“Alpha,” a spectacular prehistoric eye-candy survival yarn, is enthralling in a square and slightly stolid way.
It’s the tale of a young hunter stranded in the wilderness, who proves his manhood and becomes best friends with a wolf, and it’s like a Disney adventure fueled by a higher octane of visual dazzle, with a gnarly texture wrought from elements like blood, excrement, and maggots.
The director, Albert Hughes, made his name along with his brother Allen co-directing such landmark films as “Menace II Society” (1993) and the supremely underrated Jack the Ripper thriller “From Hell” (2001), and on his own he proves to be a seductive if highly traditional craftsman who knows how to sculpt a drama of the primal human spirit out of sweeping images: a herd of mastodons, a billowing volcano, a racing warthog, sun and wind and ice and plunging cliffs.Hughes is artful enough not to
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