Text | Ke frog
Every year, several films give the stage to animals to reflect the good and evil of human beings.
Excellent animal movies can always be like allegories, accurately and universally summarizing the light and dust in human nature.
Animals are a mirror. Although human beings are constantly walking, at any time, when they look at them, they can be dressed, know the rise and fall, and know the gains and losses.
In "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring", Kim Ki-duk mirrors the hearts of ordinary small animals such as snakes, frogs, cats, and chickens with the little monk.
In "The Fantasy Drifting of Young Pi", Ang Lee embodies Pai's other self as a Bengal tiger, and the journey of life does not end, and the game will never end.
The film I want to talk about today also belongs to the animal theme, although there may not be so many metaphors, and the quality is far inferior to the above.
But this animal came bigger, it was a wolf.
Or, you can call it "the first dog in history".
Alpha: The Wolf's Return
After Mission Impossible 6, Hollywood sent two small, little-known films, Alpha: The Wolf's Return and The Birth of a Legend.
The former has a mediocre reputation, while the latter has a mediocre box office.
When watching "Alpha: The Return of wolves", in addition to thinking of "The Fantasy Drift of the Young Pi", it is more similar to "The Wilderness Hunter" and "Fantasy Forest".
Same beast, similar plot.
This is a story that happened twenty thousand years ago.
At that time, human civilization had just sprouted and was in the stage of Homo sapiens.
Earth is in the last ice age, and the entire European continent is still under a thick ice sheet.
What was the world like then?
The winter is cold, desolate, and the beasts are rampant.
The protagonist of the story is a 17-year-old teenager, Koda.
He is the son of a tribal leader and has a mission to lead his people to live.
His father also had high hopes for him, and he carefully demonstrated and taught by example in the hunt.
But no matter what, the young Koda is instigated.
He was afraid of violence, but wanted to rule the tribe with love.
So during a group hunt, Koda was knocked off a cliff by a bison.
Both his father and his people thought he was dead, but he was saved by a flood.
The journey back is long and dangerous. In such an ancient and cold place, a person who breaks away from the tribe is nine deaths.
This is the starting point of the way home, and it is also the starting point of the growth of teenagers.
So from here, the film deliberately creates an Odyssey-style path of juvenile growth.
Koda changed from weakness to tenacity and began his difficult wilderness survival journey.
Soon after, he encountered a swarm of wolves.
In a critical moment, in order to protect himself, the teenager swung his first knife and hid in a tree.
After a long standoff, the wolves scattered, leaving only Alpha, the slashed head wolf.
After Koda got down from the tree, he didn't kill the wolf and eat meat in the midst of hunger and cold, because he needed something more important------ company.
Koda took Alpha to the cave, healed it, and fed it water.
There was hostility between them at first, then defensive, then cooperation.
Finally, there is the companionship after the emotional commonality, looking for a home.
They frolicked and played on the way back, sacrificed their lives to accompany each other, and finally embarked on the return journey together.
"Alpha: The Return of the Wolf Companion" is only 96 minutes long (the main film is at most more than 80 minutes), and the film is very harmonious and very simple to show the birth of the "first dog in history".
But although it is short, it is not tough.
Straightforward and crude expression, highly generalized routine drama structure, so that this grand pattern of the film, trapped in the millimeter.
Like "The Fantasy Drift of The Young Pi", this is also a journey of teenagers and beasts.
But what is not as good as "The Fantasy Drift of the Young Pi" is that the relationship between man and wolf in the movie is too superficial and harmonious.
The ancient wolf here is no more greedy, fierce, and deceitful than the Bengal tiger in "The Fantasy Drifting of the Young Pi", its untamed faded prematurely, and the well-behaved and pure came too quickly.
The young Koda here is also more compassionate than Pi, his truth, goodness and beauty overflow too much, and Homo sapiens's mentality is too light.
As a result, the game between man and wolf is gone, the ugliness spawned in the game is gone, and the reflection brought about by ugliness is even less.
After hiding all these things, the director put such an epic volume film with a very grand theme directly to a shortcut in expression------
Talk about love.
Love makes the teenager and the beast like brothers, loves to let the teenager find the way home, and loves to make the ancient beast easily submit to the subject.
In short, love is the power to solve all problems.
Because of this, love has also become the cheapest viscous chicken soup here.
In addition to the thin allegory, the performance of the young actor Curtie Smit McPhee in the film is slightly better.
Because the amount of lines in the film is very small, it is necessary to rely on body language and facial expressions to present a lot of inner activity.
In addition, wolves are more difficult to empathize with than dogs, and therefore much more difficult to perform cooperatively.
But the background and characters in the movie are too similar to those in "The Revenant", which has to remind people of Xiao Lizi's performance.
Such a comparison is still high and low, in terms of performance status alone, the former is still slightly painless, while the latter is to do their best.
In contrast, the best part of a movie is the imagery.
Leaving aside the story and characters, this is a literal "scenery blockbuster".
Nature is the greatest artist here, starry skies, auroras, sunrises and sunsets, wilderness, canyons...
The earth of 20,000 years ago was breathtakingly beautiful.
The film is set in the Ice Age, in order to recreate the real picture of the enlightenment of human civilization, the director did not abuse the special effects, but chose to go to many places for live shooting.
Not only did it recreate an "ice age" on the prairies of Vancouver, Canada, but it also rushed to Iceland and other places to shoot the scene.
In the end, it created a dreamlike and magnificent prehistoric scene in the movie.
But!
I have to say that under such a beautiful scenery, the story is also set off even more thinly.
In the same way, the beauty after the story has become a wallpaper and postcard-like existence.
The first encounter between humans and "dogs" in the film is so harmonious, so light, and even a little hypocritical.
In essence, it is the arrogance of human-centered thinking.
In real history, the evolution from wolf to dog may be much more brutal than in the movie.
If in the history of dogs, Alpha really surrendered to humans so easily as in the movie.
What do dogs think about this?
Will they worship their ancestors, or curse?
Will you miss the howling on the prairie?
Little curiosity.