Alpha Gang was shot in 2,000-year-old Roman fortresses with no green screen, the same bet Nolan made on The Odyssey
Dave Bautista’s sci‑fi comedy Alpha Gang is being likened to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — and its directors say they went to remote extremes to earn the comparison.
Right, so here comes another project with Dave Bautista smack in the middle of it, this time orbiting the worlds of sci-fi and comedy. The film is called Alpha Gang, and even before it’s out, it’s being lumped in alongside Christopher Nolan’s latest epic, The Odyssey. Bit bold, that. Still, there’s actually something to the comparison besides just big names and genre trappings – it’s all about where (and how) they’ve shot the thing.
Turns out, it’s all real
The Zellner brothers, David and Nathan – the directors behind Alpha Gang – have been banging on about how they went full old school for this one. No endless green screens, no sound stages pretending to be Mars. They dragged their cast out to actual, physical, knackered bits of Europe.
During a chat with The Hollywood Reporter, the directors explained how they scouted locations with a very particular vibe in mind – and they really mean it when they say “remote”. We’re talking ancient Roman fortresses, the kind of crumbling church ruins you never see unless you’re far outside any tourist bus route, and enough brutalist concrete to keep any architecture nerd satisfied for weeks.
According to David Zellner, the idea wasn’t just to make things difficult for their location manager, but to bring a "mythic" vibe to the whole film. Here’s how he put it, reflecting on their approach to filming:
We went to these 2,000-year-old Roman fortresses and medieval church ruins and brutalist monuments. We discovered these locations online and picked them before we went there. None of them are easy to get to, which is why they haven’t really been filmed to death, and they’re a real pain in the ass to go shoot at — but it made it really cool because it just gives it this kind of epic mythic kind of quality on a bigger scale.
This isn’t just a showy production flex, either. Nolan did much the same for his take on The Odyssey (the film, not the Greek road trip), racking up air miles to land on real, often punishing locations across several countries. He’s been pretty vocal about preferring the grit and hassle of real-world sets, because – to paraphrase – fake rocks are for the fainthearted, and you can’t really get that sense of actual hardship otherwise.
Christopher Nolan picked real-world locations for The Odyssey because he wanted audiences to understand just how physical those journeys would have been for real people.
So yes, Alpha Gang isn’t mucking about with its visuals. It’s all there on the screen, no cheating, and, frankly, the travel cost sheet must be a right nightmare.
Stacked cast – and another big role for Bautista
The actors pulled along for this mad logistical ride include not just Dave Bautista but also Cate Blanchett, Chris Pine, Léa Seydoux, and Lily-Rose Depp among others. That’s a lot of expensive boots standing in the mud.
- Alpha Gang brings together Dave Bautista, Cate Blanchett, Chris Pine, Léa Seydoux, and Lily-Rose Depp.
If you think Bautista is trying to outdo himself for pure job variety, you’re not far off, because he’s also back in the trenches (sort of literally) for his other big gig – playing Kratos in the TV adaptation of God of War. He’s already started training up to play the iconic baldy with anger issues, having stepped into the role after Ryan Hurst got injured (torn biceps, ouch) and had to exit. Gritty stuff.
In God of War, Bautista’s Kratos teams up with his son Atreus – young, scrappy, and desperate to figure out dad’s whole god-slash-human mess. The plot follows their trek up the highest mountain across the Nine Realms, meant to scatter the ashes of Kratos’s late wife, Faye. As for the emotional centre, the official line is that Kratos is busy teaching Atreus how to be a decent god, while the kid’s mostly teaching his dad how to resemble a functioning person.
The supporting cast this time includes Callum Vinson, Teresa Palmer, Max Parker, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Mandy Patinkin, and Ed Skrein – no shortage of familiar faces if you keep your eye on genre telly.