Movie Thoughts: Time of the Wolf (2002)

• Released: May 1st, 2002
• Directed by: Rod Pridy
• Running time: 1h 27min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

Recently orphaned Aaron goes to live with his elderly aunt and uncle after his parent's deaths. There, he has trouble bonding with these relatives he doesn't know well. He finds comfort in befriending an injured white wolf. But the local hunters are after the wolf...

My Thoughts

A perfectly fine and wholesome movie, but also nothing great or outstanding. It's just...solid. It has some decent acting, the wolf is cute, the stakes can be pretty high and it can be wholesome. The relationships between Aaron and his relatives are also pretty well-written.

But at the same time the movie never really made me feel that much for the characters, the cinematography is nothing interesting and it just feels a bit too generic to be really engaging. 

I also thought it was funny how they got several animal actors to play Roland (the wolf), but they barely resemble one another. The "main" Rolan is primarily white with some black and gray on his back, but then there's also scenes where they use a gray-and-tan wolf to portray Roland which is just odd. They don't even remotely look alike. 

I also thought it was funny how they clearly couldn't get one of Roland's actors (the primarily white one) to howl, so they instead just played howling audio over him opening his mouth when he's clearly not howling. And then later in the movie they use the gray/tan wolf to actually show Roland howling. But it's just confusing how they keep having this wolf's appearance change. I think it'd have been smarter if they just chose some actors of a more "generic" and less distinguishable wolf color, such as pure white, pure black or just your standard agouti gray-and-tan. But using them interchangeably doesn't really work.  

It's overall a cute and simple movie, but I didn't get that much out of it. No harm in watching it, but don't expect it to really grab your or pull on your heartstrings.