Like White Fang, I am certain that they will change some key characters around to avoid any negative depictions of American Indians and Latinos that would make it more realistic to the atmosphere of the time. It will be typical Disney wokeness instead.
It's probably doesn't even occur to Harrison Ford that he's taken money to star in a film written by an American Nativist.
I read the novel when I was a kid. From what I remember, there was quite a gallery of nasty characters.
For what I've seen in the cast and the trailer, they've white-washed the negative character, particularly the two brothers, very nasty guys, the were half French, one of them being half Indian. In the movie, however, both are 100% white and blond.
And then you have new 'diverse' positive characters, like the black guy or the female Indian.
In a nutshell: this is not politically incorrect. This is just more woke 'white males are evil' propaganda.
Yes. As someone else said, Thornton is really the only likable character.
Just looking at the cast, they kept all the loathsome white characters, which goes without saying.
Yeap. The original novel didn't have any racial connotations. It's was just a story with a lot of sordid people: whites, indians, men, women.
The movie, on the other side, seems to be the usual anti-white stuff.
They have never managed to make a decent version of this story that is faithful to the original and personally I doubt they will this time. But it's not because they are trying to be politically correct or whatever - they just cannot seems to resists improving the story to make it less violent and more marketable.
Been a while since I read his books but I cannot think of anything particularly objectionable about the London's stories themselves - though they do often reflect the general beliefs of one hundred years ago that we would not accept today the stories and characters themselves stand. You don't need to bowdlerize them to film them.
The thing that I found the most ridiculous is the scene where there is a fight at the saloon and suddenly an older Indian shows up and everybody immediately out of respect for him (or fear of him, I don't know). At that time period I am not even sure he would have been allowed in the saloon, let alone exerted any influence on the white patrons by the strength of his presence alone.
'The Call of the Wild' was written by Jack London in 1903. Times and attitudes were vastly different to 2020. I love London's books, but I agree that it's almost impossible to film page-for-page adaptions of them today, considering the depictions of race, animal cruelty, etc.
To be honest, I'm okay with that. I can read the books whenever I want to - I don't need a film to validate the text to me.
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Jack London spent time in the Yukon during the gold rush, so I expect his characters reflect real people. Too bad if woke idiots are offended! They're the reason we can't have proper historic movies anymore
Before gold, the only people up there were natives and trappers (often french-canadian). Fur companies set up trading posts for french and natives. Trappers could marry native women. During the gold rush merchants, hotels/bars and brothels moved in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_the_Wild#Background
California native Jack London had traveled around the United States as a hobo, returned to California to finish high school (he dropped out at age 14), and spent a year in college at Berkeley, when in 1897 he went to the Klondike by way of Alaska during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. Later, he said of the experience: "It was in the Klondike I found myself."[4]
He left California in July and traveled by boat to Dyea, Alaska, where he landed and went inland. To reach the gold fields, he and his party transported their gear over the Chilkoot Pass, often carrying loads as heavy as 100 pounds (45 kg) on their backs. They were successful in staking claims to eight gold mines along the Stewart River.[5]
London stayed in the Klondike for almost a year, living temporarily in the frontier town of Dawson City, before moving to a nearby winter camp, where he spent the winter in a temporary shelter reading books he had brought: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and John Milton's Paradise Lost.[6] In the winter of 1898, Dawson City was a city comprising about 30,000 miners, a saloon, an opera house, and a street of brothels.[7]
In London's stories there are wicked men of all races, with caucasians well represented among the bad and the ugly. But to "whitewash" all of the villainy is an insult to the intelligence of non-caucasian audience members.
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