A Sony/Columbia release.The Alpha and Omega franchise from Lionsgate is a series of American computer animated films that consists of eight films: Alpha and Omega (2010), Alpha and Omega 2: A Howl-iday Adventure (2013), Alpha and Omega 3: The Great Wolf Games, Alpha and Omega: The Legend of the Saw Tooth Cave (both released in 2014), Alpha and Omega: Family Vacation (2015), Alpha and Omega Dino Digs, Alpha and Omega: The Big Fureeze (both released in 2016), and Alpha and Omega: Journey to Bear Kingdom (2017). MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some intense perilĬast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Natassia Malthe, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Leonor VarelaĬredits:Directed by Albert Hughes, script by Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt . Then again, maybe that’s exactly what put him there. Smit-McPhee is no Leo and “Alpha” is no “Revenent.” But in an era where films have shied away from challenging, scaring or hitting kids with anything resembling harsh reality in critter features, “Alpha” is a lovely yet tough-minded reminder that the cuddly Spaniel or Pomeranian curled up at your feet didn’t get there by accident, or by being a pushover. When this was first announced, I was sure Sony would animate it, “Ice Age” style. But “Alpha” holds together well-enough and exceeds expectations. It’s kid-film cute some of the time, pretty rough and bloody going at others. He takes us exactly where we expect him to.īut he gets the boy and us to connect with the dog and has a little fun showing us boy-and-his-dog firsts - first whistle to call Alpha (what he’s named the dog), first accidental game of fetch. Hughes, who came up with the story the script was based on, has fashioned the simplest of quest narratives and rarely gets in the way of it. Still, there’s value in a father teaching his son, “Raise your head, your eyes will follow” and that wolfpacks are led by the Alpha dog, not an inherited title, “but one won through courage.”
#Alpha movie movie
The movie itself is chatty when in essence language was a newish thing and vocabularies were limited enough that using gestures and images to tell the story would have been a safer, smarter and more cinematic bet. The kid talks to the wolf - in a subtitled pre-Greek or Latin dialect - far too much for my taste. Hughes may give us windswept vistas and time-lapse scans of the night sky, but “Alpha” lives or dies on its extreme close-ups - hunters, camouflaged in mud, crawling up on the herd, a wolf softening its fear of fire and the humans who create it (with great difficulty). The production almost seamlessly marries CGI wolves to a real wolf for some scenes, mostly close-ups.
Showing empathy, he nurses himself back to health and tends to the wary wolf he knifed as he does. It’s one of those that almost gets him, and one of those that he almost kills defending himself. If only he can dodge the saber tooth tigers, hyenas and wolves. Mother ( Natassia Malthe) will have only his memory to cling to.īut Keda, left for dead, clings to that cliff, re-sets his busted ankle and using the tribal tattoo - a constellation inked on his hand - he might be able to find his way home.
That second test, fleeing the bison the hunting party are chasing off a cliff, gets him gored and flung down a cliff-face. He may pass spearhead making, but he flunks his first and second Big Tests on the joint tribal hunt, refusing to finish off a wounded wild boar that squeals in pain and looks him in the eye, terrified. Keda, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee of “The Road” and “Slow West,” is the son of the chief ( Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) of his tribe of hunter-gatherers, good with his hands (he fashions enviable flint spearpoints) but sensitive, a bit of a mama’s boy. And while it’s not on a par with that classic of pre-history, “Quest for Fire,” director Albert Hughes (“The Book of Eli”) gives us a beautifully barren prehistoric Europe of steppes, volcanoes, mesas and canyons, a forbidding land presented in magnificent 3D. But any movie with a teen and a dog in it is going to tug at the heart, even if the dog’s a wolf and the kid’s not much further along the civilized scale. It’s a movie with more blood and guts than Disney would have allowed. “Alpha” has to stand as one of the pleasant surprises of the cinematic summer, a gritty yet sentimental fantasy about that first Ice Age boy to fall for a dog.
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