In a dramatic and challenging atmosphere, this movie follows the Icy Age, where a young man argues with his group during his first journey of hunting, and incidents come to climax, when they left him alone and wounded, the thing that leads him to rely on himself in order to manage to survive, as he befriends a lonely wolf, with whom he completes his journey of returning back to home.
Alpha is splendidly photographed, nicely paced, and allows us to imagine what it must have been like to live short, brutal, vivid lives surrounded by natural predators.
...When you're starting from scratch, claw and bite, there's a lot of trust-building that has to happen. Not just between the animal and the human, but between film and the audience. For recreating the boy and his dog story... Alpha gets a cookie.
Evidently, facts aren't terribly important here (even the movie's title comes from a civilization that's still millennia away), but if you can get past that, there's a moderately gripping tale of survival and natural kinship to be had.
The story is straightforward, directional, a direct but difficult path from danger to safety, punctuated by life-threatening adventures. What could have made other storytellers stir-crazy seems to have unleashed something philosophical in Albert Hughes.
