Hachi: A Dog's Tale

Number 151 on the top 1000 films of all time is the 2009 drama: Hachi: a Dog's Tale.

A remake of the 1987 Japanese film Hachiko Monogatari, in itself based on the real life Akita dog, Hachiko, this film follows the story of Hachi.  Upon becoming lost at a US train station, Hachi is found by Professor Parker Wilson (Richard Gere.) Over time, an unbreakable bond forms between the two.

I'm going to say it now.  This film should not be on the top 1000 films of all time.  It felt like a failed children's story.  What should have been a truly emotional, heart-breaking tale was either completely flat or overly-sentimental.  Hachiko was a real Akita dog in Tokyo who was adopted by Japanese professor Hidesaburo Ueno.  After Ueno dies of an unexpected brain hemorrhage, every day for 9 years, Hachiko would return to the train station to wait for him to come home from home.

This true story is revealed after the film ends and it made me more emotional than the actual film did.  Just like the real story, whenever Professor Wilson went to work via the train station, Hachi followed him and waited for him to return home.  He even becomes a bit of a local celebrity.  While this has definite potential to be emotional, it didn't land for me at all.

I think there should have been far more work done to develop the relationship between Wilson and Hachi.  There were some montages of Wilson trying and failing to train Hachi, but slow-motion and happy smiles wasn't enough to invest me in the movie.

Like his real-life counterpart, Parker Wilson suffers an unexpected brain hemorrhage and dies.  I don't know enough about the real life story or how hemorrhages work, but this seemed too sudden.  It had so little grounding that it felt like a plot device rather than anything natural.  It was a contrived way of forcing things forward.  But then again, maybe I'm ignorant of the true nature of brain hemorrhages.

The film ends with a montage of Hachi reflecting on all of his happy memories with Parker Wilson.  This was overly-sentimental and had me rolling my eyes rather than feeling anything sad. 

Akita dogs are very cute and there were moments when I felt very sorry for Hachi, but these were few and far between.  What should have been a truly tragic film completely missed its emotional mark.