Comic-Con ‘08: Fox Panel

This post will be updated continuously during the panel.

For the Fox panel Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connolly and director Scott Derrickson are on hand to talk about The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Derrickson directed the most excellent Emily Rose. He touched on the concerns over remaking a classic film and how much he enjoys and respects the original. He thinks it’s a good idea to revisit the concept using modern day issues.

They will be showing a few clips.

The scene was an extended version of the interrogation shown in the trailer. This version of Klaatu is not docile and non-violent - in the scene he takes over the interrogator, delivering an electrical shock and controls his mind in order to get info so he can escape.

Keanu stated that his take on the role was to be an objective observer as the alien.

Derrickson says that the alien technology is biological and he didn’t want spacecraft shooting lasers.

Jennifer talked about the human elements of the story and how we treat each other and the planet.

Another clip shown which shows the boy, Bobby and Klaatu having a conversation in the back of a pickup truck.

Keanu talked about how his opinion of humanity evolves during the film to where he starts to think that maybe we’re not so bad.

(Side note: The only reason that I’m starting to think there might be a glimmer of hope for this film is that I like the director and his work on Emily Rose.)

Derrickson talked about the design of Gort and that they went through hundreds of different drawings in trying to figure out how to update the robot for the film and they ended up coming back to a design similar to the original. Weta Workshop is working on the design of the character.

The spaceship and the spacesuit have an organic / biological basis.

Biggest clip to follow, several minutes of footage.

Clip showed a lot of destruction by Klaatu’s ship(s) and I still don’t like that take on the film. The clip also showed the scene with the idiotic line where the survival of the planet is more important than humanity.

Next a scene from Max Payne that was pretty cool was shown highlight Payne getting his butt kicked before the shoots whoever is kicking his butt in an inventive way.

John Moore director, Mila Kunis, Mark Whalberg and Chris Bridges were in attendance.

The director said the challenge in making the film was “to not screw it up.” He said the game has a great story and the goal is to translate that story to a great movie.

Wahlberg saw the script before he saw the game. He was quite charming and said he was ready to do another film where he could “kick some ass again.”

Joked about how his arrest record made him a good fit for the role.

The character starts out happy with a wife and child that are taken away from him.

Another clip, highlighting the bad-assness of Wahlberg taking on a group of street punks. Forget what I said previously about concerns Wahlberg could pull this off after seeing him in The Happening. I got a modern Death Wish vibe from the clip.

They talked about a new slow motion camera system that they used, inspired by The Matrix and John Woo.

Finished up with a long clip that should a lot of action sequences from the film. Really, parts of reminded me of the first Die Hard movie - and that’s a good thing. Of course there was much more beyond that with gunfire out the wazoo, and lots of cool imagery.

Wolverine

Hugh Jackman came out and the crowd went insane. He was very gracious and said he’d be waiting a long time to bring Wolverine to Comic-Con since he didn’t have the opportunity with any of the X-Men movies. He thanked the crowd profusely saying he wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for us, and also came in to the audience to thank Len Wein, the creator of the character. Jackman had

He said the’ve finished filming, the film is big, action-packed and “bad-ass.”

There will be a lot of berserker rage in the film.

They showed an extended trailer for the film which I have to say was pretty damned awesome and the crowd went nuts. Gambit and Deadpool are in the film, shows Wolverine as a soldier with a bad attitude, Stryker recruiting him and Sabretooth to work for the government, we see Blob, lots of mutant action, big set pieces with explosions and all kinds of cool crazy stuff. The buzz on this has been that it’s not going to be good but you certainly couldn’t tell that from the trailer that was shown.

And that’s it for the Fox presentation!