Just last week, I watched a film entitled "Alpha" about how man and dog began their close relationship with each other during the Ice Age some 20,000 years ago. This film is also about the relationship of man and dog, but this time it is futuristic in scope. The dog in this case is a robot. It is a machine made for war, but is still programmed to be paired with one specific human master for orders.
Miles Hill was an introverted young man who had mad skills in riding motorbikes, but could not seem to get along with his more rowdy peers. One day, while trying to get home from the desert after a fall from a bike, Miles encountered a robotic dog that eventually connected with him as a friend and partner. It turned out that the dog A.X.L. was a prototype of a top-secret, top-dollar project to create a robot companion for soldiers in battle, and his developers and the military are looking for him to get him back.
Actually, aside from the obvious fact that AXL was an A.I. robot, this was a typical boy-and-his dog film given a futuristic twist. Boy and dog meet. They became friends. Their bond was threatened. They fought the threat together. The formula is followed to a T, and oddly the cliche can still work for kids and dog-lovers in the audience. I'm sure those climactic fight scenes can still be tearjerking for susceptible people even if the dog was a robot.
Ales Neustaedter (as Miles) and Becky G (as Miles' girlfriend Sara) need not really act too hard, since they know that audiences came mainly to see AXL anyway. They did play their by-the-numbers parts well-enough to be diverting. The rest of the cast though, like AXL's programmer Andric (Dominic Rains), Miles' dad Chuck (Thomas Jane), the flamethrower-wielding psycho Sam (Alex McNicoll) were totally forgettable in mediocre performances.
The screenplay by writer-director Oliver Daly was very simplistic. It asked us to accept some pretty unbelievable stuff like how Miles could ever do major repairs on a damaged AXL in his garage with basic tools. It does not even explain why AXL went out of his laboratory with damages in his armor. so we are also expecred to simply accept that. It does not really show the special abilities nor weapons AXL had that would make him invaluable for soldiers. Anyhow, this is clearly for young viewers to cheer the robot dog and his master on. No strict sense of plot logic was necessary. 4/10.
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