The best of 2018: Alpha
A review by Brooks Rich
2018 was the year of really bad trailers. Several films were sold to be something they weren’t. The most egregious example was Albert Hughes’s caveman survival film Alpha. The first trailer was ok and came across as a fun caveman adventure movie where a young caveman is separated from his tribe and must make his way home. Along the way he befriends a wolf, trains it, and voila, the first relationship between man and dog. Sure fine. The second trailer focused more on this and advertised the film as a borderline family film. So what kind of film did we get?
We got a slow almost meditative survival film with a caveman. Young Keda, our protagonist, is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, a young actor who has been around, one of those late teens, early twenties character actors who deserves a bigger career than he has right now. He does the heavy lifting of acting and he answers the call admirably. No one is winning any awards here but Smit-McPhee should be in the conversation for most underrated performances of 2018. Alpha doesn’t work without him. He makes you buy the relationship between Keda and the wolf, something that could have completely failed in less capable acting and directing hands.
Speaking of directing hands Albert Hughes is both an asset and hindrance to this film. Alpha loses points for a baffling decision that in fairness to Hughes also has studio decision written all over it. The opening scene is well done, action packed, ok ignore the bad CGI, and a fantastic action scene. Action scene, title card, boom. Let’s do this. Nope. We now have to flashback and meet these characters. I am really getting sick of out of order storytelling. This is one is not as baffling as Dunkirk, no need to tell that film out of order, but its so unnecessary and feels either like a studio suit or some moron at a test screening saying they want an action scene to open the film. A slow build opening where we meet our characters? God forbid.
That and the CGI not being great is Alpha’s biggest weaknesses. But looking beyond we find a very tense story of survival and unlikely friendship. The dog stuff works as does the survival element. This film should be bigger but a year long delayed release and a marketing campaign completely unsure of itself seemed to doom it to box office bomb status. But word of mouth helped Alpha become a modest hit. There’s bigger films to catch up on from 2018 for sure but if you skipped Alpha, give it a shot.
4/5
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