Alpha

A Shaggy Human Story
or
Lads and Lassies

I'm a sucker for dog movies, but then, I'm a sucker for dogs. I avoid the cinema stories because I know I have that weakness, and I just know that, before long, everything will end in tears (usually mine). I don't care if it's Lassie Come Home or Lad, a Dog or Old Yeller or The Incredible Journey or Sounder or Marley and Me or any of the litter of other films about Man's Best Friend (no, I'm purposely saying that as diamonds are a girl's best friend), I'm going to end up a blubbering mess when the dog dies, or gets hurt, or gets rejected or even gets a mean look—I spent all of Independence Day worrying about "the dog," and when Pa Kent gets whisked away by a tornado after rescuing the Kent canine—a blue heeler, the last breed of dog I owned—in Man of Steel, I didn't bat an eye because the dog got away (and I liked Kevin Costner in that movie). Dog movies make me a mess, so I avoid them as that weakness tends to screw with the objectivity. Just because I'm going through kleenex like it was stale popcorn does not mean that the movie's any good. It just means I'm easily manipulated by them, no matter the quality. Manipulation is part of the fondue of movie-making, but using dogs is like a pot of Velveeta. 

But, Alpha didn't make me shed a tear (and it wasn't because of the cataract surgery I just had.

Alpha purports to tell a story of how dogs and humans bonded—back in Europe (northern Europe, presumably) 20,000 years ago—and begins with a hunt. Tau (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) and a friend from another tribe, Xi (Jens Hultén) lead a group of spears-men crawling through the grass towards an oblivious herd of bison, grazing, perhaps ill-advisedly, by a cliff's-edge. With them is Tau's son Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) on his first hunt, and, when word is given, all the men spring on the herd and throw their lances to create a barrier to drive them to the cliff. They charge as one and many of the bison blindly charge over the edge. But one bison turns and sees Keda and charges toward him (sensing weakness?). Although not trampling him, the beast does hook his clothing, dragging him to the cliff's edge. Xi makes a desperate throw to bring the beast down, but the momentum of the charge sends the bison and Keda over the side. Keda makes a grab for the crumbling sides of the cliff to slow his fall, but he cannot.

"Whoopsie"

He ends up, ankle broken, on a ledge, out of reach, unconscious—too far to climb up, too far to safely jump down. He is on a precipice and on his own. Lost.

Flashback: Keda and the young men of the tribe are being tested to see who will go on the hunt. Tau is proud to see that his son manages to make a flint spear-head that is sharp enough to draw blood. Then, as per ritual, he and another youngster are beat up by the tribesmen, perhaps to toughen them up—hard to say. Tau's wife (Nastassia Malthe) expresses doubt that Keda is ready to go on the hunt, that he is too sensitive and might not return. But, the father is adamant; Keda is ready. And if he is not, the hunt will harden him.

The journey to the hunting grounds is long and arduous. To sustain themselves along the way, the hunters kill smaller game to eat. When a boar is tracked and wounded, Tau tells his son to kill the animal and finish the job, but the boy cannot, hesitating before the killing stroke. Tau reprimands him and does the job himself. At night, even though gathered around a protecting fire, the party is attacked by a saber-toothed tiger and the other young member of the party is dragged away and killed. The others only stand and listen to the ensuing carnage. There is nothing they can do in the dark, merely prepare for a simple memorial of rocks for the fallen. Director Albert Hughes (co-director with his brother Allen of The Book of Eli, From Hell, and Dead Presidents) than takes us back to the beginning, flashing through what we have already seen.

Tau is persuaded there is nothing they can do for Keda (this creates a slight reality disconnect that only gets more frayed later, but we'll talk about that in a moment), but he is inconsolable, mourning all night at the cliff's edge—his son still in sight but out of reach. The priority, now, is to get the bison carcasses back to the respective villages so they may survive the winter ahead. Although we don't see how they get there, the next scene shows the hunters down in the valley.

