‘Alpha’ wolf dog becomes a primitive boy’s best friend
The existential question for late Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens: How do you domesticate an animal when you’re not quite domesticated yourself? Leash, collar, dog biscuit and fire hydrant have not yet been invented.
Necessity is the mother nature of such invention in “Alpha,” a visually stunning, family-friendly adventure, set 20,000 years ago, about how man’s best friend came to be so.
It’s half past the last Ice Age, and a small European tribe led by Tau (Johannes Johannesson) is organizing a crucial bison hunt. His teenage son, Keda, has crafted an excellent sharp spear for his first outing with the tribal elite, but it will be extremely dangerous, and his mother, Rho (Natassia Malthe), thinks he’s too soft or softhearted for it.
“Life is for the strong” — not sensitive androgynous types like Keda, she believes. Yet no man can shirk his duty, and without a big-time bison harvest, the tribe will starve in winter. Tau has taught Keda critical survival skills, but early in the hunt he is injured and separated from the others. Left alone on the ledge of a cliff. Vultures circling. Plunges below. Pack of wolves closing in.
One of the wolves has been similarly wounded and abandoned by its peers. That would be Alpha, a critter of great courage and heart, as well as real personality. Like the man and the quadruped in
“Life of Pi,” this pair has no choice but to rely on each other in an epic trek for survival.
Put another way, they’ll be learning how to move up the carnivorous food chain in order to avoid becoming part of it lower down.
“Alpha” — shot in 3D for IMAX projection — is the first feature directed by Albert Hughes without the involvement of his twin brother, Allen. Their writing-directing careers were jump-started by their cheeky “American Pimp” documentary in 1999, followed by the postapocalyptic yarn “Book of Eli” (2010) with Denzel Washington.
The Hughes script at hand contains no great narrative surprise: Boy and animal alike suffer greatly, both howling for a return to their respective packs. Teamwork saves the day as Keda learns to enlist Alpha’s skills. Interspecies social history will be changed forever as two longtime mutually feared enemies become essential allies.
It had to happen sometime, right? If not there, where? If not then, when?
Thanks for asking. It gives me an excuse to relay some didactic deep background on the Solutrean hunters of this story: They were an advanced flint toolmaking people of the Upper Paleolithic period (c. 22,000 to 17,000 B.C.), whose settlement sites have been found in modern-day France, Spain and Portugal, along with humanity’s earliest, highly artistic cave drawings of bison and bison hunts.
The fact that this relatively low-budget film by a relatively unknown director got 3D treatment is curious. But its admirably restrained use enhances the proceedings, especially when those beautiful snowflakes stream out and fairly land on our eyelashes. Location shooting in British Columbia and Cougar Buttes in California’s Lucerne Valley makes for a visual feast while the special effects render magical images of woolly mammoths under the starry Milky Way and saber-toothed tigers in their ice caves.
The generally astute attention to realism, however, fails now and then: Keda is initially shown to have great difficulty starting a fire but is soon cranking out roaring blazes at a moment’s notice — with no evident fuel — evenon a frozen glacier.
The human performers are fine. Kodi Smit-McPhee as Keda far excels his previously best-known role in the dubious “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (2014). Ms. Malthe as mama Rho, Mr. Johannesson as daddy Tau, and others named Nu, Kappa and Sigma are not fraternity members but believable fellow tribespeople of a certain depth. They communicate with each other in some presumably ancient Proto-Indo-European language, requiring subtitles. It’s not real chatty, butit gets the job done.
The Jetsons don’t meet the Flintstones here. But the trulysoulful eyes of Alpha (a Czechoslovakian wolfdog in reality) meet Keda’s and tug at your heartstrings. And the omega of their “Alpha” male-and-dog tale contains a verynice twist.
In the cinematic dog days of August, you and your kids could do much worse than spend 90 minutes in thiswolf’s situation room.