Last night, Shawn and I watched the Disney movie “Eight Below,” which, according to the back cover of the DVD case, is a “triumphant and inspiring action-adventure the whole family will treasure.” Jess Cagle, of WCBS-TV/People Magazine, is quoted as saying Eight Below is “An exciting, heart-warming adventure.” I’ve never heard of Jess Cagle, but I have heard of People Magazine, so the endorsement seemed legit. Like most people whose home video libraries contain multiple titles ending in the word “massacre,” Shawn and I aren’t really the “heart-warming, inspiring tale of triumph” type. Actually, we prefer as few survivors at the end of a movie as possible, grudgingly allowing that one or two chartacters must necessarily make it out alive or there’d be no sequel. But we are also dog people, so the massacre buck stops here. In terms of puppies in peril, nothing less than inspirational triumph will do.
As many of you might know, Eight Below is about a team of 8 sled dogs that are left behind at a remote Antarctic base by a team of scientists who must suddenly evacuate and discover that there’s no room to take the dogs. This begs the question, “Well, how did they get them out there in the first place?” But I digress. The dogs are left chained up outside with the understanding that someone will return for them shortly, and, of course, due to the worst storm in Antarctic history, no one does. Shawn and I knew this going into the movie, but were lulled into a false sense of security by the Disney trademark. Sure, Disney killed Bambi’s mother, locked Dumbo's mom in psych ward, and fed Nemo's mom to a barracuda, but none of the dogs had their mommies with them, so we felt relatively safe from whatever Oedipal issues Disney's never quite worked through. Besides, these 8 dogs had something Bambi’s mother didn’t: Jerry. The back cover of the DVD case foretold that “Jerry’s beloved sled dogs must learn to survive together until Jerry-who will stop at nothing-rescues them.” In fact, ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, the line, and I quote, “Jerry and the dogs make an incredible journey to reunite” virtually guarantees a happy ending. Forget Bambi...think Air Bud...except there are 8 of him and he’s moved to Antarctica.
The film begins with Jerry and his team of dogs being forced to take a scientist in search of a meteor to a distant mountain. Here, I must make an aside to mention something that really, really annoyed me. The two men are bunkered down for the night in a tent in the middle of a vast and frozen wasteland. They fail to strip down to their long johns and engage in a playful wrestling match that awakens certain curiosities, but that’s not what bothered me. After all, it’s Disney. What irked me was this: as they prepare to go to sleep, Jerry notices a child’s drawing the scientist has, and asks, “Who’s the artist?” The scientist replies, “My son, Eric.” The camera then zooms in for a close-up of the drawing, upon which is clearly written, “To Daddy. I love you. Eric.” Whoever could the artist be? What a mystery! Knowing that the fate of the 8 sled dogs was tied to Jerry and his fiery intellect, I began to feel the first pangs of uneasiness, but chalked it up to poor communication between the script writers and Disney’s prop department. That Jerry will stop at nothing to rescue his dogs is of no comfort if Jerry’s as smart as what his dogs leave steaming in the snow behind them.
The next morning finds Jerry and the scientist out on the mountainside looking for the meteor. As luck would have it, the fist-sized meteor, after its travels through millions of miles of space and its high velocity impact with the Earth’s surface, happens to be lying out atop the snow where any idiot in a funny hat could wander by and pick it up. One wonders (at least I do) why fossils, gemstones, and murder weapons aren’t this accommodating, but, again, it’s Disney. We’ll just have to assume Tinkerbell pulled the meteor out from the deep crater that unbelievably hot objects falling from incredible heights must necessarily leave in a continent made almost entirely of ice and move on, because no one really cares about the stupid meteor in the first place. After finding the meteor, the team must race to make it back to base camp before a storm strands them out in the middle of nowhere.
While I’m perfectly aware that when one assumes, one “makes an ass out of u and me” (don’t laugh, you’re the “u”), I did think that this was the storm in which the dogs would be left. The scientist, having found his meteor, promptly slides off a ledge onto the ice, where he whines about having a broken leg before falling through into the water below. Maya, the team’s alpha dog, crawls out across the ice on her belly to bring the scientist a rope, and then the team pulls him to safety. Good dogs! Cold, wet, and injured (and still whiny), the scientist, I supposed, would have to be air lifted out in a tiny helicopter, and the dogs would have to fend for themselves for a few days out in the storm before being rescued themselves. Personally, I’d have left the scientist behind and gotten the dogs to safety first; but since this was wasn’t the inspirationally triumphant story of a stranded scientist and his long johns wearing, wrestling guide-who will stop at nothing to rescue him-it was obvious things weren’t going to swing that way.
