But any movie with a teen and a dog in it is going to tug at the heart, even if the dog’s a wolf and the kid’s not much further along the civilized scale. It’s a movie with more blood and guts than Disney would have allowed. Besser, Louise Rosnerĭirector of photography: Martin GschlachtĬomposers: Joseph S.“Alpha” has to stand as one of the pleasant surprises of the cinematic summer, a gritty yet sentimental fantasy about that first Ice Age boy to fall for a dog. Screenwriter: Daniele Sebastian WiedenhauptĮxecutive producers: Stuart M. But Alpha is always generous to its namesake, serious about being a buddy film and respectful of the impact this imagined encounter will have on the history of two species.Ĭast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Johannes Haukur Johannesson, Natassia Malthe In other hands, this might have been a YA Cast Away, giving Smit-McPhee actorly one-sided dialogues with his non-speaking companion as he battles the wilderness. At a kid-friendly 96 minutes, the film is not going to unduly drag out the deprivations of his return journey still, it’s a rough trip, peppered with a few bits of action and one visceral reminder of how close our heroes are to starvation. Though the audience might be content to watch this relationship develop, an oncoming winter gives Keda an urgent reason to find his way back to fellow humans. Along the way, he accidentally invents Fetch. The human fumbles that first attempt at hunting, but soon gets the hang of it. One suspects humans’ first attempts to domesticate canines went a bit less smoothly than this, but the film makes the bonding feel natural, watching as Alpha (played by a canine actor named Chuck) instinctively dashes into a cluster of boars to chase one toward Keda’s waiting spear. (An enhanced night sky competes with beautifully shot landscapes, where the only trace of humankind is the occasional piled-stone marker showing the way from home to hunting grounds and back.) The grudging co-dependence between man and mutt is enjoyable in an uningratiating way, and is given an archetypal flavor by gorgeous, storybook-ready compositions. While this is, indeed, the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Hughes and his screenwriter Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt don’t milk it for “aAfter he kills a rabbit, he establishes dominance by swatting the wolf away from the meat: “You have to wait your turn,” he insists. As his mother says, worrying about his going off on the hunt, “he leads with his heart, not his spear.” So while he manages to stab the wolf who leads the attack before he escapes into the upper branches of a dead tree, Keda feels compelled to nurse the animal once the rest have wandered away. And then the wolves start hunting him.įlashbacks have shown us that, despite his father’s high hopes for him as a leader of men, Keda is unsure of himself and unenthusiastic about killing animals. Enjoyably old-fashioned in its narrative but crisply modern in technique, it is engaging enough even for those of us with no soft spot for pets.Īwakening after the others have left for home, Keda has a kind of two-wrongs-make-a-right experience: multiple misfortunes cancel each other out, leaving him alive, though wounded, on safe ground. The first feature Hughes has directed without brother Allen, it marks a sharp departure from the gritty fare for which the two were known in fact, it’s something of a family film, albeit one exhibiting less sentimentality toward man’s best friend than kids may expect. Traveling back 20,000 years to imagine how humans might first have bonded with our four-legged friends, Albert Hughes’ Alpha finds a stranded youth and a wounded wolf learning to hunt together while the boy tries to find his way back home.
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