Did ‘Alpha’ Copy French Classic Film ‘La Femme Nikita?’

The teaser for the highly anticipated spy thriller Alpha has finally arrived, and it has sparked an immediate and divisive reaction online.

Starring Alia Bhatt, Sharvari and Bobby Deol, the film is directed by Shiv Rawail and produced by Aditya Chopra under the banner of Yash Raj Films.

While many fans responded with excitement to the teaser, a significant portion of viewers quickly raised serious concerns about the originality.

The primary accusation is that a key scene in the Alpha teaser bears a striking resemblance to a sequence from the 1990 French classic La Femme Nikita.

In the Alpha teaser, Bobby Deol plays a father who has trained his daughter, played by Alia Bhatt, from a very young age to become a spy.

He takes her to a lavish restaurant on the occasion of her 18th birthday in what initially appears to be a warm and celebratory gesture between parent and child.

However, the visit turns out to be about something far more significant as he reveals her very first mission: to carry out her first kill at the restaurant.

Alia’s character is visibly disappointed when she realises the outing was not simply a birthday celebration but a professional test of her training and resolve.

She proceeds to complete the mission, setting up what appears to be a defining moment in the character’s origin story as a spy.

Fans were quick to draw direct comparisons between this sequence and a famously similar scene from director Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita.

In that film, Tcheky Karyo’s character Bob takes the young and deadly Nikita, played by Anne Parillaud, to an upscale restaurant in a scene of deceptive warmth.

Nikita is initially delighted by the gesture before Bob hands her a gun and calmly instructs her to eliminate three people on the spot without hesitation.

The structural and tonal similarities between the two restaurant scenes have been widely noted and extensively discussed across social media since the teaser dropped.

A user said: “The opening scene is loosely copied from the scene in Luc Besson’s action classic La Femme Nikita.”

Another comment read: “The opening scene is copied 90% from that scene. The Plot is also similar.”

The comparisons with La Femme Nikita were not the only source of criticism that emerged from the online response to the Alpha teaser.

Cinema enthusiasts pointed out that a wolf-sheep analogy used by Bobby Deol’s character to shape Alia’s worldview as a spy had also been heard before.

The same analogy features prominently in the 2014 Hollywood film American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper:

A user said: “Maybe YRF should hunt for fresh talent instead of familiar dialogue.

“And despite Bobby Deol’s cover fire, the girl playing young Alia Bhatt looks more convincing than the star herself.”

These two observations have made the conversation around Alpha‘s teaser as much about its alleged influences as about the film itself.

YRF and the makers of Alpha have not yet responded publicly to the comparisons being drawn.