By any account, Alpha is a very simple and straightforward coming of age story. 20,000 years ago, during the last ice age in Europe, a tribe of hunter-gatherers prepares for its yearly hunt of a herd of buffalo. The chief, Tau (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), is taking his adolescent son Keda (The Road’s now very grown up Kodi Smit-McPhee) on the hunt for the first time. There are doubts about whether the boy is ready and those doubts seem pretty well-founded when Keda is separated and believed to be dead after falling from a cliff.
The chief mourns his only son, but knows he must return to his tribe with the bounty they have collected. When Keda wakes from his ordeal, he is injured and disoriented, but manages to get himself to safety, in spite of an attack by a hungry wolf pack they had encountered earlier on the hunt. In the tussle, Keda wounds one of the wolves, which is then left behind by its pack. Unable to bring himself to kill the wolf, Keda muzzles it and carries it to the safety of a cave, where he nurses the wolf and himself back to health while slowly gaining the trust of the creature.
Once the pair have healed some, Keda begins the return journey, following a star constellation his father had pointed out to him on the first leg of the hunt. He attempts to lose the wolf, but the animal is not easily deterred and refuses to leave Keda, prompting the boy to name it Alpha. The traveling companions become a competent hunting tag team, with Keda assuming the position of master and laying the foundation for the first relationship between man and dog.
During the early bonding attempts, I could not help but be reminded of 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon, which also involved the pacifist son of a chieftain of an early European tribe attempting to tame a creature heretofore considered a menace. Weirdly enough, it took a lot more time and effort on Keda’s part to tame the wolf than it did for Hiccup to gain Toothless’s trust. The similarities end there, however; while How to Train Your Dragon is a modern family movie through and through, Alpha is an adventure and survival story that may be a little too intense for young kids. A scene early on depicting the hunt shows hundreds of buffalo plummeting over a cliff to their deaths. Several other animals are killed for sustenance and a boy Keda’s age is mauled by Chekov’s saber-toothed tiger, which returns in the final act to serve as the pair’s ultimate test of survival.
Since the majority of the movie involves one human being and the rest revolves around a prehistoric society, there is understandably sparse dialogue and what is there is both laconic and entirely in subtitles. For this reason, the story is accessible to a younger audience, but may not be widely enjoyed by families. What it lacks in dialogue, Alpha makes up for in stunning visuals. Filmed entirely in the Canadian wilderness, Alpha continued to impress me even when I was thinking that the story was a little light on substance. This is a movie that deserved to be seen on an IMAX screen in all its splashy, ostentatious glory, but it likely lacked the street cred needed to bump Jason Statham and Tom Cruise from the big screens.
Centering the movie on the evolution of man’s first interaction with dog certainly helped as well by giving the audience something to relate to while also establishing its firm foothold in human history. Perhaps relying on man’s love of dog is an easy way to manipulate an audience, but it is in scenes like these—such as when Keda throws a stick at the wolf to make it go away and instead it brings the stick back to Keda—that the movie truly shows you its heart.
[SPOILERS BELOW]
For dog lovers and the faint of heart who are questioning whether they can stomach Alpha, you can rest assured that while many animals are killed for survival purposes, not a single dog dies in the course of this movie. You can breathe easy now.
