He’s the source of all of the humor and empathy, and he doesn’t even have to speak the artificial language that they made for the film. Still, I really can’t stress to you how well Chuck the wolf-dog, with the help of his handlers, performs here, and if there’s any true character to be found about the film, well, he’s got all of it. Yes, it’s Old Yeller meets Hell in the Pacific, and I wish the movie were half as good as that logline suggests it would be. The pair eases into a swell symbiotic relationship, even if there’s a lack of trust on the human’s part, and the wolf discovers he’s finally got an easy meal ticket and somebody to snuggle with when it’s cold outside. Keda gives the wolf water - anxiously, hoping he won’t get bitten - and tends to the canine’s wounds (though his snout is tied shut) in a loving manner. Smit-McPhee spends much of the first half either at the receiving end of a speech from his chieftain father or pretending to be scared while various grips shove tennis balls in his face before he meets the wolf, and his performance really begins to open up once the two are hiding out in a cave, wounded. These scenes between Keda and the wolf, whom he names Alpha (duh), are the film’s best because they’re full of some sort of life. Well, that is until he’s attacked by a pack of wolves and, before he climbs into a tree to wait out the assault, manages to wound one of the canines. His tribe leaves him for dead, as there’s no way to get to where he fell, and Keda eventually is forced to try and make his way back to them alone. An accident happens thanks to Keda’s reluctance to kill one of the damn things (a modern plot contrivance, given the lack of connection between a wild animal and a caveman at that point), and the young man is thrown off the side of the cliff. A young tribesman named Keda ( The Road‘s Kodi Smit-McPhee) is brought on the annual bison hunt by his father (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), where the assembled warriors of two tribes somehow manage to convince an entire herd of these animals to fall off of a cliff and scavenge their corpses from there. This is about as lifeless as you can get while maintaining a general mediocrity about an entire film, and it is about as disappointing as you might imagine.Īlpha’s got a germ of a great idea in it, in that explores the bond between dog (or, rather, wolf) and man at its earliest moment: 20,000 years ago in the mountains and rolling plains of Europe. It had a troubled production, cost $80 million, and PETA’s currently boycotting it, so you know, they’re not expecting to set the world on fire with this one, and it seems that Hughes followed suit. The latest clue comes via the solo debut of Albert, the prehistoric survival drama Alpha, which was originally supposed to be released in December of last year but got pushed to Hot January because of fears about its quality. See KFTV's production guide for more on filming in Alberta.Over the years, the evidence continues to mount that Alan Moore placed a curse on the Hughes Brothers - Allen and Albert - after they adapted his seminal comic From Hell into an unrecognizable Johnny Depp vehicle back in 2001. Alongside the appeal of the city, wilderness visuals can be found relatively close by in British Columbia, such as Mount Garibaldi and Manning Park that both appeared in the first series of the Netflix drama Lost in Space, standing in for an alien planet. Vancouver remains one of Canada’s top production hubs. Production on Alpha was in fact evenly split between wilderness location work and matching set designs on stages and back lots in Vancouver. Game of Thrones visited Alberta for the first time last year and the region has also hosted three seasons of the similarly-acclaimed TV drama Fargo.Īlejandro G Iñárritu’s period survival movie The Revenant, more closely related to Alpha in story terms and which Mounsey also worked on, used Alberta’s wilderness visuals as well. The province also now offers three sound stages at the Calgary Film Centre. At the end of last year authorities channelled more money into the film fund for the province’s Screen-Based Production Grant, enabling the region to host productions with bigger budgets. “I started scouting at least six months ahead of filming with the production designer, with an effort to use a variety of extraordinary locations that eventually got compressed to just a few areas,” says Robin Mounsey, supervising location manager on Alpha, in comments to KFTV.Īlberta is developing its profile as a Canadian production centre. Much of the film’s wilderness location work was shot near the Alberta city of Brooks, 100 miles south-east of Calgary, while the nearby city of Drumheller offered a different set of visuals.
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