Salt
Opening tonight, Sony had a quick panel to promote the movie without saying much. For a movie about a secret agent who nobody knows…it’s very hard to have an interesting Comic-Con panel on it because every other sentence out of the panelists’ mouths were “I wish I could tell you about it” or “I don’t want to spoil it for any of you.” Either way, it was awesome to see Angelina Jolie and she’s quite an actress. She did all of her stunts and there was no CGI Angelina in the film.
A little known fact about this movie is that it was originally written for a male lead. They changed Salt’s gender and scripted it towards Angelina to have her star in the movie. The writers commented that changing Salt’s gender wasn’t too difficult…she’s transcends gender. The real difficulty was the snowball effect on all the other characters. From what they now brought to the table to how they interacted with Angelina in the movie.
Angelina was drawn to this strong character…she loved the way she had to interact in her real life being a secret agent and how she has all these special skills to do her bad ass job. In her own words, Angelina said, “there’s something a little off about her (Salt) and maybe there’s something off about me.”
Battle: Los Angeles
Sony showed some early footage from this bad-ass action war flick with a twist. To me, it looked a lot like District 9 in the way that it was shot with a moving camera. And then also had a huge Modern Warfare (video game) feel. There are crazy alien rockets and gunfights and the aliens (even though we didn’t get to see much of them) look pretty cool already.
Battle: Los Angeles is a myopic view which follows one Marine Platoon during an alien invasion. As Aaron Eckhert, one of the stars of the film, put it, “We made a war movie with aliens”…what more can you want? It’s an alien invasion in a modern setting with urban combat. You watch as soldiers go through residential neighborhoods and places you see in your every day life while battling alien lifeforms, trying to save others, and trying to save their own life. There’s a lot of realism….you really get to see what the people who protect us would do.
Aaron Eckhert, Michelle Rodriguez, and the other actors went through a boot-camp to ready themselves for the intense scenes they had to shoot. Michelle, however, didn’t have to sleep in the tents with the other guys, she noted that there were quite a few benefits to being a girl. She likes playing the physical roles for now though. This movie doesn’t come out until next year so look out for updates!
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Tags: Angelina Jole, Battle: Los Angeles, Salt, Sony
Matthew Fong created advancescreenings.com and is the lead contributor. He watches every type of movie and will try almost anything twice. You can follow him on twitter here: @matthewfong
