Chaos has overtaken Chicago, there are smashed buildings all around us, and only one man -- and one giant albino gorilla -- can save the day!

Expanding on the Game

Naomie Harris as Dr. Kate Caldwell, Dwayne Johnson as Davis Okoye, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Harvey Russell and Demetrius Grosse as Colonel Blake in Rampage.

Yes to George, No to

Cinematographer Jaron Present and Director Brad Peyton (foreground) on the set Rampage

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In this case, Chicago is actually an outdoor set built in Atlanta for the new film Rampage , and the man in question, primatologist Davis Okoye, is played by none other than Dwayne Johnson. And while the aforementioned gorilla, named “George” in the film, isn’t present on set at the moment -- the special effects experts at Weta will make sure that’s remedied by the time the movie is in theaters -- it was hard not to grin as giant wind machines blew debris everywhere, making the chaos feel a bit more genuine, while Johnson as Davis surveyed the scene, looked up at George, and intoned, in the way Johnson was born to do, “Ready to kick some ass?”In-between watching them shoot scenes for Rampage, IGN was among a group of journalists who sat down with Johnson, his co-star Naomie Harris, and the filmmakers to discuss adapting the classic arcade game into a big budget spectacle.Asked what he thought made Rampage ripe for adaptation, Johnson replied, “I loved the game when I was a kid. When I got a little older I had it on Nintendo; loved it then. It’s such a simple premise, so the challenge was to take this fun simple premise and try to build out and hopefully make a cool movie out of it.”He added, “If you do it right, hopefully it can turn into something that’s really cool. Because you’ve got three gigantic monsters who’ve been mutated through genetic editing and you have a hero in Naomie Harris’ character, and then you have some big bald brown guy running around, shooting s**t, and trying not to get killed!”Rampage marks the third collaboration between director Brad Peyton and Johnson, following Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and San Andreas. Peyton said he felt the game’s basic set up worked for a film precisely because it wasn’t mythology-heavy, explaining, “What I liked about it was that you could expand on it so much, that there wasn’t a whole lot you had to adhere to. I thought that it led itself tonally to a fun direction, and of course there are the creatures. But grounding it in real science with CRISPR, Dwayne’s characterizations, his relationships in the movie, there was just a lot of room to make it my own and do my own thing with it.”Peyton noted he plays video games and admitted, “I’d be scared s**tless to do, like, Modern Warfare [or] Assassin’s Creed, or one of those games where you’re like, ‘Okay, this game is so deep in it’s own mythology and those characters are so defined.’ There’s a lot of pressure that comes with that, and sticking to those things, and for me, you’d have to be a real die-hard fan to have a shot at doing things right. So, for this, I was like, ‘Okay, there’s not a lot of mythology that everyone’s aware of.’ There’s a couple things – like we all think of the three creatures and the woman with the red dress who gets eaten. I’m like, ‘Okay I can do that, and then get to do all the things that I want to do.’ And that’s what led me to eventually say yes, because when I initially got it, it wasn’t a type of movie that I would want to do – it wasn’t very grounded. But then we developed it into a direction where there was more emotion, more grounding, but still maintaining all the fun of it, and it was something both Dwayne and I thought we could really kind of, with both his skill set and my skill set, could really make work.”In the original Rampage game, the three core monsters are in fact transformed humans. Asked if that was something he considered for the film, Peyton said, with a laugh, “That was a solid no,” though he did reveal the idea was at least floated in the early conceptual stage.“Let’s just say I said no to ‘Rock-zilla.’ It was presented in a [conference] room much like this and I was like, ‘That’s a hard pass from me.’”Peyton elaborated that he felt that if they went with humans turning into giant monsters, “It’s like a Saturday Night Live skit a little bit. I wanted to balance out some kind of grounding aspect with the fun. Marvel is a tone that I really go, ‘Okay that’s the zone.’”In the game, you play as the monsters, and your goal is to destroy as much as you can. So will movie audiences be rooting for Davis to stop these creatures… or for the creatures themselves? Said Johnson, “I think it’s a combination [of both]. It all depends on what you like!”Johnson noted, “I know when I watch a movie I’m going to be rooting for the monsters, because I love the monsters. I’m also rooting for the relationship and just taking myself out and watching as a fan, but I think everybody’s going to be satisfied. There’s something for everybody. But the fun of the destruction of [the video game] Rampage, which is completely destroying everything, that’s in here. There are some Easter eggs in here too that I think people are going to like.”In the film, three animals – an albino gorilla named George, a wolf, and a crocodile – have been transformed into giant creatures, with unsurprisingly destructive results, but the story begins by depicting the close bond between Davis and the normal-sized incarnation of George, and clearly is sympathetic to George’s plight. For Davis, his main goal, as the story progresses, is to help and save his friend.Discussing creating that bond, Johnson said, “I think there’s layers to it. I’m an animal lover, I have a lot of dogs and horses up in Virginia, and I raise fish… so the idea with the first part about it was what great relationship with an animal in my life that I could apply to it. And I have a little Frenchie named Hobbs, named after the character from Fast and Furious. And apply that, and also the idea amidst the calamity, amidst the science going wrong in the wrong hands, that it still comes down to this core relationship… “Johnson said that as he considered doing Rampage, “I was thinking, ‘Okay, we have these cool elements, great CGI, a great director who I’ve worked with twice already in Brad Peyton, who I know can deliver on a big massive scale, but what’s the anchor, what is the heart?’ And the heart is in this relationship. So the A-side of everything got me excited, [but] that was the part, the B-side, that got me really super-excited.”Producer Hiram Garcia described Davis and George as having a “Han and Chewie” type dynamic, and noted the Davis character helped make it so Rampage was not simply about killing the monsters.Said Garcia, “Davis was the head of an anti-poaching unit for a military unit in Rwanda so he’s coming from a place where he’s an animal lover. He’s actually not a big fan of humans. He has a hard time trusting them because he’s seen what they can do. Part of his arc is really learning through [Naomie Harris’s character] Kate that he can start to trust people again. But George is his family and his best friend. We wanted to make sure that we’re sensitive to the fact that all the animals are victims in this.”Compared to other films where the heroes are trying to kill the monster, Garcia said, “We’re actually trying to save the monster. Our story is essentially about a man trying to save his best friend. That’s our journey and ultimately Davis is doing everything he can while everyone’s freaking out and unfortunately these creatures are being triggered to rampage out of their control, Davis to the end is trying to save them. And he’s still trying to save the world but ultimately he just wants to save his friend and bring his friend back, because his friend never asked for this.”