I was gonna start a thread on this when I realized one might already exist. I remember watching the trailer several months back and I had the impression that the film came out in early 2018, but apparently the it's been pushed back to an August release for later this year. (So now that's three movies with a prehistoric slant coming out this summer. Yay, another one to [begrudgingly] look forward to and answer for at the museum!)
Overall, this does look like it has the best premise and story out of the three and I can respect it for trying to take itself seriously in that regard. It looks like a very beautifully shot movie; the only thing I don't like about it from a cinematography angle is the extremely dull brown early on that you see in every Ice Age film and the ridiculous hunting tactics that filmmakers love employing with Paleolithic people whenever they attack large game. I mean, yes, Paleolithic people likely used similar hunting tactics to some Native American Plains tribes by running large prey over cliffs, but whenever they do this in a theatrical version (like here, which is the worst offender I've seen of this trope) it's always over this ridiculously large cliff that there's no real way to traverse down in order to get the meat, let alone carrying it
all the way back up said cliff and back to the village or camp. It's just hella impractical, and I don't know why they do that in these films when playing by more realistic rules provides just as much spectacle with the added layer of tangible practicality. Like, a better version of this scene from 2001's
Walking with Beasts would've been so much more better without the ridiculous leaps in logic that the
Alpha scene has:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFcaS97RbPY
(Side note, I used to watch all of the
Walking with... series and other old CGI documentaries as a young kid, and this was really the only scene throughout all of those that I actually had a hard time getting through every time it came around, so I guess that's part of why I'm so disappointed now whenever movies have a scene like this and just botch it with over-the-top elements.)
Now obviously this is still a trailer, but I do have some real problems with the scientific accuracy of this film. I know I've been heavy on criticizing
The Meg and
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom for their portrayals of the subjects and faulty science, but I do do it somewhat in good faith. Like, part of the fun for me is seeing how bad the portrayals are, so I can at least laugh at it or hate-watch it because of their ridiculousness and it just adds to my viewing experience whenever I decide to look at a clip.
Alpha however, I cannot be so light on. This isn't B-movie schlock, it's supposed to be a serious, gritty, real film with a good "true" story that I think does have a promising premise, so it sucks that I have to call it out on the b.s. I'm seeing in this trailer. Aside from the aforementioned stupid bison hunt scene, there just a few other things. It's not an exhaustive list, but they are glaring problems that I don't understand why it's so hard for studios to get over when they make these types of films, especially with all the readily available research that's been done in the last decade or so alone. From minor to major points:
- Firstly, there appear to be hyenas in this film, which is fine for the geographical setting and time period. There were indeed hyenas in Ice Age Europe, but they were a cave dwelling subspecies of spotted hyenas that likely weren't especially active during the harshest parts of the year, so why they're out chasing a human in the middle of a snowstorm is a bit suspect. The designs are also very mangy and lanky even though real hyenas are already stocky animals and cold-adapted species are typically even stockier and have thicker pelts to retain heat. This just looks more like an attempt to make them monstrous rather than having some contextual explanation, so I'm not a fan of that. Additionally, they're making the typical snarling canine sounds (and howling) that hyenas always have in popular media even though hyenas aren't dogs and don't make any of those sounds. (The real sounds hyenas make are much more unnerving, so I don't understand why they always get stuck making dog sounds for scary effect in film and TV.)
- Secondly, the saber-toothed cat is all wrong. So much about it is wrong, and i don't understand why because they're such an easy thing to research if you want a proper look. The only thing they haven't done as far as I can tell is oversize it, at least not egregiously. However, the proportions look wrong; if this is supposed to be a Smilodon or some closely related animal, then it shouldn't look like a lion with big canines. These cats were much shorter-bodied with a profile more akin to a bear or hyena than modern big cat. Slightly sloped back with long, powerfully developed forelimbs and short hindlimbs, complete with a stubby tail. (Why these saber-toothed cats always have long tails in films is beyond me. The way it drags the man away is also fairly unbelievable to me; it doesn't match the killing style we know saber-toothed cats employed.) On top of all this, there were no saber-toothed cats living in Europe 20,000 years ago; the only remaining species lived in the Americas at this point in time. There were cave lions in the region at the time that could've filled the big feline predator role, and those were actually slightly larger than the biggest lions we have today.
- My biggest problem is the people themselves. They're too white when they really shouldn't be white at all. There have been a lot of genetic studies in the last decade or so and what we've come to discover is that the dark-skinned African phenotype was a fairly long-lasting morphology even tens of thousands of years after the "out of Africa" migration. In Europe in particular, various features that we associate with modern ethnic Europeans (light skin, blue eyes, straighter, light-colored hair) didn't really become notably widespread features in the overall population until roughly 12,000 years ago, and the combination of features didn't really become a single "package" until about 8,000-6,000 years ago. (We even have genetic evidence from "Cheddar Man" from ~10,000 years ago in Great Britain who had dark-skin, curly dark-colored hair and blue eyes, so we can see what the typical European person looked like at that point.) So in this 20,000 years ago setting, all of these humans should be portrayed by black actors, not a bunch of white, vaguely Native American-looking folks. (Unless they're Neanderthals, but they're clearly not. Neanderthals were already extinct by this point in time anyway.) Talk about whitewashing [pre]history.
So, I was hoping to enjoy this when I first heard about the premise, but then I saw the trailer and now it's lost me in a lot of ways, especially with just the litany of errors that I was able to notice in those few seconds of brief footage. I'm honestly not expecting it to be a big hit, but I do want to see how it turns out critically. Curious to see if any of the critics or viewing audience pick up on some of the things I did, aside from whatever else happens in the film. If I do end up watching it myself, I'll probably just wait for it to air on TV at some point or get put on Netflix.
