People have long referred to parts of August as the dog days of summer, and many August film releases have been dogs, but never has there been an August at the movies as we are experiencing in 2018. First, we had the contemporary romantic comedy, Dog Days, and, next week, we’ll get to see a giant robotic dog named A.X.L. But this week we go in a completely different direction, back to the Ice Age in fact, for Alpha, the story of man’s first best friend. And despite some pacing that’s at times glacial, Alpha hits the same right notes that most enjoyable contemporary canine films do.
Despite its prehistoric setting, Alpha is another story of a boy and his dog, although in this case, the dog happens to be a wolf and doesn’t appear until halfway through the movie. The boy, however, is Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the son of the chief (Johannes Haukur Johannesson) of a tribe that’s eking out a hardscrabble existence in some fairly desolate territory somewhere in Europe. The film starts with a big bison hunt as the hunters maneuver a herd of bison near the edge of a cliff and then force them over the cliff to their deaths. Unfortunately, Keda manages to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and, when he won’t use his spear against a charging bison, gets run off the side of the cliff.
Fortunately, Keda manages to land on a very narrow rock path partway down and break his ankle in the process. Keda then avoids death by one of the most improbable deus ex machinas in the history of preshistoric cinema, a major storm that floods the valley below, allowing him to drop into a newly formed river. When he eventually gets back to the top of the cliff (how this happens is one of Alpha’s many unexplained mysteries), he finds that his fellow tribesmen have headed back to their tribe. Keda follows, using the constellations in the sky to navigate by, but he has a lot of trouble finding enough food to survive, being reduced to eating worms on occasions.
Eventually, Keda is chased by a pack of wolves and escapes by climbing into the low branches of a tree. He manages to wound one of the wolves with his spear, and the rest of the pack eventually leave. Keda takes pity on the wounded wolf and carries it to shelter where he gives it food and water, and the rest is natural history, as man and wolf (whom Keda names Alpha) eventually become close companions. Along the way, they still have to overcome numerous other dangerous situations, including Keda’s near drowning when he falls through a thin spot on a frozen lake (see clip below).
Despite the prehistoric setting and the appearance of some strange animals like saber-tooth tigers, Alpha should seem very familiar to audiences, reminding them of the nature survival documentaries that show up frequently on cable TV, and for those older filmgoers like me, the Disney nature documentaries of the 50’s and 60’s. Even before Alpha enters the picture, Keda has to figure out how to set a broken ankle, scramble for food (when there’s no fruit or vegetables in sight), and find his way back home. With almost no speech in this part of the film, director Albert Hughes keeps the audience invested with Keda, whose upbringing as the son of the chief serves him well here.
Unfortunately, Hughes and screenwriter Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt seem to have been unsure of the strength of their material, so they give Keda some highly anachronistic backstory in the form of a lengthy flashback right after the bison stampede to a time one week earlier. Keda has some well-developed survival skills (he knows how to start a fire) but he’s also “sensitive,” not a character trait that’s very helpful when facing down a charging bison. Movie families have acted out scenes like this one for the 20,000 years since the time of Alpha, and the material was just as stale now as it was then. The entire backstory sequence breaks the tension of the initial stampede scene to introduce some characters we never see again and serves to slow the film down. Considering that much of the movie is about people hiking for hours over monotonous terrain, the sequence is the first of several that simply slow the movie down. Unlike later scenes that show the hardship Keda endures, however, this sequence is almost completely unnecessary.
Once Keda goes over the cliff, however, Alpha improves considerably. It’s essentially a story of a teenaged boy, on his own, trying to navigate his way through exceedingly hostile territory and overcome the dangers of potential starvation and, later, freezing to death as winter sets in. The one real positive from the flashback is to show how Keda acquired some of his survival skills like celestial navigation and making a fire from scratch. The interest for the audience during Keda’s struggle isn’t so much in seeing whether he will survive (that’s fairly easy to guess), but how, and director Hughes spends just about the right amount of time on the details to give the audience a feel for how he does things rather than showing every single thing involved in making a fire.
Of course, Alpha isn’t just a story of man’s survival, but the survival of man and wolf. Keda is pretty much able to domesticate Alpha over the course of one single scene by showing some kindness and treating the animal’s wounds, but, while that might strain credibility, it’s par for the course in animal movies, no matter in which century they are set. Plus, it helps that the dog (or dogs) playing Alpha are quite expressive and well trained (although it’s hard to tell at times how many scenes feature CGI canines). The eventual bonding between Keda and Alpha works with audiences for the same reason that these scenes almost always work when done right—it’s just human, and canine, nature.
Despite the unusual setting and a few other distractions like the somewhat odd use of a subtitled imaginary language that the characters speak, Alpha is pretty much like a lot of other animal and survival adventures. Director Hughes knows how to follow a successful time-honored storyline, and he’s helped by some often spectacular location photography. He also knows how to avoid overplaying his hand, as he keeps the events within the bounds of credibility rather than turning this into an Ice Age version of Jurassic Park. Alpha may not be the best in show, and its pace is a bit creaky at times, but it still wins a ribbon.
