Rampage (2018)
The film is the third collaboration between Peyton and Johnson, following Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012) and San Andreas (2015). It also marked the final released Warner Bros. film to be financed by Access Entertainment / RatPac-Dune Entertainment as the studio had ended their partnership with the company due to sexual harassment allegations against RatPac-Dune owner Brett Ratner (which resulted in the company going uncredited); the company subsequently dissolved later that year. Principal photography began in April 2017 in Chicago. The film was released in the United States on April 13, 2018, by Warner Bros. Pictures, in 2D, RealD 3D and IMAX. The film had grossed over $428 million worldwide and received mixed reviews from critics, with praise for its performances (particularly Johnson and Morgan), action sequences and visual effects, but criticism of its screenplay, pacing and storyline.
Plot.
Athena-1, a space station owned by gene-manipulation company Energyne, is destroyed after a laboratory rat mutates and wreaks havoc. Kerry Atkins, the lone surviving crew member, manages to escape in the escape pod when the station implodes, along with pathogen canisters that Energyne CEO Claire Wyden orders her to retrieve, but the pod disintegrates upon re-entry, killing her and leaving a trail of debris across the United States. One canister is swallowed by an American crocodile in the Everglades and another lands in a Wyoming forest where a wolf is exposed to the pathogen. Primatologist Davis Okoye, a former US Army Special Forces soldier and member of an anti-poaching unit, works at the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary. He has befriended a rare albino western lowland gorilla named George that he saved from poachers who killed his mother and communicates with him via sign language. One of the canisters crash-lands in George’s habitat and he is exposed to the pathogen.
As George grows considerably larger and more aggressive, Davis is contacted by genetic engineer Doctor Kate Caldwell, who explains that the pathogen was developed by Energyne to rewrite genes on a massive scale. She had hoped to advance research on CRISPR as a potential cure for diseases, but discovered Energyne’s plans to use it as a biological weapon and was falsely incarcerated, during which her terminally ill brother died. George escapes from captivity and goes on a rampage at the preserve. George is calmed, but is soon captured by a government team led by Agent Harvey Russell and put on a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III airplane. Meanwhile, Claire and her brother Brett oversee a mercenary team’s attempt to capture the mutated wolf, Ralph, which ends in failure and the slaughter of the entire team.
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Claire, hoping to capture Ralph and use George to cover up her plot, uses a massive transmitter atop the Willis Tower to lure the animals – engineered to respond aggressively to a certain radio frequency – to Chicago, unconcerned about the massive risk to civilian lives this poses. George reacts violently to the sound and crashes the plane, though Davis, Kate, and Russell parachute to safety. George survives the crash and joins Ralph as they make their way to Chicago, while Davis and Kate are aided by Russell in stealing a military helicopter in pursuit.
They arrive to find George and Ralph tearing through the city as the military struggles to fight against them. The situation worsens when the mutated crocodile, Lizzie, joins the duo, causing even more casualties. Planning to steal an antidote to turn the animals back to normal, Davis and Kate infiltrate Energyne’s base of
operations at the tower and take several vials of it, but are caught by the Wydens as Claire reveals that the antidote only eliminates the animals’ enhanced aggressiveness rather than reversing the other effects and shoots Davis, but he survives. When George climbs to the top of the tower, Claire orders Davis to distract it while she attempts to escape with Kate at gunpoint. Kate slips a vial into Claire’s handbag and pushes her toward George, who swallows Claire whole along with the vial, returning him to his normal personality. Below, Russell takes incriminating evidence from Brett, who is crushed to death by falling debris. As the damaged tower topples, Davis and Kate survive by crash-landing a helicopter on the Federal Plaza.
Development.
Warner Bros. acquired the film adaptation rights to the 1986 arcade game Rampage in 2009, as part of their acquisition of Midway Games for $33 million. The project was announced in November 2011, with John Rickard set as a producer. Rickard said that he decided to work on the movie by searching the list of titles to which Warner held the adapting rights and, upon finding Rampage, remembering playing the arcade game. In June 2015, Dwayne Johnson was set to star, re-teaming with New Line and producer Beau Flynn, while the studio was looking for a director to start production in mid-2016. Johnson mentioned that he loved the game as a child, playing the arcade game in a pool hall and later owning it on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
During the search for a script, writers offered many takes, including a faithful one to the game where the monsters were mutated humans, before the producers settled on the one by Ryan Engle, who aimed to make a “love letter to the monster movies I grew up watching”, such as Jaws and Jurassic Park, while making it clear that the animals were not the heroes.
After Dwayne Johnson was cast, in July, Brad Peyton went to direct and produce. Peyton later described the film to “be a lot more emotional, a lot scarier and a lot more real than you’d expect”. Between January and July 2017, the rest of the supporting cast was assembled.
Filming.
Principal photography on the film began on April 17, 2017, in Chicago, Illinois. The film also was shot in Atlanta, Georgia. Easter eggs to the original game were featured, as Energyne’s offices have a Rampage arcade machine, George eats a person who he pulls out of a building he punched, and Claire is devoured while wearing a red dress, just as the woman featured in the arcade’s opening screen.RELATED:
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Visual effects.
