Monsters: Dark Continent – Tease Infects Your Screen

monsters-dark-continent-logo

In 2010 first time director Gareth Edwards crept up on the world and released the indie spectacular that was Monsters. Having now moved on to direct Godzilla for Warner Brothers, Gareth Edwards has handed the reigns for the sequel over to another first-time feature film  Tom Green of Misfits fame.

Empire magazine recently released an exclusive first look at Monsters: Dark Continent, which Edwards is co-producing. The footage reveals very little in terms of story but does a great job at setting up the tone of the film and certainly creates an atmosphere which is reassuringly close to what Edwards established in Monsters.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

Monsters: Dark Continent expands the world that Edwards created and moves the setting to a different Infected Zone, this time the Middle-East, which the U.S. military have now taken control of. Green is aiming to stick to the theme of intimate, human story telling that Monsters captured by piecing together over 100 hours of footage which he shot on hand held cameras as he travelled across North America with stars Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy.

Green has said, in terms of creating the same mood for the sequel:

[quote]“As soon as I watched Monsters I completely identified with the idea of using real locations as a foundation on which to build a world of limitless scale. From my first visit to the location shown here, in Jordan, it was somewhere I felt was key to making Dark Continent work. The moonscape-like environment was the perfect basis for an ‘alien’ landscape. The quarry trucks you see here became ‘buggies’ to transport the remains of firebombed monster herds to be incinerated, with all the leading characters emerging from the dust to witness the scale of the death toll for the first time — and for one character maybe too many times…”[/quote]

Joe-Dempsey-Monsters-Dark-Continent

Monsters: Dark Continent stars Joe Dempsie (Game Of Thrones), Sam Keeley (What Richard Did) and  Johnny Harris (Welcome To The Punch) and will be released in 2014.

Rambo Heading To the Small Screen! Will Stallone Follow?

Currently, television seems the place to be. Over the past couple of weeks there have been a few announcements of popular movies making the move over to our small screens. Notably there was Fargo a little while back and Robert Rodriguez’s El Marichi series earlier this week. Well, add Rambo to that list as Avi Lerner has announced that his Nu Image production company has signed on to co-develop, with Entertainment One (eOne), a TV series based on Avi Lerner’s good pal Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series. Lerner has stated, “I’m happy to be partnering with a prolific company like Entertainment One who has a track record of creating high quality programming for their broadcast partners around the world.”

The blood-thirsty action packed franchise kicked off in 1982 with First Blood, a very rough adaptation of David Morrell’s novel of the same name, which saw Sly’s Vietnam vet taking on a corrupt small-town lawman. John Rambo has since returned for 1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II, 1988’s Rambo III and, most recently during Sly’s old-man action come-back, for 2008’s Rambo. Of course, this is not the first time that Rambo has been portrayed on TV. Remember Rambo: The Force of Freedom from 1986? That series lasted 65 episodes! Let’s all hope this new series will be a bit better than that. Perhaps with less shark riding.

rambo-force-of-freedom

“I’m excited by the prospect of collaborating again with my good friend Sly for an encore in this next phase of the Rambo legacy,” commented Lerner, an action movie producing vet who has produced Rambo movies in the past. eOne also seem thrilled by the chance to bring Rambo to the small screen. eOne Television CEO John Morayniss in a statement Wednesday commented, “The ability to fuse the big screen and the small screen through Avi’s feature film expertise and eOne’s domestic production capabilities and international distribution infrastructure, makes for a highly complementary partnership,”

Stallone-Rambo- Headband

As an added bonus, the seemingly always Stallone is currently in talks to star in the TV series too. Now, in what capacity remains to be seen. I doubt his elderly Rambo will be the focal point of the series. I would love to see a series that documents Rambo’s time in ‘Nam. There is plenty of reference in the movies as to the horrors that Rambo faced as well as his time as a POW. Stallone could easily bookend or even narrate episodes as Rambo as a way of contextualizing how it affected him into becoming the disconnected character that he is in the films.

There is plenty of material to be mined from the Rambo premise and if handled well, it could do what Band of Brothers and The Pacific did in providing a great deal of action and story but also offer a commentary on the war and how it impacted so many peoples lives and the US political landscape.