A satisfying tale of a boy and his wolf
Alpha Rated: PG-13 for some intense peril. Running time: 97 minutes. 666 out of 4
Imagine a slightly Disney-esque version of “The Revenant,” and you have the makings of the satisfying “Alpha,” an Ice Ageera survival tale about an injured teenage boy who befriends an abandoned wolf.
From time to time, there are the requisite cutesy boy-and-his-wolf moments, but for the most part, the film is harrowing, suspenseful and gritty — and a perfect vehicle for impressive 3D effects that bring to life an exquisitely beautiful but unforgiving land.
Keda (Kodi SmitMcPhee, solid) is coming of age in a tribe that hunts bison when the winter takes a short hiatus. Keda is quite skilled at making spear-points, but he has a major survival flaw: He is repelled by the idea of killing the animals. This sensitivity — leading by the heart instead of the spear — does not serve him well during a showdown with the bison, during which one of the stampeding animals gores Keda and tosses him off a cliff. The sequence is breathtaking.
Keda lands hard on a ledge and cannot be reached from above. The tribe, including his father (Johannes Haukur Johannesson), assumes that the unconscious boy is dead anyway, and they reluctantly return home. When a buzzard-like creature wakes up Keda, he manages (quite preposterously) to survive another long fall — and his adventure to become a true leader and get back home begins.
The movie’s titular character takes a little too long to show up, but when Alpha does — along with some hungry friends — it appears that Keda is going to be served up as din-din, instead of making a new pal. In the fracas, Keda escapes up a tree, and Alpha is wounded and cannot move. It would be easy for Keda to kill Alpha or leave the abandoned wolf behind, but Keda decides to heal the helpless animal — and they become companions on the long road back to what passes as civilization.
Director Albert Hughes cannot resist inserting some adorable scenes where the boy and the wolf learn to share food, and where the wolf fetches a stick. But Hughes is not out to make a film for the 6year-old set — the terrain is menacing, and Keda finds himself in constant peril. A wonderfully shot scene, in which Keda is trapped under the ice, is truly heart-pounding.
Hughes also takes the risk of having the characters speak in some ancient language and using subtitles, but the dialogue mostly involves easy concepts like “Go” and “Stop,” so even the most subtitleaverse of audiences shouldn’t mind. Less risky is the effective and welcome happy ending, which nicely illustrates what this fantastical tale is all about: the beginning of our long — and cherished — connection to the canine species. Alpha may not be a dog, but there’s no mistaking what this lone wolf represents.