Alpha

This Albert Hughes-directed adventure is visually stunning.

The best feature of Alpha is its imagery, which is absolutely stunning in IMAX. Hughes, his cinematographer Martin Gschlacht and the visual effects team create a world that is as beautiful as it is dangerous, often framing the characters in the center of a vast, almost endless landscape.

Mr. Hughes, who for many years cocreated films with his twin brother, Allen, and here makes his solo feature debut, is a sharp and engaged visual storyteller. It’s a pleasure to see him working in expansive wide-screen, a fitting format for his chops.

The movie...is a visual feast, one of the rare 3D films which was clearly designed with that extra dimension in mind.

Alpha has to stand as one of the pleasant surprises of the cinematic summer, a gritty yet sentimental fantasy about that first Ice Age boy to fall for a dog.

It's sweet, really, to imagine the kind of devotion Alpha might inspire, a film that's very simple, kind of strange, but will melt any dog-lover's heart.

It reduces the domestication of wolves to a series of simplistic interactions that don’t exactly convey the difficulties of a wild animal overcoming millennia of instinct.

A beautiful story where the protagonist isn't an alpha male. This is a beautiful, heartwarming story, filled with suspense. I kept wondering what's going to happen next and I loved how the hero is trying to survive WITHOUT being an "alpha male". It also shows that an alpha male isn't really the greatest of species like everyone makes them out to be.

The film works well as an exploration what humankind might have been like near the end of the Ice Age, albeit a family-friendly version. There's also lots of dog love and survival scenarios.

"Alpha" was a movie I avoided almost entirely in an effort to escape the bad taste that Roland Emmerich's "10,000 B.C." left in my mouth all the way back in 2008. Preconceived notions about the relative period aside, this really did work for the most part. It's a generally effective survival narrative that's a bit slow on the draw, focusing too much on the father-son relationship early on and nowhere near enough (you can never have enough) upon the man-dog/wolf connection that the marketing went so hard in the paint with. Once we're thrust into that portion of the narrative, though, it's decent entertainment. I also really appreciated the commitment to having this entire movie spoken in a pre-historic language. This really helped bolster a sense of historical authenticity that the visuals seemed to waver in and out of.

The dog was cute, the rest of the movie felt like what you would get if Joe Rogan wrote the story about how man domesticated dogs.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]