jens-hultn – Memphis Flyer

Ever since I saw Werner Hertzog’s 2010 documentary Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, I have been interested in—possibly obsessed with—deep prehistory.

Homo habilis, the first known tool-making hominid, first appeared in the fossil record about 2 million years ago. Homo errectus learned to use fire about 1 million years ago, but it would be another 300,000 years before our ancestors learned to make it for themselves, and another 300,000 years before they started building hearths to cook on.

Homo sapiens—us—are only about 200,000 years old, and for 150,000 of those years, we had no art beyond decorative beads and jewelry made from seashells. Then, about 40,000 years ago, something happened—complex, figurative art appears. The paintings in the Chauvet caves which Hertzog captured in his documentary represent a complete change in how humanity interacted with the world, and how we understood ourselves.

Alpha is an ambitious film about another such moment when humanity changed: the domestication of dogs. The 3D film is set in postglacial Europe 20,000 years ago. Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a young man coming of age in a hunter gatherer tribe. He sets out from the village on his first hunt with a band led by his father Xi (Jens Hultén). Their mission is walk a torturous path laid down by ancestors as far back in their past as they are in ours. At the end, they will intercept a herd of migrating bison and, if they’re lucky, bring back enough food for the tribe to make it through the winter.

But it turns out Keda kinda sucks at being a caveman. It’s hard to be a good hunter when you’re too kindhearted to kill. Plus, he’s really bad in the fire-making department. When they finally find the elusive bison, he’s separated from the hunting band in the resulting melee and left for dead.

Jens Hultén and Kodi Smit-McPhee prepare to hunt the bison

Through a combination of luck and pluck, Keda survives, alone in the harsh world. When he’s attacked by a pack of wolves, he drives them away, and they leave behind a wounded wolf. Instead of slaughtering it for food, he takes it back to the cave where he’s found shelter, and together they nurse each other back to (relative) health. Then the unlikely and still untrusting pair try to make their way back across the steppe to Keda’s village.

The film is the first solo effort from Albert Hughes, a director who has formerly shared a credit with his brother Allen for films like Menace II Society and From Hell. It is very nearly derailed right at the opening, when the story starts with the buffalo hunt before flashing back a week to what were surely the original opening scenes in the village. I’m sure this was the result of someone thinking this pastoral picture needed to start with a bang, but it was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Instead, they should have trusted the intelligence of their audiences and the power of the performance from Smit-McPhee. Long stretches of Alpha are wordless, and the rest is in a language that is supposed to be something like Proto-Indo-European, with English subtitles. That’s a hard row to hoe for an actor (ask anyone who has ever tried to play a Klingon on Star Trek how easy it is act in a made-up tongue), but amazingly, the young lead pulls it off, becoming more endearing with each near death experience.

Chuck, the titular star of Alpha

But the Paleolithic proceedings really take off when Chuck the wolfhound arrives. This is a Lassie-level performance from a canine star who can summon easy laughs with a hangdog look. Smit-McPhee and Chuck have easy chemistry, and Hughes knows how to throw just enough challenge at them to keep it interesting. You really believe that every day life for these early people is like The Revenant, only with more psychedelics and shamanism.

Alpha has moments when it descends into cheese, and somehow, the parade of prehistoric 3D spectacle never looks quite as good as the Dawn Of Man sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s also the nagging question of why Keda would name his proto-dog Alpha when the Greek alphabet wouldn’t be invented for another 17,000 years. But Alpha ultimately won me over with its pluck. It’s not a perfect movie, but its heart is in the right place, and that’s what counts.

Alpha

It’s been 19 years since Tom Cruise first portrayed Ethan Hunt in an adaptation of the hit spy show Mission: Impossible. That’s longer than the show had been off the air when the Brian De Palma-helmed reboot hit theaters with the now-iconic image of Cruise hanging over a computer terminal, suspended by impossibly thin wires. Since someone born on the first film’s premiere date would be college-aged by now, it’s likely that there are many people in the audience who don’t know the self-destructing message sending spies off on an elaborate and dangerous mission is a callback to the show’s weekly cold opening. But it’s the formula Desilu Productions developed for TV that has allowed the Mission: Impossible franchise to outlive the Cold War. A highly trained team of agents working for a shadowy, quasi-governmental agency undertaking missions so sensitive and difficult that their government will “disavow” all knowledge of their existence if they fail works just as well in the age of terrorism as it did in the days of KGB vs. CIA spy-jinks.

The latest installment, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, is nothing if not formulaic, but the movie is self-aware enough to preemptively ask if it’s still relevant. We first meet returning player William Brandt (Avengers‘ Jeremy Renner) defending the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) before a congressional committee as CIA director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) successfully argues that they are redundant and dangerously out of control. Hunley puts the IMFers, including computer wizard Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), on desk duty, but their first assignment is tracking Hunt, who has once again gone rogue. Hunt thinks he’s on the trail of yet another shadowy, elite force of spies called the Syndicate, but almost no one else believes they exist. Hunley accuses him of making up threats to justify the IMF’s funding with one of the film’s best lines: “Hunt is both arsonist and fireman.”

But since Tom Cruise is both star and producer, we know that the Syndicate is real, and it includes stock characters like the strangely cold, vaguely European mastermind Soloman Lane (Sean Harris), a Russian sadist named the Bone Doctor (Jens Hultén), and British double (or possibly triple) agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). Hunt gets the old team out from behind their desks — and in the case of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), out of retirement — to stop the Syndicate from — well, doing something that’s probably real bad. Details like the bad guy’s motivations and the exact nature of the MacGuffin (It’s a list of agents! No wait, it’s a list of bank accounts! No wait, we’ve got to rescue Benji!) are not Mission: Impossible‘s strong suit.

What Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are all about is crafting high-quality action, and judged by that metric, they succeed. The “gain access to an impossibly secure computer system” sequence is set underwater this time, to spectacular results. But the best part of the film is the second-act set piece in a Vienna opera house that references Hitchcock’s climax to The Man Who Knew Too Much.

While the Daniel Craig/Sam Mendes team has taken James Bond into more serious character territory, Cruise and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company have taken the opposite approach. Rogue Nation plays like a fond memory of Roger Moore-era Bond films such as Live and Let Die, only without the misogyny — or sexiness, for that matter. Even though Ferguson, a British actress making her first foray into the action genre, is captivating onscreen, she and Cruise share only a single extended hug.

Like Adam Sandler, Cruise’s wealth and status remove the usual motivations for doing a movie: He doesn’t need the money, so why bother? In Sandler’s case, the leaked Sony Pictures emails allege his films are little more than ways to get his friends and family free vacations. Cruise, on the other hand, appears to be motivated by the desire to perform increasingly over-the-top stunts. Rogue Nation‘s big moment comes right off the bat, when Hunt, trying to recover a biological weapons cache, clings to the side of an Airbus military transport as it takes off and flies away. At least that’s more fun for the viewer than watching Sandler yuk it up on a waterslide.