The C-list roster is typical casting for a film from The Asylum, the studio that also brought us Abraham Lincoln vs. Much of that half million is spent on the lead actors-in this case, chiseled ex-Baywatcher David Chokachi, Graham Greene (best known as Kicking Bird in Dances with Wolves), and Naughty by Nature rapper Treach. Atlantic Rim has the same basic plot, except its $500,000 budget is less than the average blockbuster's catering bill. In this case, that bigger film is Pacific Rim, the $180 million sci-fi thriller directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Idris Elba, Charlie Hunnam, and Charlie Day as humans using giant robo suits to battle skyscraper-sized sea monsters. Ray is not joking about the "little bit of money." Atlantic Rim is a "mockbuster," a film that piggybacks on the name-brand recognition of a major-studio release. "If we start with something we know is gonna look bad, we don't even have a chance."
"We try to take a little bit of money and make it look like a lot," says Ray. So he spent his off day driving around Pensacola, finding the new set: a private helicopter airport that will stand in for at least seven locations in the film. "It was FUBAR," says line producer Chris Ray, a tatted-up former navy photographer. Permission ungranted, a week before shooting was scheduled to start. Then someone in the navy read the script and reached out to the producers: The higher-ups don't like the undisciplined way the soldiers are portrayed, they were told. As of last week, the film's cast and crew thought they had permission to use the facility for free, a huge coup. Shooting today on the ultra-low-budget film-the eleventh day of a jam-packed fifteen-day shoot-was supposed to be at Naval Air Station Pensacola, a working base in Florida loaded with expensive-looking toys like air-traffic-control towers and T-45 Goshawk jets. Nothing is going as planned on the set of Atlantic Rim. A small army of extras fires at an aquatic monster.
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