PROJECT POWER
Netflix movie Project Power takes a gritty approach to the superhero genre
Netflix’s superpowered movie laid bare with our journalistic X-ray vision.
NO SUPERHEROES, ONLY SUPERPOWERS. That’s the mantra directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman adopted for their new Netflix feature Project Power. The crime thriller/action film’s premise involves a drug that grants its user extraordinary abilities – but only for five minutes. From that premise, Project Power could have spiralled into a metahuman free-for-all. Well, this isn’t that movie.
“That’s part of what attracted us to the project,” Joost tells Red Alert. “It doesn’t go in the direction I think you might assume it would based on the concept. We hadn’t really seen superpowers that had consequences and side effects the way they did in this script. The man who catches on fire gets horribly burned and disfigured by his power. The guy who grows to be 15-feet tall has stretch marks. It could even kill you if you’re not careful about it.
“Screenwriter Mattson Tomlin created a grounded world, with characters that didn’t fit easily into boxes,” he continues. “We love genre films. We love comic books, and we love spectacle. But what we also love is characters and reality, and this felt like it had both of those things.”
Project Power follows New Orleans cop Frank (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), teenage drug dealer Robin (Dominique Fishback) and Art (Jamie Foxx), a father desperately searching for his missing daughter. When their worlds collide, the trio must put aside their differences to take down the manufacturer of the drug.
“Dominique’s character, Robin, was the reason we were excited about the movie in the first place,” says Schulman. “It seemed like the first superpower-genre movie where the main character was a teenage girl of colour. That felt like a human way to get into it. We wanted to make sure that she remained the heart of the story. Whatever characters Jamie and Joseph reflected, it was all anchored on her performance.”
“Robin has sort of a twisted father/ big brother relationship with those guys,” Joost elaborates. “It’s interesting, and unusual, that they use each other in different ways. As the story progresses, they really learn how to be a team and work together, and not just working for themselves.”
Despite its fantastical elements, Project Power charts a grittier take on the superhero genre. The plot is grounded in reality, with an emphasis on the human experience. That means audiences can identify with the characters and comprehend the
mechanics behind the drug. “It’s a fine line [we] are walking,” Joost says. “At a certain level, it’s movie science. We wanted to understand how the pill worked and what it did to your body, where this power comes from and what it’s activating inside of you. What does it feel like and what are the side effects? That really informed the visual style of the movie and showing some of the stuff that’s happening inside of the body, and the way the powers look, and making them real and painful sometimes.”
Rather than rely on an otherworldly or cosmic explanation for the various different manifestations, Joost and Schulman weaved as much scientific accuracy into the details as possible.
“The idea wasn’t, ‘Movies have done the Human Torch, let’s avoid it,’” notes Schulman. “It was, ‘Someone has done the Human Torch. Let’s try and find the scientific version of it, how a human being could actually spontaneously combust or produce fire.’ The more we looked into it, there was a scientific explanation for almost every power in the movie. The idea was the pill unlocks the potentially dormant DNA that exists inside your human strain.”
“We had a brilliant visual effects supervisor, Ivan Moran, who really informed a lot of the science behind the powers and a lot of the visuals,” adds Joost. “With the Inferno Guy, there’s this close-up of the sweat shooting out of his pores and instantly turning into steam.
“The actor Xavier Days, who plays Stretch, has a certain uncanny ability to dislocate and triple-bend a lot of his joints, which he’s taught himself over the years. It’s part of a dance style called bone breaking. The idea was, if we are going to try and keep this realistic, what could someone like that perform?” he continues. “Well, they could do what a python does and use their limbs to strangle their prey. That allowed us to keep a lot of guns out of the movie, too, because now it isn’t a gunfight.”
These weird abilities provide plenty of the film’s razzledazzle. There’s the Inferno Man, an Ice Maiden and the aforementioned contortionist, Stretch, to name a few. The directors pick out the first of these as the visual which exceeded all their expectations.
“The Inferno Man turned out to be closest to our original vision, which was to make a man on fire look more realistic than it’s ever been before,” Schulman says. “I think we achieved it. It involved setting a stuntman on fire with an unbelievably complicated visual effects process. I think you can see how much work went into it.” BC
Project Power is streaming on Netflix from 14 August.