Advertisement

Alpha review: a howlingly dull Ice Age shaggy dog story

Alpha
Alpha

Dir: Albert Hughes. Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Natassia Malthe, Leonor Varela, Jens Hultén, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Mercedes de la Zerda. 12A cert, 96 min

The Ice Age was an “unforgiving time”, according to Morgan Freeman’s granite-hewn opening voiceover in Alpha, a survival drama set 20,000 years ago. But it’s not as unforgiving as all that. Primitive tribesmen throughout put up with a hideous quantity of digital sunrises, casting their kitschy roseate glow over dubious-looking tundra, and it hardly looks like there’s a real mountain in sight. This isn’t the Ice Age that your unkempt ancestors would have etched about in cave paintings, but some kind of iPad edition.

A young hunter called Keda (The Road’s Kodi Smit-McPhee), who has yet to master firecraft or boar-spearing, will emerge as the protagonist, when he’s driven off a precipice by bison and separated from his tribe. Beforehand, though, is the film’s feeblest section, a puddle of dreary, subtitled rites of passage involving Keda’s dad, played by Icelandic actor Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, and a lot of bellowed prehistoric pep talks.

The busier Alpha is, with its opening bison hunt and everyone huddling around campfires in production-line parkas, the duller it tends to be.

It picks up quite a bit when the simple, clean line of a story takes over. Keda, badly hurt and prey to roaming packs of wolves, must gain the strength to attempt an odyssey. Flashes of lightning, crackling through the murk with sudden graphic flair, jolt him into action when he falls gasping into a riverbed.

Albert Hughes, half of the directing team once known as the Hughes Brothers (Menace II Society), proves here and there that visual inspiration hasn’t deserted him outright, even if much that he’s attempting feels either too strenuous or half-baked to work.

Keda gains one of man’s best friends: an injured wolf, which he staves off with a rudimentary knife, tying its muzzle shut, and hefting the animal with him into a mountainside cave. The process of domestication takes a while. He dubs the animal Alpha, but must show it who’s boss, training it away from feral instincts to snatch and attack. Underneath the snarl and the matted fur is a cute doggy, basically, which will come to his aid repeatedly on the trek home.

The mood-rock soundtrack sounds like something salvaged from the 1980s – by Toto, perhaps, around the time they scored Dune. And the story’s episodic rhythms, more lulling than thrilling, are old-fashioned in a semi-pleasing way. Smit-McPhee, now into his early 20s, is gaining skill as an actor, and his evocation of distress and solitary terror pulls you into the film as much as he’s able.

Despite him, Alpha is really crying out to be an animation – not in the cutesy Ice Age mould, but something darkly beautiful, full of lonesome howling, with the aesthetic to make its tale wag.