Alpha

If Alpha had been set in an actual harsh environment à la The Revenant, its trivial and unoriginal survival storyline might have worked. What we have instead is quite the opposite – an artificial, oversaturated, kitschy coloring book in which even the setting sun is not real. It could withstand criticisms such as “an adventure fairy tale shot in front of a green screen” – it’s not as stupid as Emmerich’s 10,000 BC and the actors are eagerly emotional, but the fake stuff around them was too much for me. Not to mention the overly aggressive camera close-ups and time-lapses that look like something from a bombastic commercial or video game. A movie that is supposed to make me feel the protagonist’s loss and helplessness in a harsh, hostile environment must be done differently. (20/09/2018)

Who would have guessed that the creators can make a prehistoric story into one of the nicest films about the friendship of a man and a dog. A nice surprise, where the bar is unnecessarily lowered by its beginning, but once a young boy and a wolf enter the stage, then every scene features a beautiful shot and brings you a dose of emotions. (13/05/2019)

This flop about how the friendship between man and wolf was formed thousands of years ago turned out to be a surprisingly successful thing. Alpha is a family adventure that isn't afraid to be a little grittier than we're used to with films like this, it manages to be engrossing and, above all, incredibly beautiful to look at. It is brought down by the second half, in which the gradual rapprochement between human and animal protagonists is, after all, too schematic and predictable. (30/08/2018)

It could have been a bigger hit, it feels slightly like a smaller production, but I was surprisingly immersed in the plot and nicely drawn in. It's actually a period survival film and the emergence of the domestic dog at the same time. The harsh B.C. era is nicely depicted and nature is used to its fullest including animals (wolves, tigers, hyenas, bisons, vultures). The main character is likeable, I also liked the music, and the hunting scenes have a lot of pizzazz, so enough for an above-average rating. 70% (30/08/2018)

Sometimes a more grown-up Disney movie, sometimes an uncompromising fight for survival, but throughout the entire running time, it's an avalanche of emotional decisions and breathtaking visual scenes. Almost every other shot of this (almost) inaccessible version of Brother Bear deserves its place like a picture on the wall. And I don't care deeply that it's not a groundbreaking story and that the dialogue sometimes comes across as pathetic phrases. Alpha tells a tale of such archetypal and almost life-giving stuff that the resulting avalanche of emotions loudly drowns out any criticism. (20/09/2018)

If we compare the solo work of the Hughes twins, we notice that while Albert went out into the world with this, Allen had already gone out five years earlier with the relatively focused and civil Broken City. So that forces on your mind the idea of what these twins collaborating on Dead Presidents, From Hell, and The Book of Eli must have looked like. For my money, I’d guess it was that the slower brother Albert was there to paint pictures and go harass the cameraman, while Allen went around afterward correcting him and winking at the rest of the crew that it would just get done as they had agreed in the morning when his brother was at the gym. Alpha is, in fact, an utterly one-of-a-kind cinematic blunder, where everything seems to deliberately want you not to succumb for a moment to the illusion of the time. Neanderthals from the barbershop with perfect teeth attack digital cattle in slow motion, the hero finds an earthworm amidst bare rocks, and when he needs one, he finds a stick somewhere on the steppe where there are no trees from horizon to horizon. Here you can walk off open wounds and bone fractures in a day. In seven days the cavemen here pass through four seasons and five climate zones. It's clear all the way through that there's only five meters of real action in front of the camera, the rest is obligatory CGI, and a lot of bad CGI at that. What’s more, it's a dreadful bore for dog-lovers that exerts all its effort to connect the viewer to the film through a relationship between a digital mutt and the most insufferable actor of our time. Besides, once I got to fifty I got tired of counting shots against the low evening sun, which left me with fifty more dreary minutes of a horribly bad intro to a B-grade video game. I don't get it. (29/11/2018)

Even though the adventure film Alpha is an overly digitized fairy tale about the origins of the friendship between man and wolf (or dog), I quite liked the story. Except I could have done without the initial time loops. However, I'm sure the child audiences must be absolutely thrilled with this film. (75%) (12/07/2021)