Director - Shiv Rawail
Cast - Alia Bhatt, Sharvari, Anil Kapoor, Bobby Deol, Dia Mirza, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Khushi Hajare, Kiara Khanna
Writer - Soumil Shukla, Shridhar Raghavan, Ishita Moitra, Uday Chopra
Producer - Yash Raj Films
Runtime - 140 Minutes
It’s difficult to tell whether Alpha is trying to be a serious spy thriller or a high-budget concept pitch that accidentally got released as a film. Backed by Yash Raj Films and directed by Shiv Rawail, it arrives with the weight of expectation from an established spy universe. But instead of expanding that universe in a meaningful way, it ends up exposing how fragile it becomes when writing is treated as an afterthought.
The film opens with the Kargil War backdrop and immediately shifts into “Alpha Serum” territory—a pseudo-scientific idea that is supposed to feel groundbreaking but quickly turns into narrative noise. Soldiers, experiments, enhanced bodies, national revenge arcs—all of it is thrown in so fast that nothing has time to breathe. What should feel like world-building instead feels like a checklist of ambitious ideas desperately fighting for attention in the same frame.
At the emotional center is Sita, played by Alia Bhatt, but the writing never gives her the dignity of being a fully realized character. She is introduced, shaped, trained, manipulated, and pushed through a pre-decided destiny without ever truly being allowed to exist as a person. The film keeps insisting she is powerful, but the screenplay keeps reducing her to a reaction instead of a force. By the time it tries to make her emotional journey land, the audience has already detached.
What makes this worse is that the film constantly mistakes volume for impact. Scenes are staged with intensity, dialogue is delivered like declarations from a mythological epic, and every second moment is treated as if it is historic. But underneath all that noise, there is very little emotional grounding. The film doesn’t build tension—it manufactures it artificially and expects the audience to respond automatically.
The supporting cast suffers from the same structural emptiness. Anil Kapoor is placed in a role that demands authority, but he is forced to carry dialogue that feels written for effect rather than realism. Bobby Deol is given a character who behaves inconsistently from scene to scene, switching between restraint and aggression without clear motivation. Sharvariand Divyendu Sharma are present, but mostly as participants in a story that never bothers to define what they truly represent.
The film’s biggest problem is not even its predictability—it is its lack of conviction in its own ideas. The “Alpha Serum” concept could have been explored as a moral or psychological conflict, but instead it becomes a convenient plot engine that exists only to move characters from one loud set piece to another. There is no curiosity in how it affects the human mind, no exploration of cost, and no emotional consequence attached to its use.
Then comes the much-publicized cameo by Hrithik Roshan, which should have been a high point but instead feels strangely weightless. The sequence is designed to create impact, but the execution lacks precision, clarity, and energy. Even the action choreography feels strangely detached, as if the film is going through the motions of excitement without actually feeling it.
As the film progresses, repetition replaces progression. Scenes echo earlier scenes, emotional beats repeat without evolution, and stakes blur into generic urgency. The editing tries to maintain pace, but pace alone cannot hide the absence of narrative growth. What begins as a potentially layered spy drama slowly turns into a loop of similar scenes presented with increasing volume.
By the final act, Alpha has exhausted its own spectacle. The visuals are polished, the scale is large, and the intentions are clearly ambitious—but none of it connects into something meaningful. There is no emotional payoff, no thematic clarity, and no sense that the story has actually arrived anywhere earned. It simply ends, as if stopping rather than concluding.
Ultimately, Alpha is not just a weak entry in the spy universe—it is a reminder of what happens when scale is prioritized over storytelling discipline. It wants to be mythic, emotional, and cinematic all at once, but it forgets the most basic requirement: making the audience care.