At some point we’ve all wished we could move objects with our minds and see the future. Perhaps slightly less so when it comes to killing people without ever having to touch them. Still, the characters of Push, a sci-fi thriller starring Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle and Djimon Hounsou, are granted these superhuman powers through artificial enhancement.
Push is the story of Nick Gant (Evans), a telekinetic who moves to Hong Kong to escape an evil government agency called Division that genetically alters regular people in order to create an army of psychic warriors.
Nick manages to stay under the radar for a decade, but is forced out into the spotlight when 13-year-old clairvoyant Cassie Holmes (Fanning) tracks him down. Gant and Fanning then team up to track down Kira (Belle), who is the only person ever to have escaped Division, and stop the agency’s activities once and for all.
“The plot is incredibly entertaining,” Evans told The Concordian. “I’d like to believe we offer something in the way of special effects I don’t think has been done before.”
Sure, Push sounds suspiciously like the plot for Fantastic Four and X-Men, but 27-year old Evans maintains “there are certainly are no similarities in the characters.”
The film is said to be drastically different from other superhero films such as Daredevil and Spiderman, as nobody in the film knows that these powers exist. Evans thinks that this “makes the stakes a bit higher.”
Shooting in Hong Kong, the actors often found themselves out of their comfort zone. Evans spoke to us about these unusual living conditions. “In a lot of ways I felt like I was on an island.”
The food was also an adjustment for Chris.
“It’s got a different cuisine than America. You’d be hard press to just find a nice piece of white chicken meat.”
Evans says the most fun he had while shooting the film was working with Dakota Fanning.
“She is something, man, she is a little firecracker,” he said. “And her maturity level is somewhere in the 30s, while my maturity level is somewhere around 12.” Camilla Belle also shared her adoration for the young Fanning.
“I think we really bonded over the fact we’ve been working our whole lives and kind of learned on the job,” she said. Belle describes her character Kira as “quite fun too, because there is a lot of fight scenes . . . she’s really tough, and she always kind of keeps you guessing as to whether she is good or she is bad.”
Belle also enjoyed working with director Paul Mcguigan.
“As a director [he] is so different from any other director I have ever worked with before,” she said. “He really spends his time talking to the actors, and he would hold conversations for hours.”
Push hits the big screen on Feb. 6.
