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Not every film opens on thousands of screens (or in theaters at all) as more and more each year make their debuts on various video on demand services. We’ve already looked at a couple of the horror titles opening today, but two other new films aim to deliver VOD thrills this weekend too. They don’t share a genre, but both films feature characters who film part or all of the action. Default is a hostage drama reminiscent in some ways of Captain Phillips or A Hijacking for the simple reason that it gives serious time to exploring the pirates’ motivations. It’s an airplane instead of a ship, but the bigger difference is that the film is presented in a found footage-ish format as both the hostages and pirates are wielding cameras. Extraterrestrial also drops a group of people into harm’s way, but the danger this time comes from someplace farther away than the...

Piracy Politique: Brand Uses Topical Subject for Common Critique

Colombian born filmmaker Simon Brand cashes in on the current fascination with hijacking pirates for his latest film, Default, moving the action out of the water and onto a plane. Utilizing the aesthetic of the found footage genre, the perspective is almost exclusively from the camera of the news crew trapped in the hijacked plane. But rather than lending the film a tense, guerrilla style quality, this effect creates a rather visually unappealing, downright drab aesthetic. Moments of violence punctuate this rather overly talkative drama quite effectively, but it’s dismal, almost gimmicky cinematography cheapens the film.

A veteran news correspondent, Frank Saltzman (Greg Callahan), has just completed an assignment in the Seychelles. But after he boards a dilapidated, private plane with his crew, they are taken hostage by a quartet of terrorists led by the well-spoken Atlas (David Oyelowo). As...

Default, directed by Colombian director Simon Brand, and picked up by the distribution company Wild Bunch, had its world premiered at the NY Colombian Film Festival this year at the end of March.   Described as a claustrophobic thriller, Default, focuses on the hijacking of an American news crew's plan on an African runway, and stars David Oyelowo as Atlas, a Somali pirate and leader of plane hijackers, who want to tape an interview with Frank Saltzman, the plane crew's newsman.  With a script penned by Jim Wolfe Jr. and Dan Bence, Default also stars Greg Callahan, Katherine Moennig, and Stephen Lord. Joining Oyelowo, other actors of...

Distribution company Wild Bunch has picked up Colombian director Simon Brand’s English-language, Africa-set found-footage-style thriller titled Default, which stars David Oyelowo, Greg Callahan, Katherine Moennig, and Stephen Lord, in a film that tells the story of "the hijacking of an American news crew’s plane on an African runway by Somali pirates who were the subjects of their reportage," says Screen Daily. It's not clear in what country/city this "African runway" resides, but given that the hijacking is done by Somalis, we can assume that it's a runway somewhere in Somalia. There are more than a dozen airports in the east...