Heart of the Beast of Mossy Bottom

I keep calling this The Man and His Dog, even though it actually has this much much sillier title Heart of the Beast, a title I've had trouble remembering since I first saw the trailer. 

 David Ayer's movie really works. It's a solid man-in-nature thing, and instead of the man being alone or with a human best friend, he's with his canine best friend, and the two take care of each other beautifully. I found this movie exciting and enjoyable throughout. It has beautiful shots of the natural world, and Brad Pitt and his dog are both a pleasure to watch. 

 I didn't like one of this movie's central political premises, though. Heart of the Beast is framed by the violence of the US American war machine, and I don't really understand what that's about. Both the dog and Pitt's character are combat veterans, and they've experienced a great deal of modern warfare in what looked like one of the US's most recent imperial wars. This is fine, as far as it goes, and it's clear why Pitt and his pup would want to leave all that behind and escape to the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness where Heart of the Beast is set. But the movie also takes for granted that the experience of modern warfare is somehow comparable to or equivalent with the experience of being alone in nature at the mercy of the elements and the local megafauna. This strikes me as a deeply disingenuous point of view. US bombs are actively destroying wildernesses, habitats, and the natural world, and the US military and its ballistic systems have been doing this for nearly a century.

Unrelated except for the fact that its title makes a fun Wheel of Fortune-style Before and After is Shaun the Sheep: the Beast of Mossy Bottom:

It's pleasant, and I laughed out loud many times. Something about the silence of all of the characters, though, starts to feel boring, and both me and my companion fell asleep at different times in the movie and each missed about 5 minutes (we compared notes afterward to make sense of the film). Honestly, though, it was a nice nap, and the world of Mossy Bottom and Shaun the Sheep is pretty delightful.

For the record, this movie's onscreen title is simply The Beast of Mossy Bottom. It seems like internet databases like IMDb and TMDB all use the titles on posters now instead of using the titles that actually appear on screen (cf. The Mandalorian and Grogu, Wicked: Part One). This seems odd to me, but oh well.