Alpha (2018)
Directed by Albert Hughes
Written by Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt
Starring Kodi Smit McPhee, Johannes Haukur Johannesson
Release Date August 17th, 2018
Published August 18th, 2018
Alpha is the kind of action movie drama that stacks the odds far too high against the main character creating cartoonish levels of odds to overcome. Albert Hughes, the director of Alpha, sets his scenes in such a way that even Elmer Fudd might shake his head at the lack of believability, and he was repeatedly shot in the face by his own gun. The odds stacked against the lead character in Alpha on top of some silly looking at times special effects make Alpha a right laugh.
Keda (Kodi Smit McPhee) is undersized and gawky and also the son of a chief and therefore a future leader of his tribe. He’s about to go on his very first Bison hunt and his mother is concerned that he’s far too sensitive to be a hunter. His father, a barrel of a man, played by Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, believes that the hunt is exactly what his son needs to develop as a man and as a future leader.
A bison hunt is a strange event, especially as filmed by Mr Hughes in Alpha. The chief tracks the bison by their… droppings and immediately the scene is followed by the tribe smearing themselves in something that looks exactly like the dung. It is apparently mud but the cut from the almost tasting of the bison leavings to the smearing of mud on his son’s face is clumsy and I am left to wonder if this was a failed attempt at a visual joke.
From there, the hunters sneak to within a football field distance from their prey and then drop the stealth entirely so as to begin running toward the bison and screaming. Why did they need the mud bath if this was the plan all along? The goal then becomes using spears to sort of shepherd the bison off the side of a cliff where they can be easily harvested at the bottom of the cliff. This goes wrong when Keda fails to find the ability to move either left or right when a charging bison is running straight at him. Our hero ladies and gentlemen.
Keda has the poor fortune of having one of his garments snagged on the horn of a bison that is running toward the cliff’s edge only to stop right at the edge and throw Keta over the side. Thinking his son has been killed, the father leaves to mourn but the boy isn’t dead and thus a journey of survival and discovery is set in motion, one filled with ever-increasing implausibility and survival and some supposedly heart-warming nonsense about a wolf, quickly domesticated.
Alpha isn’t as bad as I am making it out. Kodi Smit-McPhee is a nice young actor, though his perfectly shampooed hair will likely drive those in search of verisimilitude up a wall. He has a sympathetic quality that is undeniable and a steeliness that could be believable in a less cartoonish context. His mastery of whatever language he’s speaking is impressive, even if at times it comes off sounding like Leeloo from The Fifth Element, whom he oddly resembles in some scenes.
I respect the movie enough to not want to spoil anything by going too far into the implausible scenarios that Keda survives. Let’s just say that Leo in The Revenant was not as lucky as Kodi’s character in Alpha. The Revenant, at the very least, had some recorded history behind it whereas Alpha is based on a theoretical history of how early man interacted with nature. There is some theory that states humans were tougher then but tough enough to survive the trials of this movie? I found it too hard to believe.
I was going to mock the notion of Alphas and the Alpha Male construct but the movie actually does one thing right in how it eventually plays out that outmoded notion. For those who don’t know, the scientist who came up with the concept of the Alpha Male in the early 1970’s now decries it and points to new science that indicates that such things as battles for dominance among wolves are more like familial squabbles over thinning rations and not some battle over leadership or control. The Alpha is not the toughest, he’s the father and provider and his pack are more often than not, his children.
Even then, it’s not always a male wolf that was the provider. In some cases, female wolves acted as the provider for the pack. So, really all of those silly people who consider themselves Alphas and operate on the notion that being the most ruthless making them a leader are operating on their own shoddy intellectual construct and not the actual science of the wolf pack. The science states that a good leader is a good provider for the pack and thus is followed by the pack, not out of fear but necessity.
That’s a bit of a tangent but only, again, because the ending of Alpha actually acts to deconstruct that notion as well by being much closer to the scientific truth of wolves than I was expecting. That is, unfortunately, the most impressive thing about the movie. The action is stilted, the stacked odds are cartoonish and the special effects are rather weak. Alpha isn’t terrible but it is much closer to terrible than being good.