The visual effects were primarily provided by Weta Digital. Effects supervisor Erik Winquist and a small crew travelled to Chicago to create a model of the Chicago Loop that would be destroyed in the climactic battle, learning the building materials and architecture styles. Up to 15,000 photographs were taken with 3D scanners, while motion cameras covered downtown Chicago. As reference for the building destruction, the artists studied both the World Trade Center collapse from 2001 and implosions of buildings affected by the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake in Weta’s hometown of Wellington. One of the more challenging aspects for Weta was figuring out how the weight and mass of the monsters would affect the city environment and destruction.
Given Weta had plenty of experience creating animated apes in King Kong and Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its sequels Dawn and War, it helped the studio create George “in a much shorter time than it may have 10 years ago”, according to Winquist. Motion capture coach Terry Notary even took a break from Avengers: Infinity War, which was also filmed in Atlanta, to help Jason Liles in his performance as George. On the other hand, the lack of motion capture for Ralph and Lizzie let the animators go loose with how these monsters were portrayed, such as “a wolf that has porcupine spines and wings”.
Other VFX companies like Hydraulx, Scanline VFX and UPP contributed to the film.
Marketing.
As part of the promotion, three new games were made available: one is a browser game called Rampage: City Smash; another an arcade beat ’em up playing more as a redemption game, was made available at Dave & Buster’s; and a free VR game called Project Rampage VR.
Theatrical, Home Media.
Rampage was released on April 13, 2018, in 3D and IMAX, by Warner Bros. Pictures, after initially being set for release a week later, on April 20. The release date was moved up after Avengers: Infinity War had also shifted its release up by a week, to April 27, so as to provide Rampage with a two-week cushion. The film was coincidentally released 3 weeks after Pacific Rim Uprising, another American kaiju film. Rampage was released on Digital HD on June 26, 2018, and on 4K UHD, Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray and DVD on July 17, 2018. To date, Rampage has sold $28.7 million worth of DVDs and Blu-rays in North America.
Box office.
Rampage grossed $101 million in the United States and Canada, and $327 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $428 million, against a production budget of $120 million plus another $140 million for the marketing budget. Deadline Hollywood reported that the film was likely to break even two years after its release after accounting for all revenue streams. In the United States and Canada, Rampage was released alongside the openings of Truth or Dare and Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero, as well as the wide expansion of Isle of Dogs, and was projected to gross $35–40 million from 3,950 theaters in its opening weekend. The film made $11.5 million on its first day (including $2.4 million from Thursday night previews), $13.9 million on Saturday, and a total of $35.7 million over the weekend, finishing first at the box office. Like many films starring Johnson, the audience demographics were diverse, with 43% being Caucasian, 21% Hispanic, 19% African American and 14% Asian. The film dropped 41% in its sophomore weekend to $21 million, finishing second behind A Quiet Place, which was in its third week.RELATED:
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Critical response.
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 51% based on 284 reviews, and an average rating of 5.3/10. The website’s critical consensus reads: “Rampage isn’t as fun as its source material, but the movie’s sheer button-mashing abandon might satisfy audiences in the mood for a brainless blockbuster.” It became the best-reviewed live-action video game film in the history of the site until the release of Pokémon Detective Pikachu the following year. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 45 out of 100, based on 46 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “A−” on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported adult and children filmgoers gave it respective overall positive scores of 90% and 86%.
Variety’s Peter Debruge gave the film a moderately positive review, saying: “However derivative it may be, Rampage knows its audience—namely, Transformers fans and kids born after 9/11 for whom elaborately orchestrated scenes of falling skyscrapers carry nary a whiff of real-world trauma…. What director Peyton lacks in artistic vision he compensates for in his ability to wrangle such a CG-intensive production” Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com gave the film 2.5/4 stars, and wrote that “when Johnson is doing that movie action star thing he does so well and giant animals are going enormous-mano-a-enormous-mano, there’s undeniably goofy fun to be had. You just have to be patient during the downtime”. The Mir Fantastiki review gave the movie 7/10, claiming it’s a stupid movie, but one that’s good at what it’s supposed to be, and honest about not being any more than that.
Accolades.
Rampage was nominated for three Teen Choice Awards, in the category Choice Sci-Fi Movie, and for the acting performances of Dwayne Johnson (Choice Sci-Fi Movie Actor) and Naomie Harris (Choice Sci-Fi Movie Actress). Director Brad Peyton was asked if the rat in the beginning of the film was based on “Larry” from the Atari Lynx port of the original game. Peyton responded: “We didn’t name him Larry, but I’m going to use that, if there is a sequel, I’m going to make the rat’s name Larry”. The film was also speculated to be a prequel to The Walking Dead television series because of the similarities between Negan and Harvey Russell, both of whom are played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan.Cast:
- Dwayne Johnson as Davis Okoye
- Naomie Harris as Katherine “Kate” Caldwell
- Malin Åkerman as Claire Wyden
- Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Harvey Russell
- Jake Lacy as Brett Wyden
- Joe Manganiello as Burke
- Marley Shelton as Kerry Atkins
- P. J. Byrne as Nelson
- Demetrius Grosseas Colonel Blake
- Jack Quaidas Connor
- Breanne Hillas Amy
- Matt Geraldas Zammit
- Will Yun Leeas Agent Park
- Urijah Faber as Garrick.