Alpha
I would like to take a moment at the outset to thank whomever it was who had the idea of having an adventure film, set thousands of years prior to Roland Emmerich’s lousy “10,000 B.C.,” completely in subtitles, and have it be about the first time man domesticated wild animals. This was a concept I did not really expect, but I’m not going to lie, I rather enjoyed. Yes, it can be a bit silly, at times, given the somewhat predictable storyline, but director Albert Hughes (yes, the co-director of “Menace II Society,” “From Hell” and “The Book of Eli”) has a strong sense of how to keep this story moving and engaging.
The film begins with a pair of early tribes of man on a buffalo hunt on the European continent in 20,000 B.C., and the leader of one of them has his son, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), with him on his first hunt. Tau (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), the leader, is not sure of how he will do, and his wife has reservations, but it is time to see if Keda will be a worthy hunter and leader. Keda, however, goes over a cliff’s edge with one of the buffalo, and is thought dead by the tribe, to his father’s devastation. Keda survives, though, and he manages to get himself on the path home. When he is attacked by a wolf pack, he manages to wound one of the wolves, who is also left for dead. If you cannot figure out where it is going from there, I would be more than a little surprised.
The story by Hughes, turned into a screenplay by Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt, is like many others we’ve seen before about man befriending an animal. What distinguishes it is not just the setting, but also the novelty of having the film be subtitled rather than just going ahead with English dialogue. That gives the film a degree of authenticity that it wouldn’t have had otherwise, and Hughes has a strong enough visual style to give us a rousing adventure of survival and friendship that hits all the expected buttons on that front, but is filled with such rich visuals and style that you have no problem just going with it to the ending you expect. There’s really not much more beyond that one can say about “Alpha”- one thing I will say is that it was unexpectedly refreshing to find a movie that takes the chances it does in movie theatres in the summer, even if it is the tail end of the movie season. It was a pleasant surprise.
