‘Air’ #SDCC Trailer: Robert Kirkman Takes on a New Kind of Apocalypse

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The first trailer and poster for Air were revealed at the Skybound Entertainment panel at Comic-Con Saturday afternoon. Air reunites The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman (who was on hand to host) with one of that show’s stars, Norman Reedus, who stars alongside Djimon Hounsou (Guardians of the Galaxy) as two custodial workers who tend to a cryogenics facility containing the last of humankind in suspended animation.

 

The trailer opens with Michael Hogan (Col. Tigh fromBattlestar Galatica) giving a very presidential speech about protecting our way of life from global tyranny. And then nuclear war apparently wipes out life on the planet and renders the surface and the atmosphere unlivable. It’s okay, though, because a small piece of humanity has been cryogenically frozen, tasked with repopulating the planet once things are viable again.

Air is the first film produced by Skybound Entertainment, Robert Kirkman’s publishing company, which puts out The Walking Dead comics with Image. Air is also Kirkman’s first foray into film production, and writer/director Christian Cantamessa’s first feature film as well (having previously worked on the video games GTA: San Andreasand Red Dead Redemption). But with Reedus, the breakout star of The Walking Dead, and two-time Oscar nominee Hounsou as his leads, the film seems to be in pretty good hands.

Air has the feel of some of the great psychological science fiction films of the past, like Sunshine, the russian epic Solaris, the quieter moments of Alien, or the Sam Rockwell sleeper hit Moon. From the trailer, it seems that the movie may just be Reedus and Hounsou standing next to each other for an hour-and-a-half, not talking and trying desperately to hang onto their sanity. And somehow that’s okay.

It’s oddly refreshing to see a nuclear fallout Armageddon movie. Since the end of the cold war, almost all of our cinematic end-time scenarios have been fantastical to some degree (the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road notwithstanding). Humanity has been wiped out by everything from asteroids to global warming to the Aztecs to aliens to other asteroids to the opposite of global warming to more aliens  to the rapture to monkeys to even more asteroids; not to mention Kirkman’s cataclysm of choice: zombies , zombies, and more zombies.

Nuclear war and the subsequent radioactive fallout can be a much more chilling prospect. Not only is it still a very real and conceivable form of mayhem that could strike at any moment, but it has the added bonus of being an entirely man-made force of destruction. If earth gets destroyed by an asteroid or taken over by aliens, that’s really not our bad. If we all die from nuclear war, well, that’s on us. It’s the bleakest, emptiest, most depressing way of killing off humanity.

Which is exactly what the trailer for Air is: bleak.

Air is currently filming. There is no announced release date. Stay tuned to Screen Rant for more details.

 

http://screenrant.com/robert-kirkman-air-trailer/