“Alpha”– Movie Review

Recently, I attended an advanced screening of the new action-adventure, “Alpha”.

Synopsis

When an Ice Age hunting trip goes awry, a teenager gets separated from the group – but once he’s befriended by a stray wolf, can the two help save each other survive?

Story

Twenty thousand years ago, the planet Earth experienced what has come to be known as The Ice Age.  Somewhere on the European continent during that time, there was a small village whose inhabitants needed to go out to hunt for food for their family.  The leader of the tribe, Tau (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), chose his best weapon-makers to join him on this expedition – including his teenage son, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee).  There is some degree of trepidation around this choice not only due to the boy’s relative inexperience but also because Keda does not exactly have a reputation of being fierce.

During their journey, Keda suffers an accident and winds up being separated from the group; alone and injured, he must figure out a way to survive as he tries to find his way back to the village.  Since Keda’s hunting skills are underdeveloped, scrounging for food is a challenge and he has to settle for anything he can get. Keda also has to fend off various predatory beasts who wish to attack him either because they believe he’s a threat or because they want to use him as a food source.  One such experience is with a wolfpack; unable to fight them off, Keda climbs a tree to evade them.

Hours later when the pack has given up on their prey, Keda descends and upon returning to the ground finds one of the wolves has remained; discovering that it is badly injured and no longer a danger, he proceeds to nurse the animal back to health.  Over time, the two seem to develop something of a trust between each other and the natural animosity gradually dissipates. When the wolf has an opportunity to return to its pack, it instead stays with Keda and together, they overcome various life-threatening adventures as the wolf, who by now Keda has named Alpha, follows him back to the village.  But as a blizzard hits, will the two be able to survive long enough to return to civilization?

Review

Although “Alpha” is only an hour and a half in length, it feels much longer due to its slow pacing and the fact that it takes quite a while for the story to get started.  Additionally, Keda keeps facing one adversity after another so you just want to scream, “Enough already, we get it!”. At that point, it almost turns into a self-parody.  This also begs the question about what was the father doing – or perhaps more to the point, what was he not doing?  As far as we can tell from the film itself, the father never once tried to look for his boy, which makes scenes where he appears to get all emotional about the assumed loss of his son all the more suspect. 

The second act of any movie is typically its longest; structurally, this is handled by the screenwriter asking the question, “What are the other characters up to?”.  This is done to keep the main character from being forced to carry too much of the middle of the film, potentially causing the audience to zone out at best or get sick of him/her at worst.  What might’ve helped “Alpha” from feeling longer than its actual running time may have been including scenes of the villagers or what the hunters did after they were separated from the boy (as mentioned above, the father didn’t even seem to make any kind of an effort –it appears he quickly gave up and just went home). 

One minor point has to do with the dialog.  Since this takes place in Europe during the Ice Age, the characters appear to be speaking a long-extinct language – possibly Solutrean in its origin, which might make it a French/Spanish variation.  In any event, it will not be immediately recognizable to the audience – it’ll pretty much just sound like a bit of gibberish. This is why the dialog is translated to English in its subtitles. While this might not be considered a deal-breaker for the cineaste who’s seen many foreign films, it could turn out to be something of an impediment if the filmmakers are trying to reach a wider audience.   

IMDB

“Skyscraper”– Movie Review

This week, I attended an advanced screening of the new action thriller, “Skyscraper”, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Neve Campbell.

Synopsis

When a Chinese tower is ablaze, can the American security expert hired to assess its safety rescue his family trapped inside?

Story

When it finally opens in Hong Kong, The Pearl will be the world’s tallest building – and that’s where Will Sawyer (Dwayne Johnson) comes in.  Sawyer is a security expert who has been hired by the building’s billionaire real estate developer Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han) to ensure that the structure is totally secure.  For Sawyer, this is something of a forced career change; having worked previously as a member of a SWAT team, he was severely injured on one case – his left leg had to be amputated below the knee, requiring him to wear a prosthetic device.  A decade later, he’s now happily married to Sarah (Neve Campbell) and they have two children.

Having completed a preliminary inspection of the various security and safety systems installed in the building, Sawyer reports to Zhao that The Pearl is in pretty good shape –but the inspection is not yet complete.  Sawyer will have to visit the remote location which is the central headquarters that manages the building’s security and safety systems. Unknown to either Sawyer or Zhao, the software that controls the building has been hacked by a nefarious crime syndicate out to seek revenge on Zhao.  But in order to totally fully take control of the building, they steal the tablet Zhao gave Sawyer – a device which allows him to biometrically authenticate into the system as an administrator to inspect the system in detail.

Putting their plan into motion, the criminals set fire to one of the floors in The Pearl; after disabling the anti-fire system, the edifice will likely burn to the ground.  But there’s one thing that they didn’t take into consideration: Sarah and her children would still be in the construction at the time the fire starts. Trapped inside with no way out of the building, Sarah must protect her family from the fire while simultaneously dealing with the criminals who caused the blaze in the first place.  Can Sawyer somehow manage to rescue his family while also bringing the criminals to justice?

Review

The Rock on only one leg can still kick butt – and for that matter, so can his wife (who is also a combat surgeon who fluently speaks Chinese … but perhaps that’s giving away a bit too much).  That said, maybe the real star of the movie is duct tape -- yes, duct tape. One of the lines Johnson has goes, “If you can’t fix it with duct tape, then you’re just not using enough duct tape!”.  In fact, the studio, Universal, believes in it so much that at this particular screening, they used as a marketing tool a roll of duct tape – that is to say, they were giving away rolls for free as a way of promoting the film.  No joke – the word “Skyscraper” was emblazoned across the roll of duct tape. (If you’re not getting it now, you will when you see “Skyscraper”)

But enough about duct tape.  While the movie might be reminiscent of “Die Hard” where Johnson would be the Bruce Willis character, the script of “Skyscraper” is nowhere near clever enough to compare it to “Die Hard”; there are no jokes – in fact, one complaint about the film may be that it seems to be taking itself way too seriously.  It might’ve benefited from more humor as a wink to the audience. The script, of course, isn’t always clear or logical in its story or motivations – but then again, you don’t see a motion picture like this expecting nuance and symbolism or allusions to Italian post-war neo-realism. The greatest applause by the audience came in the explosions. 

If an old style action movie is what would make you happy to while away a summer day or night, then purchase a big tub of popcorn and barrel of soda and check your brain with the theater’s ticket-taker and run straight to the next screening of “Skyscraper”.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, even if you did take that last sentence to be derisive in its tone. But having said that, the experience may instead leave you yearning for something a bit better – in which case, you may want to go home and stream all of the “Die Hard” movies as a reminder of how it’s done properly. 

IMDB