Comic Con: Knowing And Push Delay Start Of Twilight Panel

By Ed Perkis: 2008-07-30 12:13:35

You have to feel a little sorry for Paul McGuigan and Alex Proyas. They spend a year or more preparing and directing the thrillers Push and Knowing for Summit Pictures and then shlep themselves down to Comic Con to talk about their work in front of 6,500 enthusiastic fans. Unfortunately, the 6,500 fans (or 6,300 of them anyway) are only there to see the third movie on the Summit panel, Twilight and had little interest in the other two Summit offerings. One of these two movies actually looks pretty good.

It’s not Push, represented at Comic Con by McGuigan and stars Chris Evans, Djimon Hounsou, and Camilla Belle. Dakota Fanning was also supposed to be on the panel but ended up getting caught in that massive traffic jam caused by a truck flipping over on the freeway. The group brought along the title sequence, which is mostly historical footage of governmenty looking experiments with a voice over from Fanning explaining that military research (beginning with those Nazi bastards) has led to “special people” with paranormal abilities. They also showed a short clip with Hounsou as the head of a super-secret organization that is after anyone out there with the abilities. It shows him “pushing” a memory onto a henchman that the henchman unloaded a gun, then the henchman uses the gun to shoot himself, thinking he unloaded it. The final four minute sequence shows Fanning (a “watcher” or someone who can see the future) and Evans (a “mover” who can move objects with his mind) escaping some bad guys in a Hong Kong fish market.

Everything had a certain interesting visual style but didn’t really get my gears turning at all. In fact, the scene in the fish market was more annoying than anything, since the bad guys would scream in a high pitched way and break all the glass in the fish tanks. When they got to the Q&A, one of the first questions was if the fish explode and the tanks explode during these screams, what happens to the people standing right there. McGuigan said it “stops them in their tracks.” The fact that it should blow their heads up like it did with the fish was obvious to everyone (at least everyone sitting in my seat, namely me.)

McGuigan seemed like a genuinely nice guy and I didn’t cringe too much when he said the premise of the movie was “what if these government experiments were real.” He noted quickly that they were real experiments, so he meant what if they really worked. That seems to be what you hear from every science fiction director these days, that their movie is taking some fantastical premise and making it “real.” He also said a lot of the stunts were real and the CGI was kept to a minimum. The stuff I saw in the fish market must have had a lot of CGI, but I’ll take his word for it. McGuigan did joke around that pushing would be a cool ability to have since you could make someone think they owed you a $100 or make a girl think you were dating. That actually might be a movie I’d watch. The actors didn’t add much to the discussion although they all swore the reason they were doing the film was the great script.

Unlike Push, Knowing looked like something I might actually watch. Director Alex Proyas came out alone to talk about the movie with a moderator, star Nicolas Cage was nowhere to be found. Proyas brought a trailer that I think has been on the Net already but it was the first time I’ve seen it. A very creepy looking girl in the 1950’s is supposed to draw a picture of what the future will be that is going to be sealed in her school’s time capsule. Instead she writes a seemingly random series of numbers. When the capsule is opened in the present, the girl’s number series is given to Cage’s son. Cage eventually sees a pattern in the numbers that foretells horrible disasters that happened between the 1950’s and today and could predict the apocalypse.

The trailer included a very cool shot of Cage standing on a bridge while a plane crashes right next to him. Afterwards, the moderator said to Proyas that it must be “the money shot, but Proyas said there are others in the movie that are even better. He did note that it’s not a slam-bang action movie. He also joined McGuigan in saying that he tried to take a fantastical premise and turn it into something that felt real. Ugh. I’m not against the whole idea of some sci-fi idea put in the real world, but this is closely following “great script” as something that gets mentioned in every discussion of any movie with any type of fantasy premise.

Proyas was very articulate and actually talked about his movie and Nicolas Cage very intelligently. Of course, no one was listening as the room was gearing up for the soon to begin Twilight panel. The nimrods behind me kept up a constant stream of “blah, blah blah, then we’ll go to the Dollhouse panel, blah, blah, blah.” A few people asked questions like what the numerical code meant and if Proyas was going to direct a Silver Surfer movie. He said he couldn’t explain the code without giving too much of the plot away and no, he liked Silver Surfer but didn’t know how that rumor got started. He, along with anyone else on stage in this segment, could have just as easily set himself on fire and probably not gotten much of a reaction from this crowd. They were here to scream at the Twilight cast (and any other hunky guy who happened up on stage in the meantime) and that’s what they were preparing for. I may see Knowing since it looks like it has potential. I’d skip Push, but would probably choose it over Twilight.

Oh, and Dakota Fanning finally broke through the traffic and made it after the Twilight panel. She came out waved and said thanks and then disappeared. Probably not worth the reported seven hour drive.

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