EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY
Tale of a boy and a wolf will nip at audiences’ hearts
Nothing wrong with the name Alpha, but this prehistoric boymeets-canine tale could have taken on so many other names. First Dog would have made a nice counterpoint to the upcoming Neil Armstrong biopic First Man. Personally, I’d have gone with Dances With Wolf.
Two years ago, when the movie was being shot near Drumheller, Alta., it went by the name The Solutrean, which sounds like a lost J.R.R. Tolkien novel and requires some explanation. The Solutreans were a European group living in what is now southern France and Spain 20,000 years ago, using advanced flint-knapping techniques that amounted to the Industrial Revolution of the Ice Age.
Australian actor Kodi SmitMcPhee
stars as Keda, the son of a Solutrean chieftain played by Iceland’s Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson. The hardy, hunthardened chief leads his people on a daring attack on a herd of steppe bison, but the kid is a bit of a disappointment, unable even to kill a pinned-down animal. When the boy is almost gored by a bison and falls to an inaccessible cliff ledge, the tribe is forced to leave him for dead and head home.
Of course, Keda survives the fall, and even sets his own broken leg. He next manages to fight off a wolf attack, but then takes pity on his wounded adversary and decides to nurse the animal back to health.
It’s a modest plot, and director and co-writer Albert Hughes (The Book of Eli) never quite manages to give the material the existential oomph required of a lost-in-thewilderness tale. Keda glumly plods through the gathering glacial winter, trying to get back home, and the film does likewise.
Smit-McPhee, who gained fame in another survival story, 2009’s The Road, does a good job of portraying a stone-age emo teen who gradually discovers the inner strength he needs to survive.
And credit must also go to Chuck, the Czechoslovakian wolfdog who co-stars as Alpha the wolf. Initially growly and surly, Alpha soon learns to trust the human. In one of the movie’s rare comic moments, Keda tries to scare the wolf off with a stick, and inadvertently invents the game of fetch.
There’s also some amazing scientific accuracy in the background. Take the language spoken by the Solutreans, and rendered in English subtitles. It’s made up, but based on something called proto-Dené-Caucasian, a hypothetical common ancestor of several European, north Asian and Indigenous tongues. Then there’s the stars Keda uses to navigate home — if you think they look like the a misshapen Big Dipper, that’s because the constellation would have looked that way 20 millenniums ago, thanks to the slow drift of its constituent suns.
None of this is enough to make up for the film’s sometimes lacklustre pacing — I won’t stoop to calling it glacial — or narrow storyline, but if you yearn for better science in your fiction, it’s a great take-away. (See also Agora, a 2009 biopic about fourth-century philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria, starring Rachel Weisz.)
And as a fanciful notion of how wolves became dogs, Alpha should also please those latter-day Solutreans who count canines among their family and friends.