Chris Pratt has saved the galaxy, battled velociraptors and is today playing an LAPD detective accused by an AI court of slaying his wife in retailer MGM Studios‘ upcoming Mercy from Timur Bekmambetov.
The trailer just dropped at New York Comic Con, and we see that Pratt’s Detective Raven, the architect of a system whereby accused felons have 90 minutes to prove their innocence, is today convicted. He’s up against an AI judge (Rebecca Ferguson), and he doesn’t know how this occurred. Pratt’s Raven gets help from his partner (Kali Reis), who helps him retraces his steps.
Pratt said the movie, which is set in the near future, was shot like a stage play with 60-minute full-length takes. Ferguson’s judge is on a monitor, as you can see in the trailer, with Pratt buckled down in a chair. The actor said he literally was strapped in during the shoot, creating “a natural claustrophobia.”
Said Bekmambetov about having the movie set in real time: “We live in a world today where AI is knocking on the door and we don’t have time to understand what happened. AI could be our enemy, our friend or our child. This ticking clock is metaphorical of the time we live in today.”
Oscar-winning Oppenheimer producer Charles Roven, who also was on today’s NYCC panel, said: “We got a pitch from a writer, Marco [van Belle], who wrote the script. When we first got the script, people were talking about AI, and it wasn’t happening yet. When we started talking about the movie, all of a sudden companies were dealing with AI, and the future wasn’t definitely not far away. The fact that the movie takes place in 2029, I think every day, every week, every month that goes by, there’s something more that makes our movie true.”
Give Mercy props: It was shot in downtown Los Angeles. Bekmambetov shot a truck-chase scene over six days. Talk about taking DP equipment to another level: The director revealed that in addition to shooting the movie with bodycams and drones, he used robo-dogs to film crowd scenes.
The pic comes hits theaters January 26 via retailer MGM Studios.
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