Watch Neill Blomkamp’s New Short Film ‘Zygote,’ Starring Dakota Fanning
Neill Blomkamp’s Oats Studios is taking a kind of diet approach to filmmaking: testing out concepts that could be cool by making short films out of them with bonkers-high production value. The first one, Rakka, introduced us to an Earth almost completely overtaken by some fabulously gross aliens, and a few days ago we got Sharlto Copley as a very cranky God. Today, Oats Studios has rolled out Zygote, which sees Dakota Fanning and Pablo Cantillo on the run from a truly terrifying monster.
Since the movie is only a little more than 20 minutes long, I won’t go too into detail on the plot to avoid spoilers. The premies, basically, is that Fanning and Cantillo are trapped in a mining facility somewhere in the Arctic, and have to get from Point A to Point B without being caught by a beast extremely reminiscent of The Thing.
None of these shorts have anything to do with one another; it’s mostly just Neill and his buddies playing around with any ideas they’ve had percolating (and using up some of that money they clearly have just burning holes in their pockets). Since these are all short one-off films, Blomkamp can get any A-list stars he wants because it’s not like they have to sign on for a time commitment of multiple years. And because they’re so short, they don’t suffer from getting bogged down in their own concept the way that CHAPPiE and Elysium both did. Maybe Neill is a short films kind of guy. Playing around with smaller ideas does sound a lot more fun.