Walking into the almost empty theater, I saw the effects of the false media surrounding the film. At the beginning of the year, TMZ released footage of an German Shepard being forced to do a scene for the movie, A Dog’s Purpose. The plot of the heartwarming movie focuses on the recantation of a dog’s life. The spirit of the dog is brought back as a different breed each time and tries to find his original owner. In mid-January, TMZ released the video of the dog actor known as Hercules, being forced into rushing water in order to shoot a scene for the movie. In the exclusive video, the dog was thrown into the water and forced to stay in the water, although the dog tried to climb out.  

After the allegations were deemed to be false, the news had already spread.  PETA had already called for a boycott and people followed their command.

The director, Lasse Hallstrom, reported, “ I did not witness these actions, which are unacceptable and would never happen with my knowledge. We were all committed to providing a loving, respectful and safe environment for all the animals in the film. I have been promised that a thorough investigation into this situation is underway and that any wrongdoing will be reported and punished.”

Hallstrom is known for directing heartwarming dog based movies, like “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale”, and was truly disturbed to find out what was going on.

An eighth grader at Hingham Middle School,  Julia Burm, attended the movie despite the controversy, and she said “it looked like a good movie and though what they did to the dog was terrible there was nothing to be done at this point.”

The movie theater was almost empty, besides a family and a couple of older couples. Sitting in the back of the theater, the people seemed uninterested. The movie was too fast paced and failed to follow a plot. The directors focused too much on showing multiple lives of this same soul of the dog and not enough time spent on connecting with the viewers.

One of the attending viewers, Junior, Sydney Mallett says, “Despite the controversy, you shouldn’t see the movie regardless because it’s confusing and at times boring.” The movie was very scattered and always very hard to follow. Because of the lack of details, it was hard to connect and feel emotional about the ending. However, one enjoyable feature was that the dog narrated the movie, giving you an inside look of how the dog feels .

“It adds a lot to the movie and makes it overall much more emotional and at times extremely sad. But in the end the narration helps tie the whole story together in a nice way.” Sydney later added. As a dog owner, seeing the movie made me think of my dog’s purpose, and overall was a good idea to a movie, but the film could have been made better.  Then again, the film had tons of adorable dogs so they couldn’t have gone wrong there.