But no, the injured scientist and Jerry, who is now suddenly ill and coughing for some unexplained yet dramatic reason, are heroically dragged back to camp through the storm by the dogs, led by Maya. It must be admitted that Maya reminded us of our own Mesa, though Mesa’s never done anything more heroic than bark at passing cars at 3 a.m. Since Mesa is a third or fourth generation mutt, there’s no way to tell which breeds she’s got in her (we’re still trying to figure out where her curly tail and webbed feet come from), and so every so often we’ll spot a purebred dog that reminds us of her. So we were big Maya fans. That’s why we were so distressed to see her and the seven other dogs left chained outside the base as a plane with all the people took off. There looked like there was plenty of room on the plane to me, even with the injured scientist groaning on the floor. As the plane took off and the dogs tugged at their chains and whined and howled piteously, Shawn and I decided at once that we did not like this movie.
But we were stuck. To turn the movie off would be to leave the dogs forever stranded in our minds. That would simply not do. Besides, there was Jerry-who would stop at nothing-to rescue them. And it’s Disney. Perhaps the dogs would get snowed on and look sad, but that's as bad as we were expecting things to get. We watched with baited breath as Maya, Dewey, Truman, Shorty, Max, Shadow, and Buck all broke their collars and chains and escaped to forage for food....leaving Old Jack behind. Old Jack is 10 years old and, as Jerry comments earlier, “ready to retire.” Old Jack never gets off the chain and starves to death, but not before Maya attempts to rouse him to action.
At this point, we decided we really didn’t like this movie. When another dog falls off a ledge and lies dying surrounded by the rest of the team, we decided we absolutely hated this movie. Sure, we have no problem whatever watching an entire sorority house fall under the blade of a masked madman who knows to twist the knife once it's in a naked co-ed's belly, but seeing a dog lying on its side fatally injured and whimpering while his littermate stands watch over him proved to be way too graphic for us.
And then there was Jerry-who will stop at nothing-to rescue his dogs....eventually. Nowhere on the back of the DVD cover did it even hint that the rescue would take about 6 months. Jerry spent a lot of time looking moody and ruggedly handsome, had clich?-riddled fights with his girlfriend, and taught kayaking at summer camps...but spent very little time rescuing his dogs. To be fair, he did have a few conversations with people that went like this:
"Fly me to Antarctica."
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
"Oh, come on!"
"No."
Meanwhile Max, the pup of the group, is stalked by a killer Leopard Seal who later bites Maya in the leg, crippling her, causing Shawn to cry out in dismay. I happened to be holding my cat Wednesday in my lap at the time, and he scared the hell out of her. She left a gash in my leg beating a hasty retreat, and Shawn moaned, “I hate this movie!”
In the end, Jerry ultimately arrives just in time to save the mortally injured Maya and the five other dogs, but not before pulling Old Jack’s frozen corpse from the snow. He smooches his girlfriend and everyone laughs happily ever after. The movie ends with a shot of a makeshift cross with two dog collars hanging from it. I’m sorry if I don’t find that image especially inspirationally triumphant.
Once again, Disney has scarred us for life...or have they? Actually, the true story upon which Eight Below is based is a lot less inspirationally triumphant. There was a Japanese Antarctic surveying team that was evacuated by helicopter from their base in 1958. They left behind not 8, but 15 sled dogs. Seven of those dogs were unable to escape from the chains and another 6 died on the glaciers. There were just 2 survivors, Taro and Jiro, who were brothers. They survived for just under a year on their own. I suppose the 2 dogs surviving is inspirational, but the 13 who died rather dampen any warm fuzzy feelings that might give me. The fact that today, Taro and Jiro are stuffed and on display in a Japanese museum doesn’t help much, either.
The whole thing rather reminded me of why I don't watch nature shows anymore. The last one I ever saw had to do with lemurs. It showed a baby lemur happily bounding around in a tree while the narrator commented on how innately agile these remarkable creatures are. And then the lemur fell out of the tree and landed on a log below, which broke its back. As it thrashed about screaming, the narrator calmly commented that sometimes the most agile of creatures can miss the mark, and that something would be along shortly to eat the lemur and end its suffering. Oh goody.
I'm pretty sure Shawn and I will stick to movies where the only things that die are terrible actors and the only people-who will stop at nothing-are psychotic killers. It's just so much more humane. And we've yet to find an actress who reminds us of Mesa.
