Film Review: Alpha
“Alpha,” a spectacular prehistoric eye-candy survival yarn, is enthralling in a square and slightly stolid way. It’s the tale of a young hunter stranded in the wilderness, who proves his manhood and becomes best friends with a wolf, and it’s like a Disney adventure fueled by a higher octane of visual dazzle, with a gnarly texture wrought from elements like blood, excrement, and maggots (the latter of which, at one point, become dinner). The director, Albert Hughes, made his name along with his brother Allen co-directing such landmark films as “Menace II Society” (1993) and the supremely underrated Jack the Ripper thriller “From Hell” (2001), and on his own he proves to be a seductive if highly traditional craftsman who knows how to sculpt a drama of the primal human spirit out of sweeping images: a herd of mastodons, a billowing volcano, a racing warthog, sun and wind and ice and plunging cliffs. Hughes is artful enough not to hold any of these shots for t...
