Alpha

The story of a man's best friend

The tagline for the prehistoric adventure film “Alpha” — “Experience the incredible story of how mankind discovered man’s best friend” — is a bit of a spoiler.

Set 20,000 years ago in Europe, the story follows a young hunter named Keda as he fights to survive with the help of an unlikely ally: a gray wolf. But thanks to the spoiler, there’s never any doubt of our hero’s survival, or that of his lupine companion, despite an endless parade of near-death experiences that start out over-the-top but grow more tedious by the minute.

The plot is set in motion by the Great Hunt, an annual ritual in which the macho men of various hunter-gatherer bands team up to drive a herd of bison over a cliff. Keda (Kodi-Smit-McPhee) is the son of the chief (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), but his sensitive nature makes it unlikely he will inherit his father’s leadership savvy. Even less so after a rampaging bison tosses him over the precipice.

While it’s true that fossils record this kind of mass kill in prehistoric times, it stretches credulity to believe hunters could have traveled hundreds of miles to do the deed (it’s a journey of some months, apparently, through mountains, forests and barren volcanic landscapes). But that’s just the beginning. There’s the scene of Keda, left for dead and suffering from a broken ankle, setting the bone by twisting his leg between a pair of rocks, splinting it with a stick and then .walking up a mountain