"The first. The fastest. The strongest."
Hello everyone!
And happy return to the YRF Spy Universe!
Man, I was waiting for this movie's release. Like, stupidly waiting, because I was looking forward to a female-led action movie in this line, especially as said lead is definitely young enough to be able to eventually continue the series onward once the oldies retire, should they wish to pursue that angle.
But REALISTICALLY, every old agent WILL eventually retire, or be put in the ground, so.
Anyway.
My excitement reached peak performance when Netflix really hustled to get it onto its streaming services, and you know I watched it almost the second it landed.
So without further ado: Alpha.
Links to previous related posts can be found at the bottom of the page, as per usual, and they're linked chronologically by release date rather than how I watched them (which is: out of order LOL). You're very welcome for that.
In flashback, we relive the aftermath of the 1999 Kargil war, and Vikrant (he who will later take over R&AW from Luthra) is reeling from the loss of so many soldiers. His subordinate Fateh is like: we got something to help make sure this many soldiers NEVER die again, and he launches the ALPHA program, with Vikrant's support.
See, the program has developed a serum - or, shall I say, a doctor developed this serum, and Fateh decided he liked it enough to launch it into a program - wherein they inject it into willing subjects, and said subjects, who are all elite soldiers already, suddenly become proto Captain Americas with better hearing, speed, strength, faster healing abilities etc.
Vikrant is overjoyed when the program gets approved, and especially that the serum works, because his pregnant wife is diagnosed with congenital heart disease, so he secretly takes some of the serum to inject her with.
The only problem: the serum kills everyone it was injected into after a certain amount of time, and the same thing happens to his wife.
Fateh, who somehow knows what happened - IDK man, omnipotence is apparently a secret superpower these guys eat for breakfast - declares that Vikrant's baby is government property and takes her away. Vikrant rushes to get her back, but gets her back only to bury her, sadly.
At least, that's what he's told.
Fateh hides the fact that little Sita (Bhatt) is alive and well, and he takes her to the middle of nowhere, where she grows. She doesn't become interesting to him until she hits puberty, and the serum kickstarts, the puberty hormones finally giving it traction, and so he trains her to become the very best of the best, capable of taking out anybody (he also conveniently neglects to treat her like a human being while he's at it, natch).
In present day, after a string of deaths who are all connected to the old ALPHA program, which sends shivers up Vikrant's spine and sends him to Fateh in exile (he was demoted and sent to the jungle after the program's disaster), the other man mercilessly reveals that, hey, Sita's your daughter and we have to kill her before she kills us. Yeah I also lied twenty-something years ago, but it's fine, she needs to be put down like the stray dog she is because she's turned on her master.
Because Sita went and burned down Fateh's original compound, warning him she's after him, too, though she first tracks Vikrant down, as he's also in the program photo.
Vikrant hauled ass to Spain, meanwhile, where there's another surprise waiting: his wife was carrying fraternal twins, and the doctor helped him hide the second one from Fateh, so he could give her a relatively normal life with relatives far, far away. Now though? They both return to India, hoping to head Sita off, and it becomes a funny confrontation at Vikrant's secret home base.
In the end, Sita explains that, after Fateh asked her to kill the doctor who raised her, because apparently he turned traitor, the doctor told Sita the entire story, including the fact that they've been trying to figure out why the serum hasn't killed Sita yet, as it has every other soldier before her. In the end, the only conclusion the good doctor could reach is that it's because it's SITA HERSELF, and the serum has somehow adapted, which means the only way to get this version is to extract it from her.
This WILL kill her.
It's why she turned on Fateh, and why she was looking for Vikrant, because she wanted answers, not his death.
Unfortunately, the fuzzy wuzzies have to wait since Fateh's men attack the house, but Vikrant, who trained Fateh back in the day, sends both Sita and Durga away with emergency backpacks, and coordinates to a safe house while he handles the intruders like the pro he is - and also because he booby trapped the entire place to high hell.
The girls bond during this trip, unwillingly for Sita, happily for Durga, who's wanted to know Sita all her life after being told she had a twin sister, and they finally reach a monastery in the middle of nowhere, where they sit down with a weird ass monk working on a sand mandala on the floor.
Said monk is none other than Kabir (Roshan), whom Vikrant asked to help, and my favourite scene from the entire movie is when the bad guys recognize who the hell is sitting under that monk's hood, he shakes off the robes, and gets to work.
Man needs no serum to be absolutely badass, and it's perfection.
Unfortunately, with Durga wounded in the action, Sita has to leave her behind after Fateh calls saying he has Vikrant (who, unwisely perhaps, tried to haul Fateh to R&AW headquarters and failed), and of course Fateh takes Durga instead since he now knows there's two of them. Defying the odds, the father-daughter duo he left behind follow him to his jungle base and launch a two-man attack which WOULD have ended badly, if not for the fact Durga frees herself and also frees the elite commandos who were unwilling to follow Fateh's craziness.
OH and, by the way: Fateh isn't Indian at all.
He's Pakistani, and he's been gathering intelligence for literal decades. He's taking the serum to his homeland, and they can FINALLY beat India.
Yeah right, says Sita, not if I get you first.
Which she does, and spectacularly too.
The movie ends with Vikrant telling the girls they have a choice: live quiet lives and disappear, or join him and his team, helping to save the world.
No guesses what they pick!
Fast paced, hitting emotions at all the right places, and ridiculously funny in others, Alpha is an amusing little action romp that absolutely veers into sci-fi for a bit, but other than the serum the rest of the movie is reasonably mundane, all things considered. I mean, these spies ALL pull off the most ridiculous tricks that you'd never see happen IRL (and I mean, rearranging columns with your head, or surviving a shanking to your abdominal section are really realistic, you know?), so this one isn't an outlier.
It's absolutely fun to watch, and Anil Kapoor shines as a father figure, honestly, which I needed from him because he needed something more humanizing after his sudden, evil-looking appearance in WAR 2.
There should be plenty more in the Spyverse where this came from, so I'm looking forward to it. I hope you all watch Alpha yourselves and see whether or not you like it!
I definitely recommend.
xx
*images and video not mine
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