Alpha's Doggone Best Elements Are Also Its Most Original Tendencies

Stories about a boy and his dog (or some kind of other creature standing in for the dog) are a dime-a-dozen in the wide world of cinema, but Alpha looks to set itself apart from the pack by telling the story that explores the very first time man and canine bonded. Such a tale occurs during the ice age thousands of years ago as Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) travels with various members of his tribe, including his father, chief Tau (Johannes Haukur Johannesson), to hunt buffalo. It's an important mission for a number of reasons, including the fact that Keda see's this as a potential rite of passage of sorts that can prove to his father that he has what it takes to be a proper chief.


During the hunt though, Keda is tossed off a cliff and is presumed to be dead by his father and his fellow tribe members. Long after they all head back to their home though, Keda is revealed to actually be alive and now he must trek back to his village on his own. Well, not completely on his own as it isn't long before he heads home that Keda wounds a wolf that, instead of killing, he chooses to nurse back to health. Giving the wolf the name Alpha, this unlikely pair are gonna have to work together to help Keda get back home. There's not much more to the story than that and, like with Ready Player One earlier this one, simplicity is both a blessing and a curse for Alpha.

On the plus side, it's nice that there aren't forced antagonists for Keda and Alpha to face like human hunter foes or a recurring animal adversary. There's plenty of conflict for these two to face, but it's all random obstacles that reinforce how unpredictable the terrain is in this harsh wilderness, which really gets to feel like an imposing threat without having to share the screentime with shoehorned in human-level opponents for our two leads to face. Keeping the character dynamics between Keda and his tribe simple also means it doesn't take long for the story proper about Keda's journey back home to get underway, there's a real efficiency in how Alpha just dishes out the limited amount of backstory information we need to know and then goes on with what its really concerned with, a prehistoric road trip.

Unfortunately, the simpler story ends up robbing Keda of much of a character arc to go on in trekking home with his newfound wolf pal. It's established early on that Keda, unlike his fellow tribe members, doesn't like to kill things and at first it seems like, given that resorting to helping a wolf instead of slaughtering it leads to him getting a new best friend, the crux of Alpha's story will be about Keda using the very traits that make him a bit of an outsider in the village to get back home, but he's soon killing rabbits and other animals without hesitation.  For the rest of the film, here are no other distinguishing parts of his personality that get tested or honed during his journey. 

Just watching Keda and Alpha try their hardest to survive the elements is certainly watchable enough even without some kind of characterization to ground it, but the fact that Keda is such a nebulously-defined character for so much of Alpha left me more interested rather than emotionally engaged in what was occuring on-screen. The lack of distinguishing characteristics in the main character and how he grows on his journey also highlight the derivative nature of certain plot details, such as the relationship between a young adult son and a chief father having shades of How To Train Your Dragon while a large wooden structure with handprints on it feels like it was recycled from The Good Dinosaur.

To be fair, Alpha does have some bold original elements to it, namely the decision to have all of the characters speak in a fictional arcane language. There's not a word of English spoken here and any American film choosing to go that route (especially ones that cost a pretty penny to produce like Alpha) deserve applause for that. Plus, Alpha takes advantage of both the time period its set in and the various landscapes its two lead characters travel through to conjure up some memorably majestic imagery, director Albert Hughes has a grandiose visual sense for this movie that's really pleasing to the eye. There's lots of images and some distinct details to Alpha that are highly noteworthy, but if only similarly distinctive traits could have been woven into the character of Keda, then this movie could have been as good of a boy as it could be.