Let me first say that I love early human history and this was the main reason why I watched this movie (and continued to watch it after being dissapointed). Ok, I'm not that much into canines, I'm more of a feline fan, but I like animals and the human-animal friendship is always a good story for me. Therefore, this movie scored high in my view ... but only from the above angles.

As for the rest, it was very dissapointing - and the main reason was the missing factual accuracy and historical credibility. Although the movie made some efforts - that I do appreciate - to simulate historical accuracy (e.g. realistic scenery, good cinematography, not too much talking, accurate stone tools and appropriate - although way too uniform - costumes), Alpha was for the rest higly inaccurate and not at all believable (I don't think the things in the list below are actual spoilers, as they don't specifically reveal the plot, but if you're really paranoid, you can skip some):



In my view, sure, the human-animal friendship story was nice and such, but this movie would have worked much better by letting the teenager become a man by himself out of the need to survive alone. This would have avoided most of the minuses above, if tweaked a little, and would have generated a similar, if not bigger impact on the viewers. Or, the other (and harder) option: hire someone with a clue about how life was likely to be 20000 years ago, not only visually, but socially as well. I'll give it a 6 just because I like these early human history movies, and the human-animal friendship is always a nice touch. I would love to see more movies like this, but better made.