But...how? Director Hughes has a penchant for big vistas in a CGI'd style that reminds one of Zack Snyder, pixilated to a fare-thee-well.* One of those vista's is that cliff that seems to have no end. They must have gotten to it somehow, but the impression is that it must take quite awhile to get there—meanwhile, the bison-bodies are rotting away down below. When they're down there, it is mentioned that they must prepare "the sleds" to take the many tons of meat back. Okay. Ther isn't a lot of timber available—there are trees, but no axes (they're still working with spears and flints) and in the many shots of the journey the only thing they're carrying is spears. Here's another issue: to construct those sleds, they have to put them together with something, like leather straps or (I dunno) rope. Rope would have been very handy to reach Keda (at which point, we're only left to invoke Hithcock's "Ingrid, it's only a mooovie" strategem to explain the lapses in logic). It makes one wonder just how resourceful these hunter-gatherers are; it's impossible to believe they're the ancestors of the guys who came up with Ikea.

The hunters move on and Keda gets his rock memorial, but that's it.

He's still alive, though, and shocked to consciousness when a vulture tries to sample some of him. He yells, but there's no one anymore to hear him. His ankle is busted, making it practically impossible for him to climb down the hundreds of feet to get to the valley floor.

Fortunately, the Earth provides; at the same time there are volcanoes erupting in the distance, a torrential rain occurs, providing a handy flash-flood for Keda to leap into to save his life. Once he stops being flotsam, he sets his ankle with a make-shift splint and tends to his wounds. But, he still very vulnerable in the environment. He's not fleet enough to catch potential meals, nor enough to avoid becoming one, himself. The movie turns on Keda being chased by a wolf-pack, which he's only able to avoid by climbing a tree and clocking the most aggressive of the wolves, wounding it. The pack backs off, leaving him with the one fallen wolf. He raises his knife to dispatch the animal, but, again, does not. Instead he muzzles it—very sharp teeth and growly habits—and carries it to a cave-shelter, where they both can recover.

"Stay away from me, ya lousy, stinkin'..."

They eye each other warily, but Keda turns out to be a good provider. The wolf doesn't attack because he's taken it out before, and the kid provides water—inventing the first dog-bowl, it should be noted—and food with what he can catch. If the wolf moves in to help itself to a bite of Keda's food, he just clocks it and admonishes it. Evidently, that works, because the wolf doesn't go for HIS throat, instead.

"Oh! Water! Cool!" (dogs are so easy...)

So. You can tell where this is going. The two bond and even learn to collaborate in survival. As the two get healthier, they start to hunt together (Lancing with Wolves?), the canine directing wild boar towards Keda to be able to make a good throw, so they can enjoy a cooked meal and mutual warmth during the increasingly cold nights.

Except for those last two incidents, the question I kept asking myself was: what's in it for the wolf? What does it get out of it, other than a reduction in pack order and getting slapped around? It's a pack animal, by nature, but even when the wolf-pack catches up to the two, the wolf goes off with them for a night, then comes back to Keda, in what would appear to be an anti-instinctual act (especially considering what comes later).

So, Alpha appears to be a little bit of wishful thinking for the origin of the man-dog relationship, using the current bond to explain the past, even though reverse-engineering doesn't usually work with behavior and evolution. 

It follows a template familiar to movie-goers—some folks have mentioned a similarity to Revenant (which actually IS based on a true story), a sort of "Revenant-Babies." But, the movie I looked at as an evolutionary cousin to Alpha is Pixar's The Good Dinosaur (and, frankly, Alpha is the better of the two stories). Despite sharing sharing some of the most convenient of occurrences, both also share some magical thinking about the maturing of the protagonist, as opposed to giving us any illustrative touchstones to show the process.

It left me unmoved, but appreciative of the vision of the images created. Perhaps a bit more Beta-testing of Alpha could have produced a better movie.

* Not fair, I guess. The Hughes brothers were around before Zack Snyder. But the visual style of Alpha seems much more reminiscent of what Snyder does now than in their previous movies.