Alpha is an odd movie, to say the least. It isn't terrible, nor is it great, and I'm kind of at a loss as to whether I liked it or disliked it. One of the worst sins of this film is its derivative nature and the transparency with which is uses its inspirations, namely The Revenant with a touch of Life of Pi and Dances with Wolves.

Alpha is incredibly similar to The Revenant in terms of its underlying themes, its setting, and its cinematography. The film is a historical one, set in a prehistorical era, around the last ice age. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Keda, a young man who is left for dead following a freak accident, and must find his way back home to his tribe through daunting conditions with the help of a wolf he befriends and names Alpha. Much like Leo, our hero has dreams of his family throughout the movie, and must resort to unsanitary eating and drinking habits in order to earn his Oscar come awards season. The initial conflict between Keda and Alpha is quite similar to Life of Pi, and their friendship takes a while to form as they come to work together to fight for survival. One of the big issues is that making this film so similar to these films highlights the elements of this film which don't work so well with the rest of it as I feel the others preceding it were much more carefully crafted than this one.

Though the film has several great moments, it's rather clunky for the most part. The pacing feels rather sluggish as it takes 25 minutes to kick into gear with a rather well-executed sequence in which our hero has to make his decent down a cliff with a broken foot and low stamina. This sequence, however, is rather short-lived, and I don't feel the film ever gets back to that point of intensity, which is a real missed opportunity as I feel it needed to stay that way in order to help it stand out against other man vs. nature type stories. What we get is a series of inconveniences that happen from time to time that don't abide by story structure and rather feel like a bit of a roller coaster ride rather than a story building up to something big.

The editing and cinematography felt a bit confusing at times, often coming across as silly to me rather than exciting. There is a scene where our hero gets trapped under ice, much like the Metallica song, and in one instance there's a rather beautiful shot of the wolf diving in the air down to the ice to free our hero, and the shot is in slow motion and I was actually surprised when the dive did nothing, immediately remembering the movie was going for a realistic vibe despite setting up for silly Hollywood stuff on a regular basis. There's a number of cheesy CGI effects that I feel the film would have been better to have done without, such as a dust effect that stood out like a sore thumb and just sucked the gravity out of the scene in question. There's also a moment in which our hero comes across a man's corpse, in which there's a shot of the wolf looking rather serious, but then as soon as the camera cuts, our canine friend looks rather happy. There are several of these Hollywood shots throughout the film which feel silly and unrealistic, and I swear at times they even CGI the wolves' faces to pull off such moments the way they want to rather than going for a subtle, feasible approach. There's also a number of effects that are either used too often, or used inappropriately, such as zoom-ins and time lapses that make otherwise interesting scenes come off as cartoony.

The film is tonally confusing at times. Most of the film is intense and gruesome, but there are odd moments of levity on occasion. There's a scene in particular early on where Keda tosses a stick at Alpha and screams at her to go away, in which she picks up the stick and brings it to Keda instead. There are many of these cutesy doggo moments that seem to trivialize the domestication process of wolves to dogs in history as it happens nearly instantaneously in this film. The ending is kind of cheesy as well, but it's oddly satisfying and I wasn't really expecting it, so I'll give the movie a plus for that.

The plot seems a bit repetitive in a number of ways. There are several scenes in which Alpha and/or Keda get injured followed by very similar scenes of them recovering, which I think should have been sped up after the first time they happened. Though an alternative might have proven coincidental or convoluted, I probably would have preferred it over the predictable nature of this film.

The acting was okay, though there was not a lot of it as it essentially did the live-action Jungle Book thing of having one human interacting with a bunch of animals with the goal of survival.

There are a couple of nitpicks I have. The alpha structure of a wolf pack seems to have been disproved as of recent, and there is a rather accentuated jumpscare early on that I felt would have been more effective given a realistic approach rather than tossing in the loud scare chord right as it happened. I thought I was going to Alpha, not Peek-a-Boo: The Movie, and I really wish all movies would stop tossing jumpscares in, especially dramas and action flicks, neither of which are genres that should ever have them in the first place.

If you're a wolfaboo, Alpha is a must-see movie. Otherwise, The Revenant is superior in most ways. I'd recommend this movie if it vaguely interests you, but otherwise I'd say you'd probably be best to go with your gut on this one. Alpha is going for a particular audience and I'm sure if you feel you're that audience you'll probably enjoy it. I felt it was a tad overlong, and didn't offer all too much of its own, but at the same time it wasn't stupid or frustrating to watch either. It's a mostly-competent and rather inoffensive film in the grand scheme of things.