind of insight that's missing from "Eight Below." It doesn't attempt to explore how the dogs might have survived by behaving like dogs, even though such an approach would have been more enlightening.
Worse still, the adventures of the dogs are constantly intercut by the boring exchanges of the human characters on their way back to the base. Walker is the moral center who really loves the dogs, Greenwood (a dead ringer for Sam Neill) is the foolhardy explorer, Jason Biggs tries unsuccessfully to provide comic relief as the team's goofball, and Moon Bloodgood is there for a romantic subplot with Walker. There isn't much passion in any of these relationships; they exist to fill space whenever the movie wants us to take a breather from the dog scenes.
The technical direction of the dogs is impressive, making me wish there was a special award for this sort of thing. Not only are the eight dogs easy to tell apart (even a pair of identical twins are distinguished by a scar), each one has a different personality. Through their body movements and the tones of their barks and whimpers, we always understand what the dog characters are supposed to be thinking. But it's basically a story of people in dog suits.
I suppose that we all anthropomorphize animals to some degree. It's part of how we're able to relate to them on any level. But for me at least, there should be an element of mystery, a sense of encountering a mind very different from our own. That's the area where "Eight Below" sorely fails. But then, that may explain why I like cats more than dogs.