'Rampage' Plot Details Emerge: It's A Big, Dumb Monster Movie
The big screen has seen its fair share of giant movie monsters lately. Pacific Rim had humanity fight them off with giant robots called Jaegers, Godzilla returned to crush buildings and more in 2014, Kong: Skull Island pitted the giant ape King Kong against a slew of creepy monstrosities just last month, and even the indie world is bringing a huge creature into play controlled by Anne Hathaway in Colossal. And there are only more massive monsters coming.
Rampage is a new movie starring Dwayne Johnson based on the Midway arcade game of the same name from the 1980s. The game has players controlling humongous versions of an ape, a wolf and a lizard, all trying to cause as much city destruction as possible while avoiding the military trying to take them down with tanks, helicopters and more. That game is being turned in to a movie, and if you were somehow expecting it to be anything less silly than the game itself, we have some bad news.Splash Report has gotten word on the Rampage movie plot, but I don't recommend reading after the image below if you don't want to know anything about the story until the real marketing for the movie begins. You've been warned.
The movie opens with a privately owned space station being destroyed thanks to some kind of mysterious experiment that was being done on board. In the wake of the destruction, three canisters from the experiment somehow end up falling all the way to Earth. One of the canisters falls into a gorilla enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, another lands in the plains of Wyoming and the final one ends up in the Florida Everglades. You can already see where this is going.
The experiment that was being conducted hails from The Griffin Technologies Group, a company owned by two siblings played by Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy. Looking to ensure the government doesn't link their company to any of the work they were doing on the space station, they try to destroy the evidence at the crash sites. But of course, the contents of the canisters have already caused a gorilla named George, a wolf and an alligator to start evolving, growing at frighteningly exponential rate. So how can they cover this up now?
The Griffin siblings concoct a genius plan to use a beacon that attracts each of the creatures to their head office, ensuring that all evidence of their experiments will be destroyed. It just so happens that their head office is located in Willis Tower in Chicago, which won't bode so well for the residents of the Windy City.
You may have noticed that there has been no mention of Dwayne Johnson's character in this movie. Well, he's playing an ex-marine who works as the primatologist who raised the ape George, teaching him sign language and everything. Surely that will come into play when Johnson inevitably gets caught up in all this monster action. Naomie Harris (Skyfall, Moonlight) also has a role as a Griffin scientist who helps Johnson trying to stop the monsters from destroying Chicago.
This doesn't sound like anything incredible, but I wasn't expecting much from a movie based on a video game with a thin premise. Plus, let's not forget that Brad Peyton is directing this, the man who has brought us Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and San Andreas. He's the perfect filmmaker for this kind of movie, and there's a chance it could be brainless blockbuster fun. It certainly sounds like it so far.