I’m writing this from a secret location–no, not SXSW–to let you know that producer Robert Rodriguez showed off a sneak peek of some footage from his Predators movie at the festival this past weekend:
Starring such actors as Academy award winner Adrien Brody, Academy Award nominee Lawrence Fishburne, Topher Grace, and Alice Braga (I Am Legend, Repo Man), Predators is directed by an American named Nimród Antal whose major work has been in Hungarian music videos and TV commercials. However, he did release a film in 2003 called Kontroll which won the Award of the Youth at the Cannes Film Festival that year, so it’s not like Rodriguez picked a no-name to direct this set of actors.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the script (of which Rodriguez wrote a first draft) by Alex Litvak and Mike Finch concerns a group of mercenaries and convicts who get lured to an alien planet/game preserve. From the preview, it looks like the movie is doing everything correctly when it comes to making another installment in a long franchise including taking the story back to its roots (group of martially trained fighters runs a-foul of a predator hunting party) and then amping up the excitement factor (introducing new breeds or races of predators).
As I’ve briefly mentioned before, the thing I liked about the first Aliens Versus Predator Dark Horse comic and its novel adaptation was that the predator in question became the co-protagonist of the story because you learned about its motivations and the culture of the predators through the human protagonist Machiko Noguchi. Time will tell if this new movie will do any of the same, but I highly doubt it.
Related Posts: Robert Rodriguez to bring Predators, Machete to the big screen
Tom says:
Nimrod also directed:
Vacancy (Kate Winslet, Luke Wilson)
Armored (Matt Dillon, Jean Reno and Laurence Fishburne)
Considering that's one more film than he made in (what I'm assuming is) his native country of Hungary.
Maybe you were avoiding mentiong those films due to a lack of quality (that I can't attest to, having not seen either) but to not mention them seems like the wrong thing to do.
MO-- says:
As long as this film will be better than the AvP movies, I'm content. On the other hand, it's not much of a challenge to be better than those …
Gordon McAlpin says:
I only saw the second one, but holy shit, what a piece of crap that was. (I'm told that way way better than the first one, too.)
TrishaLynn77 says:
Both of those were made after he did Kontroll, and I figure that it was his win for that movie in Cannes which got him the job working with American talent. (BTW, it's Kate Beckinsale, not Kate Winslet.)