The Creator Director Gareth Edwards Really Wanted To Kill That Dog

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“The dog is riffing off a Darwin Awards story,” Edwards explained in an interview with Empire Magazine. There was a real-life story where a dog fetched a live grenade back to his master, killing them both in the process. The phrase “winning the Darwin Award” is often used to make fun of someone when they die at the hands of their own ineptitude, and that’s exactly what the Darwin Award website did with this real-life tragedy in 2002. It’s an inherently mean-spirited website that not only jokes at people’s deaths but celebrates them as having “improved our gene pool” in the process. To direct these jokes at a dog seems even meaner, which is why it’s lucky that Edwards’ girlfriend changed his mind.

“In my original first draft, the dog blew up, and my girlfriend, who would read my scripts, just handed it back to me and said, ‘You can’t kill the dog,'” Edwards explained. “I tried to kill the dog for a very long time.” Eventually, he listened, however, and the result was a movie scene that was the opposite of mean-spirited; instead, it served as an ironic celebration of organic life. Ultimately, the logical, supposedly superior robots are defeated by an animal who doesn’t realize just how dangerous this game of fetch really is. Whereas celebrators of the Darwin Awards would likely joke that dogs like this would be better off removed from the gene pool, the good dog instead inadvertently saves our main characters’ lives, and, by extension, saves most of humanity as well. 

Thank you, Gareth Edwards’ girlfriend, for helping turn what would’ve been the movie’s worst scene into one of its best.

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