A murderer chooses his victim carefully. That’s what Ben (Taron Egerton) does when he determines that Sasha (Charlize Theron), an elite climber who has entered the outback Australian to overcome a duel, is his next objective. What Ben doesn’t know is that Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur has spent twenty years specializing in placing extraordinary actors in devastating environments. The result of this clash receives the poor translation of ‘Dominant predator‘in Spain (the original is the most elegant’Apex‘), premieres on April 24 on Netflix and is pure popcorn party.
Shot entirely in real locations, the film put Egerton and Theron, who are joined by Eric Bana, to the limit of their strength. In fact, Theron suffered a broken toe during filming and continued filming without anyone on the crew knowing. A good example of how the film posed a challenge for its performers that went beyond the strong psychological tension that is drawn between the two rivals.
In fact, The approach of ‘Apex’ is one of the oldest in action cinema: The short story ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ by Richard Connell, published in 1924, described an aristocrat who hunted humans on his private island, and inspired a total classic of the genre in 1932, ‘The Evil Zaroff’. From there, multiple variants of the “people hunting” trope, and which is often, as here, accentuated by a danger that is added to the relentless hunters: an environment that functions as a gigantic trap.
‘Apex’ director Baltasar Kormákur has spent two decades building a filmography around a single question: what does extreme adversity do to people? His most relevant survival films, ‘Everest’ (inspired by a real catastrophe in 1996), ‘Adrift’ (about a couple trapped in the ocean after a hurricane), and ‘The Beast’ (where Idris Elba confronts a lion in South Africa), have common characteristics: real locations, actors subjected to harsh physical conditions and landscapes that are both scenery and threat. This new Netflix exclusive ‘Apex’ plays in that same league.
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