There’s an old-school charm to Alpha, which is evident in the trailer itself. Opening with a panoramic shot, the voice-over in the trailer introduces, “At the end of the last ice age, when our world was a harsh and unforgiving place, a boy was separated from his family…” When was the last time we saw a trailer with a voice-over, which wasn’t a parody of an old film? That sense of traditional, restrained storytelling — untouched by the Grand Guignol of Hollywood superhero sagas — is omnipresent in Alpha. But the film, directed by Albert Hughes, is caught in a paradox. On the surface, it is as vainglorious as an IMAX film — showcasing the best modern-day CGI technology — could be. But on the other, it’s reflective of the simplicity and rawness of man-canine friendship, the emotions of losing your family and the overwhelming vastness of nature.Set somewhere in Europe, 20,000 years ago, Alpha traces the origins of man’s relationship with dogs, or wolves, as they used to be. Humanity stood at the hunter-gatherer evolutionary stage, where man lived in tribes and spoke in monosyllabic words (which, in the film, sounds more like grunts). Staying true to its time, the film abstains from using English but invents its own language and has subtitles peppered throughout. The lack of verbosity and reliance on visual drama to animate the adventures of the teen protagonist, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and the wolf, Alpha, makes the film impactful and pacy. It’s once again a pleasant throwback to classic survivor films like Cast Away (2000), in all its silences, distress and the willingness to pull through.
At the heart of the film is a clichéd (or classic?) story of two underdogs fostering an unlikely friendship. Folklore, as embossed in caves, and evolutionary science, as bottled up in natural history museums, have both been fascinated by man’s love-hate relationship with the wild. Alpha attempts to showcase that through a coming-of-age tale of Keda, where nature is both a source of intimidation and comfort. Headlining the film, Smit-McPhee is equally fragile and rugged, as a Palaeolithic teen is expected to be. During his trek back to his tribe, the film indulges the audience in magnificent landscapes, which are a delight to savour on the big screen. But look beyond and the film has very little novelty to offer. It follows a set pattern of an optimistic Disney fairytale, where, for instance, you predict the wolf will at some point come to rescue the boy, and she does. The filmmaker elicits emotions on cue and you are aware of being manipulated but you still give in, because, at the end of the day, it’s not an extraordinary story but it resonates with something very intrinsic — that inexplicable feeling of being loved by a dog.