Becoming best friends

While it’s a visually stunning movie that’s sure to please plenty of dog lovers, you can’t help feeling like Alpha missed an opportunity to be great. What’s there is good enough to provide an afternoon of family fun—and that alone is something to celebrate given it’s one of the few non-animated movies appropriate for most ages—but it could have been so much more.

Think of the storyline as a reverse Call of the Wild, providing an origin myth for the puppy love humanity has enjoyed for millennia. Young Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is about to embark on his first hunt with his Ice Age tribe. Like any boy, he’s anxious to prove himself, all the more so because his father, Tau, is the chief.

As they progress on their journey, Tau (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) teaches Keda the basics of survival. Seeing elements other historical dramas use to up their edgy pagan cred explained as mere expediency will give older viewers a chuckle. Are tribal tattoos just supposed to look cool and druid-y? Nope, they’re maps of constellations you can use to find your way home. And the fearsome black paint smeared over faces and chests? That’s bison dung. Because smelling like bison makes it easier to hunt them.

Not that there isn’t a minor pagan element—this is pre-Christian Europe, and it would be strange if there weren’t some reference to native beliefs. But they’re presented in the most restrained way possible, like vague references to being “guided by ancestors.” The more forceful theme, as Tau voices it, is that “life is for the strong” and you have to “earn” your right to it. It’s clear that Tau loves his son and is trying to prepare him for hard realities, so the theme offers an interesting discussion point with children on why this is the world’s logic without God. And Keda’s later experience presents a subtle contradiction to it.

When the bison hunt goes awry in a jaw-dropping scene, it isn’t being strong that saves Keda. It’s being merciful to an injured wolf that would have happily made him its lunch.

With zero foul language and no romance save that time-honored affection between a boy and his dog, the only thing that makes PG-13 Alpha unsuitable for the youngest viewers is the realistic peril a variety of ferocious animals pose. That, and the fact that the under-6 crowd might struggle with the subtitled fictional language.

Unfortunately Alpha’s failure to fully buy into the mind frame of its setting eventually undermines it. Keda occasionally feels too naïve to be credible. His struggle to kill animals at the outset is intended to explain his reaction to the wolf he names Alpha, but it mostly just comes off as implausible. How could any child raised in a hunter culture where killing would be constant be squeamish about stabbing a boar? By the same token, Keda shifts a little too easily in trying to turn what up to that point in human history has been a bloodthirsty predator into a pet, seeming no more afraid of it than a child today might be of a boisterous Yorkie.

He doesn’t even consider in the worst of his starvation whether to eat the dog. Again, for many a modern Western mind it would be unthinkable, but we’re supposed to be seeing Cro-Magnon wheels turning. How much more moving would it have been to see Keda planning to do what should have come naturally to him—that is, killing and eating an animal to stay alive—until something in the encounter convinces him not to?

But I don’t want to be too hard on Alpha. Along with showing a loving father-son relationship and a strong traditional family model, it offers some truly spectacular scenery that refreshingly doesn’t shield kids from the harsher elements of nature. And if those moments where dogs first learn to fetch or come when called seem a little too cute for reality, try tapping into your inner 10-year-old. He or she will buy every second of it.