Alpha
*ing: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chuck, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhanness
Rated: 7/10
It’s an Ice Age grand adventure film pegged on a boy graduating into being a man through a stark and lonely trek back home through an impossible terrain — cliffs, volcanoes, ice storms, wild beasts and situations that are made to look jaw-droppingly sensational through a deft play of CGIs.
The 20,000-year-old spectacle embarks on this differently-enabled journey when this boy is flung in slow motion over a cliff by a wild bison as his tribe and father watch him go helplessly. That’s when you stop breathing, and many such awe inspiring moments follow, having been eked out of an eerie, severe and isolated terrain where no man other than Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has ever walked in solitary splendour.
The film is stitched around the pre-historic Cro-Magnon man and there is intense attention to detail which also entails that the mount does not speak a word of English or any other language humanity today understands. It communicates in an entirely undecipherable Cro-Magnon language, which the script-writer created all on his own, all 1,500 words of it!
One, however, wishes fervently that more such detail had gone into the wolf-dog and man relationship that fleshes out the film, because this is where the awe gets embedded in the more human emotions of love, compassion, togetherness, friendship, reliability, loyalty and survival.
Being left for dead after the Keda lands on an outcropping of rock way down the cliff from where he was flung, Keda keeps his father’s inspiring words on survival close to his heart as he fixes his cracked bones, gulps down worms to keep the hunger at bay and trudges to isolated cave shelters down the route to home. On one such trudge he is attacked by a pack of wolves and is made to spend a night atop a bare tree after he manages to repel the leader, the Alpha, with a knife wound.
Almost fatally hit by the knife, the wolf is breathing his last as he looks longingly for help from Keda and that’s when the backbone of the film, the relationship, gets formed. The connection between the recuperating wolf-dog and Keda gives the most powerful moments to the film but they leave you wanting more than what the director unfolds through Keda’s perilous journey home through the Ice Age winter.
Alpha, played by Chuck, a Czech wolf-dog from France, is a darling and powers the film whenever he is given a close-up. More of them are eagerly solicited as they take your heart, like when, Keda throws a stick to shoo him away and he picks it up and brings its back. Or, when Keda falls into the ice and the wolf-dog attempts to facilitate his rescue looking down through the clear blue water-ice sheet trapping his mentor. These bring life to the dead, glacial terrain of 20 millennia ago.
Indeed, when the entirely English subtitled film is about being a simple tale of survival and friendship between a man and his beast, spread over a grandly singular terrain, it stands out as a moving big screen spectacle. It helps when the landscape is so grim otherwise, the glacial winter being deftly depicted through locations in Vancouver, Alberta and Iceland.
last but not least is the stunning homecoming wherein the concept of Alpha gets stunningly and touchingly redefined, re-gendered to a perfect finish.