{"id":1235,"date":"2018-09-11T10:06:28","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T16:06:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=1235"},"modified":"2018-09-09T10:22:11","modified_gmt":"2018-09-09T16:22:11","slug":"movie-alpha-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2018\/09\/11\/movie-alpha-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"MOVIE: Alpha (2018)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><u><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/thumb\/7\/72\/Alpha_%28film%29.jpg\/220px-Alpha_%28film%29.jpg\" alt=\"Alpha\" width=\"220\" height=\"326\" \/>Alpha<br \/>\n<\/u><\/strong>Year: 2018<br \/>\nRating: PG-13<br \/>\nLength: 96 minutes \/ 1.60 hours<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not sure what surprises me more about this movie: that nobody had made a film about the domestication of the wolf or that anyone needed to make that film at all. Consequently,\u00a0<em>Alpha<\/em>\u00a0(2018) seems a little unnecessary and highly predictable as the \u201chero\u2019s journey\u201d plays out. The trailer doesn\u2019t leave much for the imagination, as a lot of the events in this film don\u2019t have any significant twists that the astute viewer wouldn\u2019t see coming. And maybe I\u2019m biased because I\u2019d be more of a cat person than a dog person\u2014despite being allergic to both.<\/p>\n<p>Visually, though,\u00a0<em>Alpha<\/em>\u00a0does provide some fantastic shots of wilderness that one can only find in places like Canada and Iceland. Plenty of the flat silhouette shots of characters traversing huge distances and the stylized slow-motion events made this movie feel a bit like\u00a0<em>300<\/em>\u00a0(2006), which isn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing. The real trouble is that it takes these characters so long to traverse these distances that there isn\u2019t much excitement in the first half of the film (aside from the inciting incident). If the beautiful scenery can keep your attention, you\u2019ll be fine, though.<\/p>\n<p>A few of my more significant qualms come with the plot of the film, though. Many of the characters\u2019 decisions seem to be merely present to drive the desired plot along, even if they don\u2019t make much sense. Like, I get why these early humans would go out to hunt a huge herd of animals at once, but how are they preserving that much meat? How are they hauling tons of meat four days back to their settlement (I\u2019ve played enough \u201cOregon Trail\u201d to know there\u2019s a weight limit)? Why isn\u2019t the settlement near this hunting ground? Lots of these plot choices led to the main character\u2019s eventual survival story, but they don\u2019t work if the survival was never needed in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>A scenically beautiful film with a predictable (if not nonsensical) plot, I give\u00a0<em>Alpha<\/em>\u00a03.0 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n<h2><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alpha Year: 2018 Rating: PG-13 Length: 96 minutes \/ 1.60 hours I\u2019m not sure what surprises me more about this movie: that nobody had made a film about the domestication of the wolf or that anyone needed to make that film at all. Consequently,\u00a0Alpha\u00a0(2018) seems a little unnecessary and highly predictable as the \u201chero\u2019s journey\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,2],"tags":[1020,1457,1461,1458,1459,1462,13,1463,8,1460],"class_list":["post-1235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3-0-stars","category-movie","tag-1020","tag-alpha","tag-ancient","tag-dog","tag-domestication","tag-hero-journey","tag-movie","tag-nonsensical-plot","tag-review","tag-wolf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1236,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions\/1236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}