Entertainment

Eisenberg, The Ecoterrorist

by Alanna Bennett

Jesse Eisenberg will be taking an interesting career move soon with his turn as Lex Luthor in the sequel to Man Of Steel. This trailer for Night Moves , though, makes the role seem like less of a leap. Albeit one overall less Machiavellian. The film stars Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard as three environmentalists trying to blow up a hydroelectric dam. As they prepare to complete their goal issues of trust bubble up around the stakes, and the trailer seems to show that this thing's built as a slow-burning thriller.

Here's a snippet from Indiewire's Eric Kohn's review of the film that sums it up pretty nicely:

While set in modern times, Night Moves could have been made decades ago, in the heyday of eco-terrorist groups like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation group, whose participants provide a model for the movie’s protagonists. At its center is a trio of disturbed radicals: Josh (Eisenberg), a soft-spoken farmworker, Dena (Fanning), a high school dropout who comes from a wealthy family, and ex-marine Harmon (Sarsgaard). When the movie begins, the trio have already joined forces in Southern Oregon and concocted a plot to blow up one of the region’s oppressive dams. While the first hour steadily tracks their strategy sessions, the second finds them trapped by the fallout of the act. No other Reichardt film falls into this neat construction, which puts extremist action of any stripe under the microscope and magnifies its immediate ramifications. Only a political film by implication, Night Moves predominantly involves the moment-to-moment uneasiness of risky business.

So not quite the super-villainy that made Lex Luthor such an icon. But intriguing nonetheless.

Image: Maybach Film Productions