Alpha Gang Review: Rebels Without a Planet

A squad of aliens lands to conquer Earth and catches our emotions instead in Alpha Gang, the Zellner brothers’ committed, very strange comedy.

David and Nathan Zellner’s latest oddball comedy sends a gang of extraterrestrials to Earth with one job: conquer the planet. They arrive looking like leather-clad fifties greasers, perfectly synchronized and blissfully free of the messy emotions that make humans so difficult. Then they run into music, art, weather, attraction and grief, and their carefully organized mission starts falling apart in ways they never could have anticipated.

That’s very much Zellner territory. Like Sasquatch Sunset, this is a deadpan creature comedy about beings discovering that existing is harder than advertised. There were stretches where I felt like I was watching that movie again with leather jackets on, which is both a compliment and a complaint. The difference is that Alpha Gang gives its strange creatures a much bigger playground and a cast of movie stars who seem completely delighted to spend time in it.

Léa Seydoux (The Beast) is especially good at this kind of absurdity, bringing her particular French deadpan to Alpha One. She approaches everything with such literal seriousness that even the simplest interaction becomes funny without her ever appearing to chase a laugh. Dave Bautista (Knock at the Cabin) may have the movie’s best visual gag simply by existing in that outfit, looking like a Tom of Finland illustration wandered into a science-fiction B-movie.

Kelvin Harrison Jr. (Chevalier) gets the trickiest assignment, with a run of increasingly bizarre business involving a messenger hawk that’s better experienced than explained. Lily-Rose Depp (Nosferatu) connects with humanity fastest, while Bae Doona (Cloud Atlas) becomes increasingly desperate to have whatever everyone else seems to possess. Riley Keough (Mad Max: Fury Road) is the newest Alpha, and her wide-eyed initiation gives us an easy way into this very strange little family.

Then there’s Chris Pine (Star Trek), whose role I won’t name because figuring it out is one of the movie’s best surprises. The part requires a very specific brand of phony bravado, and Pine’s years as James T. Kirk have clearly prepared him for the assignment. Cate Blanchett, who also produces, turns up late in an eyepatch and a haircut that’s half Kate Gosselin, half Sid Vicious. She doesn’t blink. It’s a riot.

What I admire most is how completely the Zellners commit to the idea. Plenty of movies arrive with a terrific premise and spend the second half sanding off everything that made it interesting. Alpha Gang never does that, even when the story wanders into territory that could easily have sent another movie running for something more conventional.

Mike Gioulakis (It Follows, Nope) gives the film a striking visual identity, while the costumes go all-in on the greaser aesthetic. The production moved from Budapest to Croatia, where the aliens’ headquarters occupy the Monument to the Revolution of the People of Moslavina, a concrete structure that already looks like a set from a movie nobody ever made. Its history as a memorial to people who fought an occupation makes it an especially cheeky choice for an alien invasion headquarters. The Octopus Project’s score keeps everything just slightly off-kilter.

There’s something unexpectedly sad underneath all the weirdness, too. The aliens arrive as one interconnected unit, a single organism with a job to do, but feeling turns them into individuals. Being an individual, they discover, can be lonely and exhausting. They don’t get one emotion at a time, either. They get joy, grief, want and nostalgia all at once, which is roughly how a phone feels.

The script is where things get shakier. It’s episodic, and a few sequences wander far enough out that the momentum starts to sag. The ant-colony battle was clearly a breaking point for some people at the premiere, and I suspect this will be one of those movies that sends viewers reaching for the remote before it reaches the end.

That’s also why I think Alpha Gang needs a theater. At home, it’s too easy to pause, check your phone and decide you’ve got better things to do. In a packed room, you’re stuck with strangers while a gang of alien greasers discovers badminton, feelings and the catastrophic inconvenience of being human.

I had a good time. The folks who walked out probably weren’t wrong about themselves, either.

Alpha Gang was screened at TIFF on September 13, 2026.