Review of Alpha (2018) by William A — 15 Nov 2018

**SPOILERS**.

The positive reviews for this movie are mind-boggling. Was it visually stunning? Yeah, but it quickly becomes overkill. "Epic" flying computer generated aerial shot after aerial shot.. some going on for way too long, ends up feeling forced and redundant. Like too many movies today, the CGI in general looked phony... which makes it difficult to be moved by anything going on with creatures you are supposed to believe are real. The costume design was laughably bad. Literally, these outfits looked like modern fashion. All the perfect stitches and designer materials were so flatteringly tailored to their bodies, with fur-trims that looked like Canada Goose donated them to the film. What were they thinking? When you couple that with these unrealistically clean-cut looking people, with their white teeth and glowing complexions, it's hard to invest yourself in a world which was supposed to take place 20,000 years ago in Europe.

I wish those were the only problems and that the story was good enough to move on, but this movie had a skeleton for a plot and nothing more. Total lack of character development. The boy wanted to be a leader? Why, because he was made to go through the trials of becoming a man? The boy showed no actual signs of wanting to be a leader. Over the entire course of the first hour, this boy can be summed up as an incompetent whimp who has no direction other than to do what he's told... and fail miserably. The plot is also offensively redundant, and makes no effort at all to expand on what's been done before. There was one moment which was so shamelessly recycled I laughed out loud... where two separate tribes came across each other in a great field and the leaders slowly came face to face in a "tense" showdown, only to break out in smiles and hug as old friends. Really? How over-used and underwhelming. The entire story is like this, where each moment is purely generic and we're brought through the tired motions in their bullet-point form. Nothing is ever fleshed out, and not a single character has any depth.

The situations in this movie require complete suspension of disbelief, often making literally no sense at all. The boy is so inadequate he can't even start a fire (which strangely he hasn't been taught yet at his age, and before his first big hunt nonetheless), yet he has the knowledge to expertly relocate his broken ankle and craft a splint for it? He can descend a sheer vertical cliff? In the rain? He can carry a full grown (pregnant) wolf on his injured foot, last underwater beneath a frozen lake for over a minute, and defy the odds of freezing to death in the arctic tundra after being submerged... We're supposed to believe this. The "man befriends dog origin" story is slathered on like sugary sweet icing, and the director hopes that dog lovers everywhere will just lap it up, succumb to the over-the-top visuals, and ignore the cringeworthy execution... sadly he was right. What a bizarre amount of praise this film has received. Again, we go through the motions and arrive at the expected result with that story. Nothing in the relationship is explored, the boy shows no depth, and the ferocious wild animal becomes completely loyal to him in almost no time at all. All because he cleaned her wounds? (which the boy himself inflicted in self-defense). Literally, this wolf was so hungry she tried to kill him, but after the shoelace falls off from around her secured muzzle she just casually sits in the cave with him instead of attacking him. I'd chalk it up to she was just tired and weak, but nothing in her body language suggested that. She just looked and acted like a dog being told to sit still. You could almost picture the trainer off-camera with treats in hand. I'm a dog lover too. Maybe even a little bit of a dog obsessor. In my opinion, there wasn't a single tangible moment where I truly believed this was a human and an animal bonding and figuring each other out. Everything was on the surface and felt forced. Even the cut-aways to the wolf reacting to the boy felt detached, as if they were from some other moment entirely.

Finally, the movie was excruciatingly slow. I don't mind slow films as long as something's building, but scenes in this would drag on for so long with no real development. You mostly knew what was happening and where it was going all the time... just sitting and waiting for it to get there. Remarkably, someone even let the director repeat the "big" (unimpressive) hunt scene from the beginning of the film, not long after we had already seen it... and styled like the intro recap for a previous episode in a tv series. How tacky. The score, like everything else in this movie, was generic and forced. Often the music was trying so hard to sound epic it felt like I was watching an SNL parody. An unoriginal, interchangeable, and completely forgettable score. In fact, I would say exactly the same for this movie as a whole. Totally uninspired..