Animal attack movies seem to have truly peaked about a decade ago, but Megan Fox is apparently trying her best to subvert the war genre with a lion attack film of her own with Rogue. The trailer, which dropped on Tuesday, starts out looking like a classic war film with a specialized force, led by a tattered Yankees cap-wearing Fox, executing a rescue plan against a well-armed group of unknown origin.
The trailer lays the plot of the movie out as such: Fox’s team has recovered the daughter of a governor, played by Jessica Sutton (The Kissing Booth). Their extraction helicopter blows up, though, setting up a fight for survival that will take them far from the original plan. And then a… lion shows up to try eating everyone in sight?
The trailer quickly goes from war film to horror, with an upbeat musical cue and the revelation that the movie is from the director of Silent Hill: Revelation. And unlike Cloverfield, we get to see the Big Bad right away here.
Fox has shined in these kind of less serious roles before, with Jennifer’s Body atop the list of cult favorites in that realm. The trailer actually has an odd juxtaposition to it, with the beginning and end looking straight out of the war-torn cliche playbook and the middle serving as the big reveal to the film’s true antagonist: a female lion. The tag line “All Hail The Queen” surely will have some symbolism to work with: is it about Fox’s Samantha O’Hara or the lion trying to kill every human on screen?
The movie is going the on-demand route, with a release date set for August 28 according to the trailer. As for an explanation for this particularly human-hunting lion? Take it from one character in the film, who simply said “some lions go rogue.” Good enough for me.