Alpha is No. 3 on Netflix's non-English chart with 3.3 million views and a 22% Rotten Tomatoes score

Netflix has tried its luck again with another action extravaganza, and this time they’ve decided to flip the script and deal us a gender-swapped take on the old Jason Bourne formula. No capes, no supervillains from outer space — just a hefty pile-up of double-crosses, shady government projects, and a leading lady who can break you in half if you blink at her the wrong way. This is Alpha, and if you fancy revenge tales with a few injections of sci-fi serum, it might be worth a punt. Or you might hate it. Critics certainly did.

Alpha arrived on Netflix on 28 August and clocked 3.3 million views in its first week on streaming.

Super Soldiers, Sibling Drama, and Spies

At its core, Alpha isn’t reinventing the genre. We start just after the 1999 Kargil War, and one Colonel Fateh Singh Lakhawat (Bobby Deol, channelling all the menace he can muster) dreams up a clever little side project known as Project Alpha. His plan? Whip up a handy serum that basically turns regular squaddies into stronger, faster, battle-ready types — think Captain America’s super-soldier stuff, if you remember all that patriotic nonsense.

Things go sideways straight away, obviously. Vikrant, one of the main scientists, finds his pregnant wife stricken with illness and in a move that’d have most bioethics professors tearing up their notes, tries to save her and their unborn children by shooting her up with Alpha serum. The wife doesn’t pull through, sadly, but out come twin girls, and he opts to raise one — Sita (Alia Bhatt) — as a sort of lifelong experiment. Sita grows up utterly lethal, with the emotional range of a turnip, and absolutely zero idea there’s another twin out there called Durga (Sharvari).

Years later, Sita goes full ‘Bourne’ — single-minded, vengeful, and wringing necks as she hunts down everyone party to the dodgy human experiments. She eventually crosses paths with Vikrant, who’s moved up in the world and now heads India’s intelligence agency. The real kicker: she learns about the existence of said sister, and they end up awkwardly joining forces. Colonel Fateh, meanwhile, has gone rogue, pursues his own shady objectives involving theft and weaponisation of the Alpha serum, and before long, the trio have to work together to take down their shared nemesis.

The YRF Spy Universe and Netflix Stats

This whole adventure sits inside the YRF Spy Universe, the connected world behind such Bollywood bangers as Tiger, War, and Pathaan. The twist: Alpha is the first of these films featuring a woman as the muscle. Not that it helped with the film’s reputation — reviewers lined up to put the boot in. Alpha currently sits at a measly 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is about as low as it gets before they start handing out sympathy votes.

That hasn’t stopped it smashing Netflix numbers, though. Following a short cinematic run back in July, Alpha hit global streaming on 28 August. In its debut week — 24–30 August — it snagged 3.3 million views, translating to 7.7 million hours watched. That performance nudged it up to number three on Netflix’s Top 10 Non-English Movies for the week, just behind some cartel drama and a twisty thriller called The Secret Woman.

• Facing El Chapo: 20.7 million views
• The Secret Woman: 11.4 million
• Alpha: 3.3 million
• A Child of My Own: 2.4 million
• Pyaar Prema Kalyanam: 1.8 million
• The Wave: 1.4 million
• Cocktail 2: 1.3 million
• Here the Whole Time: 1.2 million
• Call Me Mother: 1.1 million
• Elize: Shadows of a Woman: 1.1 million

So far there’s been no sign of a direct Alpha sequel, but given the franchise habit of having characters make surprise cameos from film to film, no one would be shocked to see this lot pop up alongside the Tigers and Pathaans in future YRF outings.