According to BBC News, Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez has been offered a $30 million contract to make a Hollywood film with Sam Raimi as one of the producers. Numerous studios took notice of the man after he uploaded a five minute sci-fi short on YouTube that reportedly only cost $300 to make.
“I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios,” Alvarez said. “It was amazing, we were all shocked.”
It’s shaping up to be a story similar to that of District 9‘s Neill Bloomkamp, whom Peter Jackson championed on the strength of Bloomkamp’s short Alive in Jorburg. Hopefully this story will have similar positive results, because the short, which you can watch below, is pretty impressive.
Blomkamp was chosen because of his amazing body of work, not because of a single short he made five years ago. His films also had narrative and structure. Alvarez’s short is a FX reel, nothing more. It show nothing in terms of his ability to handle a story or some sort of coherent structure. And this type of stuff was done better when it was called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
1) Why do the robots bother shooting up everything if they are just going to blow up the whole city when they get to the centre. Seems unnecessary.
2) Other then some impressive effects work, this short is ridiculously unremarkable. I see five effects shorts like this year.
3) $300? Yeah, maybe cause he did the effects in house and didn’t pay for them…
Regardless, it impressed enough of the right people that he got a $30 million deal out of it. Although yeah, Peter, I was wondering why they did all of the shooting in the first place also. I guess just because they wanted to look awesome before they went.
Clearly, this film is a tech demo more than anything else. When I watched it, I read it as simply the fantasy of the little boy who was playing with his toys at the beginning, not a literal reality. (Kind of a metaphor for the raison d’etre of the film!)