Alpha 2018

     The setting of this film is the Earth of about 20,000 years ago during the last Ice Age.  Keda is going with his father Tau on his first hunt with his tribe’s most elite group of men.  His mother Rho is worried that he will hurt or killed but Tau assures her he will be fine.  During a steppe bison hunt, an injured chief animal tosses Keda over the edge of the cliff where the bison have fallen below.  Tau believes Keda is dead and there is no way to bring his body up from below.  Amazingly, Keda is not dead, he was unconscious and he has a broken ankle.  A sudden heavy rainfall causes the ravine below to flood.  Keda jumps into the water.  He uses two rocks pushed together to straighten his ankle and he makes a split.  He then climbs to the top of the cliff.  He befriends a dire wolf and they work together on Keda’s journey back to this tribe.

     I thought this was interesting and good.  I knew that our current dogs came from ancient wolves.  The earliest known dog-like fossils come from Europe.  DNA studies have shown that dogs were also in early East Asia and the Middle East.  A large DNA study from fossils suggests dogs originated in Europe 19,000 to 32,000 years ago.  Dogs share a common ancestor with an extinct wolf lineage.  The wolves came into contact with European hunter-gatherers and some became domesticated.  The genes of dogs and wolves diverged so recently that many of their genes have not had time to separate into distinct lineages.  3 ½* (I liked this movie) 

     

96 min, Adventure directed by Albert Hughes with Kodi Smit-McPhee, Johannes Haukur Johannesson, Marcin Kowalczyk, Jens Hulten, Natassia Malthe, Spencer Bogaert, Mercedes de la Zerda, Leonor Varela, Morgan Freeman.

Note:  Imdb 6.7 out of 10, Roger Ebert 3*, Rotten Tomatoes 80% critic 71% audience, The Guardian 4* out of 5* Wendy Ide, RollingSteon 3 ½* out of 5* David Fear, EmpireOnline 3* out of 5* Olly Richards, Metacritic 63 out of 100 with 26 critics 6.6 out of 10 with 98 user score, Amazon 4.2* out of 5* with 853 reviews.

Special Note:  Filmed near East Coulee and Dinosaur Provincial Park near Patricia Alberta, Canada.  Also, filmed in Iceland, Vancouver, British Columbia; Brooks, Alberta, Canada and Cougar Buttes, Lucerne Valley, California.  The wolves in the film are a mixture of real wolves, wolf-dog hybrids and CGI.  The hybrids are a breed of dog called a Czechoslovakian wolf-dog and the Alpha dog is named Chuck.  The dialogue spoken throughout the movie is a language invented for this film.  The word Ayah that Keda screams for his father means father in both Malaysian and Indonesian.