Saw’s Darren Lynn Bousman Will Direct Predator-Meets-Call-Of-Duty Actioner Apex
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Describe a movie as “Predator meets Call of Duty” and it is a safe bet that you will get our attention. And that is exactly how Darren Lynn Bousman’s upcoming indie science fiction actioner Apex is being talked about.
That portrayal comes courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter, and it isn’t just this quick hitter that sounds promising, the rest of the details are quite auspicious on their own. The story revolves around a special ops team that is sent into North Korea on a mission to obtain weapons of mass destruction. You assume that they’re stealing some from the notoriously belligerent nation, hamstringing their ability to attack other nations. This part also sounds rather Predator-y—can’t you just imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch on such a covert operation? Along the way, this cadre is transported to another world somehow, and find themselves at odds with a “dangerous alien race.” If they didn’t have our attention before, they most certainly do now.
James E. Cavanaugh is responsible for coming up with the idea for Apex, and also knocked out a screenplay, which reportedly has “an eye on current scientific trends in physics and biology.” What exactly that means we’re not sure, but, like the rest of this announcement, it has definite potential. 2511 Productions and Ambience Pictures will produce the film, and envision it as a “trasmedia property.” From their depiction this seems to mean that there will be things like tie in comic books, video games, and that sort of cross platform promotion. They even plan to key art and some of the alien designs at San Diego Comic-Con later this month. If that’s true, it seems like they may be farther along in the process than you might initially suspect.
Bousman is most known for writing and directing multiple entries in the Saw franchise, but he has a fairly lengthy resume helming indie horror movie outside of that realm as well. Among other titles, he’s directed 11-11-11, Mother’s Day, The Barrens, and Repo: The Genetic Opera!, both the original short and the feature length adaptation. Overall, he appears to be pumped as hell to be working on this project, calling it, “[A] love letter to the sci-fi films I grew up watching with my dad such as Alien, Predator, Enemy Mine, Tremors. But I also want it to have the more modern feel of some of the recent video games I am currently playing, like Halo and Call of Duty.”
If you’re going to invoke the names of any movies, that’s not a half bad list, but that isn’t all he has to say on the matter. Bousman also wants to infuse the movie with the stark reality of recent movies like Lone Survivor, and adds, “This can be a balls-to-the-walls action fantasy and it’s franchisable outside of the movie universe…There is a whole world to explore with Apex.”
