christian alvart Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Really good sci-fi horror flicks don't come along too often. Pandorum may be burdened with the unfair stigma of "not screened in advance for the press" (at least in my area), but it proves to be a superior picture, expertly establishing and maintaining a charged atmosphere of unhinged ferocity.

Director Christian Alvart displays an assured grasp of visual storytelling and provides a solid framework for Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid to let loose with intense, uninhibited performances. Four years ago, Alvart made the powerful Antibodies, a haunting serial killer movie that neatly subverted expectations, and he has delivered another impressive genre-buster. He even made me sit on the edge of my seat a few times, an inclination which I nearly always resist.

Foster and Quaid are apparently the first two members of their mission team to awaken from hyper-sleep on the spaceship Elysium. They're both badly disoriented; hyper-sleep is supposed to induce brief memory loss, but they look like they've journeyed through all nine circles of suffering in Dante's Inferno, which might feel like a picnic in the park compared to their situation.

The ship appears abandoned; no one is present to greet them, the power has been shut down, and they're locked in a chamber with impregnable metal doors. They can barely remember their names, much less their mission or even their own qualifications. Just wait until they find out they're not alone. And whatever is out there is very fast, very ugly, and very hungry.

After a few years to ingest and come to terms with what happened on September 11, it was time for the U.S. to start dealing with the trauma cinematically. Obviously, the first wave consisted of heroic stories made to wow and inspire us in the face of tragedy. World Trade Center gave us the struggle of two police officers trapped in the rubble of the Twin Towers. United 93 gave us an imagined account of what happened on the doomed flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. Now, German director Christian Alvart (Case 39) is set to direct an adaptation of Jess Walter's recent political satire, The Zero.

Published in 2006, and compared to the likes of Joseph Heller's Catch 22, Zero deals with a heroic cop named Brian Remy -- except that in the first few pages he wakes up to find that he's shot himself in the head. In what I can only assume is a Fight Club sort of deal, Remy continues from there, dealing with his son who feels neglected, and a strange mental state that results in him seeing "flashers and floaters" in his eyes -- all the while starting a new job that has him examining the millions of paper scraps that rained down on the city as the towers fell, and finding himself in a sinister goverment plot. Obviously, the film will not so big on the tear-inducing heroicism. There is no cast listed yet, but with a large talent pool to pick from, I'm sure Remy will get great actor treatment.