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Canine charisma rescues 'Eight Below'

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Call it "March of the Pooches."

The new Disney movie "Eight Below" is a similar tale of survival in the icy harshness of Antarctica. But this time, it's six Siberian huskies and two malamutes, not a horde of penguins, who must endure wind, snow, freezing temperatures and the occasional predator.

Walt Disney Pictures

'Eight Below'

The verdict: Move over, Lassie, these sled dogs have star power to spare.

Director: Frank Marshall
Starring: Paul Walker, Jason Biggs, Bruce Greenwood, Moon Bloodgood
Run time: 120 minutes
Release date: Feb. 17, 2005
Rating: PG for some peril and brief mild language.
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Paul Walker stars as a guide stationed at a research base on the south end of the world. Bruce Greenwood is a scientist eager to find fragments of a meteor that crash-landed. Walker and his eight-dog sled team are enlisted for the expedition, but a bad accident combined with worse weather mandates the men be emergency evacuated to better medical care in New Zealand.

The perky pilot (Moon Bloodgood) promises to return for the dogs, but a blizzard and bureaucracy block her way. Winter settles in and the dogs are left on their own.

(Spoiler alert for parents of very young or very sensitive children and for very sensitive animal lovers: Not all the dogs make it. Which isn't what you'd expect from a Disney picture. Sure, Uncle Walt killed off Old Yeller and Bambi's mother, but there's a certain survival-of-the-fittest brutality here that's unsettling. Anyway, so you don't spend the second hour in misery wondering which pup will be picked off next, know that only two animals die. And it happens early on after they're abandoned. As threatening as circumstances become, the rest make it. And count your blessings. The 1983 Japanese film that "suggested" the movie was a horror show in which one dog after the next met a grisly end.)

The second half of the movie is divided between the dogs' efforts to survive and Walker's efforts to rescue them. Unfortunately, he lacks his canine co-stars' charisma, so every time we cut away from the animals, the film goes flat (despite good work by Greenwood and Jason Biggs as a comic-relief cartographer).

Director Frank Marshall, whose credits include "Congo" and "Alive," is best-known as the second-unit man on the "Indiana Jones" movies. His experience in handling mammoth-scaled adventure movies serves him well as he trains his camera on the unforgiving vastness of this frozen land with its Van Gogh-ish starry, starry nights.

Yet, as magnificent as the setting is, the dogs are more so. Graceful, gorgeous creatures, they're anthropomorphized just enough to give them distinct personalities. With the possible exception of Harrison Ford, these paragons of beauty, strength, intelligence and loyalty are as close to old-fashioned heroes as anyone or anything we've seen onscreen all winter.