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- Released: September 13 2018
- Directed by: Albert Hughes
- Running time: 1 h 36 min
- Rating 3.5/5
Synopsis
After getting separated from his tribe during a hunt, a young prehistoric man and the wolf he befriended must make their way back home.
My Thoughts
The concept of this movie I obviously loved. Being the wolfaboo that I am, any movie with a wolf as a major character I will gladly watch. But how does the rest hold up?
The story is basic but executed decently. One thing I will say is that I honestly think the movie is too short. I sometimes complain about things being too long, but, honestly, I’d have loved to see more of this story the way it was handled.
The journey Keda and Alpha face is long, but their bond doesn’t feel all that genuine. You do get to see Keda slowly nursing his wolf back to health and befriending her, but I don’t feel a genuine strong connection between these two. They do obviously care for one another, but the bond doesn’t feel very “tangible” if you know what I mean. It just feels like they care for one another because of the plot.
There’s also this point where we see Alpha doubt where she belongs: her previous pack or the boy she befriended, but the conflict is glanced over really quickly. She goes with her pack for a bit, but soon after comes across Keda again and never once looks back at her pack. It’d have been interesting to see them explore her doubts on where she belongs a lot more. Seeing her in the end choose Keda after all that would’ve made their bond feel stronger, too.
I can of course also bring up how the wolf knowledge in this movie isn’t all too great as the whole “alpha-theory” is applied in the wrong way, but I do like that Keda named his wolf after his father’s lessons on wolves as a way to keep his family close.
For this movie they used wolfdogs to play the wolves, intermixed with CGI. In order to make the wolfdogs look more like real wolves, CGI was sometimes done over their faces to make them look more lupine. Sometimes this works, but sometimes it causes a kind of uncanny valley effect because you know you’re looking at something real that has been tampered with in order to look different. It’s not always all that noticeable, but in certain shots you can just really tell that Alpha’s face isn’t fully real. For the scenes where they used fully CGI animals (the bison, boar, other wolves and sabertooth), it generally looked fine, but there were also some instances where it looked rather fake. Don’t expect god-tier CGI effects, but it didn’t bother me too much outside of the slightly uncanny facial CGI on Alpha.
I did think that it was interesting that they used a conlang in this movie, sans the narration in English. The prehistoric peoples have a basic language, but there isn’t even that much dialogue in the entire movie.
The characters are really not all that interesting, Keda is very bland, but you do want to see him succeed, obviously. The other tribespeople are barely even in it, only at the beginning and the end, so don’t get too attached to any of them.
Overall a pretty good movie, just not as good as I’d hoped due to the bond between the main characters not feeling entirely genuine and Keda being an uninteresting character. The CGI will either bother you or it won’t, it generally didn’t for me sans some brief shots.
The story is basic but executed decently. One thing I will say is that I honestly think the movie is too short. I sometimes complain about things being too long, but, honestly, I’d have loved to see more of this story the way it was handled.
The journey Keda and Alpha face is long, but their bond doesn’t feel all that genuine. You do get to see Keda slowly nursing his wolf back to health and befriending her, but I don’t feel a genuine strong connection between these two. They do obviously care for one another, but the bond doesn’t feel very “tangible” if you know what I mean. It just feels like they care for one another because of the plot.
There’s also this point where we see Alpha doubt where she belongs: her previous pack or the boy she befriended, but the conflict is glanced over really quickly. She goes with her pack for a bit, but soon after comes across Keda again and never once looks back at her pack. It’d have been interesting to see them explore her doubts on where she belongs a lot more. Seeing her in the end choose Keda after all that would’ve made their bond feel stronger, too.
I can of course also bring up how the wolf knowledge in this movie isn’t all too great as the whole “alpha-theory” is applied in the wrong way, but I do like that Keda named his wolf after his father’s lessons on wolves as a way to keep his family close.
For this movie they used wolfdogs to play the wolves, intermixed with CGI. In order to make the wolfdogs look more like real wolves, CGI was sometimes done over their faces to make them look more lupine. Sometimes this works, but sometimes it causes a kind of uncanny valley effect because you know you’re looking at something real that has been tampered with in order to look different. It’s not always all that noticeable, but in certain shots you can just really tell that Alpha’s face isn’t fully real. For the scenes where they used fully CGI animals (the bison, boar, other wolves and sabertooth), it generally looked fine, but there were also some instances where it looked rather fake. Don’t expect god-tier CGI effects, but it didn’t bother me too much outside of the slightly uncanny facial CGI on Alpha.
I did think that it was interesting that they used a conlang in this movie, sans the narration in English. The prehistoric peoples have a basic language, but there isn’t even that much dialogue in the entire movie.
The characters are really not all that interesting, Keda is very bland, but you do want to see him succeed, obviously. The other tribespeople are barely even in it, only at the beginning and the end, so don’t get too attached to any of them.
Overall a pretty good movie, just not as good as I’d hoped due to the bond between the main characters not feeling entirely genuine and Keda being an uninteresting character. The CGI will either bother you or it won’t, it generally didn’t for me sans some brief shots.
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