Alpha

Twenty thousand years ago, a teenage member of a hunter-gatherer tribe (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is grievously injured and left for dead. He not only survives but forms an uneasy alliance with a wolf (also wounded); in time, human and canine bond in the archetypal boy-and-his-dog story. Give director Albert Hughes (who co-wrote with Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt) an A for ambition, but a C for cornball achievement. As a piece of prehistory, the movie is maybe a cut above One Million Years B.C., but with cheesier visual effects. Smit-McPhee and his co-star get upstaged by the Canadian and Icelandic scenery. The superfluous Native American dialogue comes with equally superfluous English subtitles—but at least the subtitles may keep the smart alecks in the audience from supplying their own sarcastic translations.