| Worth seeing: | for the landscapes and the warmth of the relationship between Brad Pitt and his dog |
| Director: | David Ayer |
| Featuring: | Brad Pitt, Anna Lambe, JK Simmons, Uber |
| Length: | 101 minutes |
| Certificate: | 12A |
| Country: | US |
| Released: | 25th September 2026 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
It’s been a while since James Belmont (Brad Pitt) left the services.
He’s now using his military skills to live off grid in the Alaskan wilderness, with his amputee service dog Odin (Uber).
They fly around in their seaplane, pitching their tents in the most remote places they can find.
During one flight, James suffers a heart attack and the plane crashes into a lake. He wakes at the bottom of the lake and manages to pull Odin and their luggage to their surface.
Nearly 60 miles from the nearest road, with only the provisions he can carry on his back, James and Odin set off on foot, through the most inhospitable terrain in the US, in a battle against nature for survival.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Tom Hanks did it in Castaway; Robert Redford in All Is Lost; Mads Mikkelsen in Arctic; Sandra Bullock in Gravity; Matt Damon in The Martian. More recently, Ryan Gosling did it in Project Hail Mary.
Now it’s Brad Pitt’s turn to spend the vast majority of a film as the only human on screen – fighting for survival against the odds.
Hanks had his volleyball Wilson to keep him company. For Ryan Gosling, it was Rocky, the non-verbal alien. Pitt has his pet dog – both offering him emotional support and adding to his responsibilities.
Apart from the briefest of encounters with another lost soul (JK Simmons), one man and his dog face their destiny alone, as they hike day after day, through forests and rivers, facing bears and wolves and nature itself.
The veteran’s survival instincts propel the pair towards their destiny – facing greater and greater adversity, inching closer to safety, by the day.
As their journey progresses, the scenery is at once stunning and frightening, as this travelogue switches from encouraging everyone to pull on their hiking boots and head to the hills to persuading even the most hardened hikers to hang up their boots for good and find a good book to read by the fire.
There’s much to admire about the film, from Pitt’s resourcefulness and indefatigability to his dog’s boundless loyalty and the warmth a devotion between the pair as they struggle to survive – if it wasn’t enough that they’d already survived war together.
But while there are a handful of dramatic moments – encounters with wild animals and wild rapids among them – the drama itself feels weak and oddly uninspiring. It all seems obvious and inevitable and it doesn’t add anything to any of the previous films we’ve seen about solitary survivors and viewers will be left wondering whether it was all worth it.
It’s perfectly entertaining but somewhat forgettable – for anyone except the most hardened Brad Pitt fans and dog lovers – is becomes all the more evident from the final caption.