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Focus> Offbeat HK> Content
Friday, September 28, 2018, 12:27
Running with a wolf in 20,000 BC
By Elizabeth Kerr
Friday, September 28, 2018, 12:27 By Elizabeth Kerr

Alpha, directed by Albert Hughes, written by Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt. Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee. US, 96 minutes, IIA. In cinemas now. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

In the spirit of the family-friendly Mid-Autumn holiday, Alpha steps up as the latest entry in the long, storied history of the animal friendship canon. With Steven Spielberg busy, who better than Albert Hughes to steer a film about the domestication of wolves into theaters? Hughes is best known for Menace II Society, about a kid trying to break the cycle of inner city violence; Dead Presidents, pivoting on a Vietnam veteran pulled into a life of brutal crime, and of course the gory revisionist spin on the Jack the Ripper legend, From Hell. He’s perfect for a family adventure.

But it is precisely Hughes’ penchant for the dark side of humanity that makes the potentially cornball Alpha work as well as it does. Unfolding 20,000 years ago somewhere in Europe and spoken in an imagined version of Cro-Magnon, the story starts when Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee, X-Men: Apocalypse’s Nightcrawler), the first born, sensitive son of tribal chief Tau (Icelandic actor Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Atomic Blonde), carves his very first spearhead in preparation for hunting his very first Great Beast (a buffalo of sorts), whose meat, fur, fat and bones will sustain the tribes through the harsh winter. During the hunt, Keda is presumed killed, left for dead, and then forced to make his way back to his village alone. On the way, he gets chased up a tree by a wolf pack, and injures one while defending himself. Like Keda, the wolf is left for dead. Unable to finish off the suffering animal, Keda fixes him up and the two become a team. 

If your first thought was “Oh no! Another 10,000 BC,” rest assured: Alpha never comes close to that level of cheesy. Hughes and first-time writer Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt’s script is heavy on imagery, taking advantage of its locations (northern Canada and the arid California interior) to set the tone. Smit-McPhee — whose costar is a Czechoslovakian wolfdog for the majority of the runtime — balances terror, insecurity and determination in just the right measures to keep Keda from ever straying into whiny.

When Keda tosses a stick that Alpha trots off to retrieve, it stretches the premise that Alpha is a facile take on thousands of years of evolution, breeding and human meddling to its breaking point. It is, but it’s also a genuinely thrilling adventure that Hughes manages to keep at least marginally unpredictable. His fearlessness with regards to the brutality of prehistoric life — and willingness to kill other animals as a matter of course — and a few oh-so modern twists give the film an effortless tension that serves it well narratively, but may be a bit much for very young children. The icing on the cake is gorgeous cinematography (with help from CGI) by Martin Gschlacht. And,  to be honest, you would have to have a heart of absolute stone not to be won over by that wolf.


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