Director (/writer/cinematographer/producer/actor/composer) Shane Carruth’s third feature — his first big-budget film — was already highly anticipated given how well-received his first two indie projects were (those being Primer and Upstream Color). But even the promise of a “nautical thriller” tale is no match for the hype that is about to accompany it now that its cast has been revealed.
The Modern Ocean will star Anne Hathaway, Keanu Reeves, Daniel Radcliffe, Jeff Goldblum, Chloë Grace Moretz (If I Stay),Tom Holland (Spiderman), Asa Butterfield (Hugo), and Abraham Attah (Beasts of No Nation), which makes for a completely star-studded lineup.
According to a press release, the film is about,
…the competition for valuable shipping routes, the search for the hidden cache of priceless material and the powerful need for vengeance will converge in a spectacular battle on the rolling decks of behemoth cargo ships. This epic tale, fraught with danger and intrigue, takes us from the ancient trading houses of Algeria to the darkest depths of the ocean floor. Enormously inventive, but grounded in arcane reality, THE MODERN OCEAN will draw audiences in to a secretive world filled with mysterious technologies and bitter rivalries.
In September, we reported on the project, noting that despite the film’s large budget, don’t expect Carruth to do anything other than bring his own unique mark to the material. As he told The Playlist at the time,
I’m constantly interested in the politics, interactions between different personalities, different characters. That’s what this boils down to: it erupts into a big action film, essentially, but the reasons why it does are the reasons the story exists…That characters are unable to get aligned is because they’re all pointed in different directions, they all have slightly different motives. And that’s not always known to the group.
FilmNation will be taking the project to the American Film Market tomorrow, and we’ll let you guys know of any updates from there. But currently: hot damn, this sounds pretty amazing.
