For as long as we have been telling stories to each other, there have been stories about humans and animals working together. Whether it’s Romulus and Remus being nursed by a wolf, Androcles helping a wounded lion, or Hiccup and Toothless in How to Train Your Dragon, we humans love telling stories about how animals have helped us, or we’ve helped animals. I mean there are REAL stories about people who have been raised by wolves. We seem incapable of surviving without the help of our furry friends. These stories have to do with our natural empathy towards animals. Alpha proudly sits alongside these tales and is a pretty cool little adventure movie to boot.
 
It’s Europe, 20,000 years ago. Life is nasty, brutal and short. The weather is terrible, mammoths and sabre tooth tigers stalk the plains, and a young man named Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) feels out of place amongst his hunter-gatherer tribe. Keda’s different than his chieftan father, Tau (Johannes Haukur Johannesson), in that he has a natural empathy for the animals he comes in contact with. Tau understands, but in this harsh world you have to be strong in order to survive ,and caring about things gets you killed. While on the tribe’s annual buffalo hunt, Keda is severely injured and reluctantly left for dead by his father and tribe. Now, Keda must do everything he can to survive, which is difficult when everything is trying to kill you, including a hungry wolf pack. It’s during an altercation with these wolves that Keda manages to injure one of them, but he doesn’t have to heart to kill the animal. Timidly at first, he nurses the wolf and himself back to health. Now the wolf (who Keda names Alpha) and boy will have to work together to survive this harsh world and in the process bond together and change the course of history.
 
Alpha is a great little adventure film, told simply and elegantly. Director Albert Hughes brings an impressive stylistic approach, which feels real and grounded, but at the same time being mythic and archetypal. And because the film mostly centers on Keda and Alpha, and is in a fictional primitive language with subtitles, Hughes has to rely on pure visual storytelling in some places and it works to great effect. The buffalo hunt sequence is an exhilarating piece of action filmmaking and makes me want to see more from Hughes. The cinematography by Martin Gschlacht is gorgeous; the sequence where Keda falls into an ice covered lake, while Alpha tries to rescue him looks like a renaissance painting.
 
The film wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does without Kodi Smit-McPhee. The movie is basically his, as he shares the majority of his screen time with Alpha. So if Smit-McPhee couldn’t carry the film, the whole enterprise would fall apart. Luckily, he’s very good in the role as Keda, delivering a solo performance that shows his heartbreak at losing his tribe and the joy of making a new friend. It helps that McPhee’s wolf companion is very good (when it’s not a CGI creation). The other actors are good, but they are not in the film that much; a particular highlight is Johannes Haukur Johannesson as Tau. Johannesson conveys a lot of emotion and empathy just through a look – it’s obvious he cares for his son and wants to see him be the best hunter he can be.
 
The script by Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt from a story by Hughes isn’t anything original (with the dynamic between father and son and the wounded wolf, there’s a lot of the first How to Train Your Dragon in here), but that’s not a huge problem, as the film is told simply and honestly.
 
Alpha is not a perfect movie (there are some sequences and animals that have some fairly dodgy CGI) and the film is a little slow to get moving, but once it gets going it’s very engaging.
 
Essentially, Alpha is the story of how empathy and compassion toward animals allowed humans to survive, which is a vitally important theme at this point in time. It’s definitely worth a trip to the theater to see it – some of the images are simply stunning on the big screen. It won’t be in theaters for long as the film isn’t doing very well, but definitely check it out.
 
Three out of four stars.