Brad Pitt Heads Into the Wild in Heart of the Beast

A plane crash. The Alaskan wilderness. A Special Forces officer and the combat dog that refuses to leave his side.

Heart of the Beast strips survival back to its most basic instincts, throwing Brad Pitt into a landscape where experience, endurance and trust may be the only things keeping him alive.

Directed by David Ayer, Heart of the Beast sees Pitt play Special Forces officer James Belmont, who survives a harrowing plane crash only to find himself stranded deep in the Alaskan wilderness alongside his combat dog, Odin.

With civilisation seemingly a long way away, Belmont and Odin are forced to rely on each other as they battle the elements and attempt to find a way home. At the centre of the story is the bond between the soldier and his dog — two partners who have already been through plenty together, now facing a fight for survival where neither can afford to leave the other behind.

For Pitt, preparing to play Belmont meant doing more than simply learning lines and stepping in front of a camera. He trained with experts to understand the skills, physical demands and instincts required to survive in the wilderness, helping ground the film's action in the realities of being isolated in an unforgiving environment.

Ayer takes audiences behind the scenes of that preparation, revealing how Pitt approached the training and the work that went into creating the world surrounding Belmont and Odin.

It's territory that seems particularly well suited to Ayer, a filmmaker whose work has frequently explored loyalty, brotherhood and people pushed into extreme circumstances. Here, those ideas move away from city streets and battlefields and into the vastness of Alaska, where nature becomes an adversary of its own.

But underneath the survival thriller sits a much simpler story. A man and his dog. Trusting one another when there is nobody else around.

Written by Cameron Alexander and starring Brad Pitt, J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe, Heart of the Beast looks set to combine large-scale wilderness adventure with something considerably more intimate — the loyalty between two companions when everything else has been stripped away.

Sometimes survival isn't about going it alone. Sometimes it's about who you've got beside you.