Alpha

Would you like to be pleasantly surprised by poor production values? Watch Alpha.

One of the DVD extras for Quest for Fire described an unforseen difficulty encountered when they tried to film scenes involving mammoths. They used circus elephants as handy stand-ins, garbed in shag rugs and whatnot so as to lend them an air of mastodonity. (And by the way, wouldn't you love to be the one to hand the make-up crew THAT assignment.) Unfortunately for them, elephants turned out to be just visually oriented enough to panic upon seeing each other in Halloween attire. Cue the Yackety Sax.

Luckily for anyone filming a stone-age adventure these days, you can avoid such shenanigans by computer-generating your Pleistocene megafauna. Unluckily, doing it well still requires more moolah than Alpha's crew was willing or able to fork out. Most of their cable documentary reenactment-grade beasties would make poor doomed Varok and his mammoth look lifelike by comparison. Even on the live action end of things, most of the extras could've used a couple more days of rehearsal. And if those flaws might be overlooked, the Flintstones costumes were just unforgivably discrepant. Though supposedly made for the movie itself they still look like faux-leather biker jackets bought at Sears. On clearance. It takes a lot of cut corners and laziness to make me complain about costumes, of all things, but nothing about modern production techniques can make for an authentic-looking stone-age overcoat. The exterior is too glossy, the stitching too rectilinear, the hems too even, the lining too clean. Alpha's immersion could've been aided greatly had the costume department simply taken the time to toboggan down some rocky slopes atop their new creations before declaring them caveman fresh. All the more perplexing that this was marketed as, among other things, an IMAX feature.

And yet... Alpha is a good film. The showstopping climactic scene on the ice paradoxically benefited from the cheap CGI's more stylized look. The core cast of around three or four (wolfdog included) acted their hearts out, more than compensating for the more befuddled bit players. The costumes... were still crap, but at least hair ornaments and other jewelry looked authentic.

Most importantly, it's a good story. "A boy an his dog" being nearly as trite a setup as "boy meets girl" makes it hard to believe anything worthwhile might come of it. Yet the prehistoric setting puts it in a new, much less sappy light. For the same reason, the coming of age motif seems entirely more apt to a paleolithic tribe which could be more logically expected to abide by such primitive ritualism. Being written, directed and produced largely by the same author, the entire flick holds together remarkably well from start to finish, with almost no unnecessary digressions, none of the usual gratuitous sex scenes or cackling villain monologues or contractually mandated close-ups. Though it takes some liberties with its factual inspiration, it's nonetheless surprisingly engaging.