ProjectPower is a 2020 American science fiction action film[3] directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, produced by Eric Newman and Bryan Unkeless, and written by Mattson Tomlin. It stars Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dominique Fishback, alongside Colson Baker, Rodrigo Santoro, Amy Landecker and Allen Maldonado, and follows a drug dealer, a police officer, and a former soldier who team up to stop the distribution of a pill that gives the user superpowers for five minutes.
The film was released on August 14, 2020, by Netflix. It received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, who praised the performances of the cast, action sequences and visuals but criticized the screenplay.[4]
Six weeks later, Newt's teenage cousin Robin, a dealer herself, is nearly robbed by customers seeking Power. She is rescued by NOPD Officer Frank Shaver, one of her regular buyers. Art, a man hunting for the distributor "Biggie", tracks down Newt, who dies after a struggle when he overdoses on Power. Frank foils a bank robbery by a Power-enhanced thief, but is suspended for using Power himself. His captain reveals that government personnel are pressuring him to terminate any investigation into Power, and gives Frank a picture of the man they suspect to be the source of the drug: Art.
Using Newt's phone to find and abduct Robin, Art forces her to take him to the drug cartel's safehouse. He is shot while eliminating several of the cartel's men, and discovers that Power users throughout New Orleans are being monitored as test subjects for the drug. Art bonds with Robin as they treat his wounds, and reveals that after leaving the military, he was recruited by Teleios, a private defense contractor who experimented on him to create superpowers. His daughter Tracy, born after the experiments, exhibited powers without ever taking the drug, and was abducted by Wallace, a Teleios operative.
Art and Robin find Biggie hosting a private demonstration of Project Power for a potential buyer near the Superdome, where large groups of Saints fans are arriving for a home game. Biggie claims that Power represents "the next evolution of the human species", with the pill's powers derived from the abilities of animals, such as the chameleon or the wolverine frog. Art interrogates Biggie at gunpoint and learns of a ship, the Genesis, but Frank intervenes, having tracked other users to the demonstration. Biggie takes a dose of Power, forcing Art, Robin, and Frank to flee as Art kills Biggie in an explosion.
Frank arrests Art and informs his captain, but Art explains that the Power epidemic in New Orleans is mass testing to stabilize the drug, and that Tracy is the source of the drug's powers. Having convinced Frank that his captain is actually taking orders from Teleios, Art purposely has himself captured by Teleios and taken aboard the Genesis. Frank and Robin infiltrate the ship, and Art persuades a guard to free him. Frank and Art kill Wallace, while Robin finds Tracy and reunites her with her father.
As the four attempt to flee, Robin is captured by Dr. Gardner, the head of Project Power, who demands Tracy in exchange for Robin's life. Art confronts Gardner, using Power, which gives him the ability of a pistol shrimp to finally kill Gardner and her men. Despite this costing Art his life, Tracy ultimately resurrects him with her powers. They all escape the ship.
Frank intends to expose Project Power to the press, while Art decides to move on. He gives Robin his truck and a bag full of money to cover her mother's medical needs, telling her to use the greatness inside of her. Art and Tracy depart, finally free. Meanwhile, Robin begins a new career as a rapper.
In October 2017, it was announced that Netflix had acquired Mattson Tomlin's spec script Power in a bidding war with several other studios. Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost would direct the film, with Eric Newman and Bryan Unkeless producing.[5] In September 2018, Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Dominique Fishback joined the cast of the then-untitled film.[6][7] In October 2018, Rodrigo Santoro, Amy Landecker, Allen Maldonado, Kyanna Simone Simpson, Andrene Ward-Hammond, Machine Gun Kelly, and Casey Neistat joined the cast of the film.[8][9] In November 2018, Jim Klock joined the cast of the film.[10] In December 2018, Courtney B. Vance joined the cast of the film.[11] In July 2020, it was announced that the film would officially be titled Project Power.[12]
Principal photography began on October 8, 2018 and concluded on December 22, 2018.[13][14] Filming took place in New Orleans.[15][16] On October 31, 2018, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was injured during filming while riding a bicycle.[16] The film had a total production budget of $85.1 million, with $80.4 million spent on-location in Louisiana.[2]
Project Power was released by Netflix on August 14, 2020.[17] It was the top-streamed film on the platform in its first two weekends before finishing in second place in its third.[18][19][20] In October 2020, Netflix reported 75 million households watched the film over its first four weeks of release.[21] In November, Variety reported the film was the 12th-most watched straight-to-streaming title of 2020 up to that point.[22]
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 61% based on 178 reviews, with an average rating of 5.7/10. The website's critics' consensus reads: "Although it wastes some of the potential of its premise, Project Power is a slick, fun action thriller - and features a star-making turn from Dominique Fishback."[23] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[24]
Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney said that "what makes Project Power entertaining is its canny combination of familiar ingredients in a textured real-world milieu that gives it fresh flavor."[25] Kate Erbland of IndieWire gave the film a "C+" and said that "Project Power wrestles with a litany of thorny moral issues (and not only those of the 'great power, great responsibility' vibe) but never fully engages with them. There's broad strokes about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans residents, and a paper-thin exploration of the criminal implications of a cop not only using the drug, but buying it off a teenage dealer."[26]
No shame. No blame. Just one aim. Project Power is here to help the whole family. As a no-cost lifestyle change program, Project Power empowers adults and children to reduce their risk or manage and thrive with type 2 diabetes.
Project Power is an initiative which aims to help adults and youth raise diabetes awareness and offers diabetes risk reduction education. With support from CVS Health, Project Power is on a mission to tackle the diabetes epidemic.
It came to me as part of an on-going conversation with Barnaby Raine about the themes of power and freedom and a discussion in Beijing with Cui Zhiyuan moderated by Wang Qing, hosted by Imaginist, the publisher of Crashed and Deluge in Chinese translation.
3. Think of the difference between factory production and high-rise construction, or the difference between schooling and the life-long and haphazard business of self-fashioning. Think of the difference between making a disciplined army out of raw recruits and actually using that army in war.
Factory production involves routinized, endlessly repeated processes. Drilling an army is, likewise, a matter of inculcated routine. Constructing buildings and fighting a campaign involves quite different processes and energies. Of course, both may involve standardized components, but they are assembled and arranged, each one according to a specific design and vision. Each choice is distinct, idiosyncratic, particular. Each has irreversible consequences.
Hierarchy and inequality have structural preconditions, but they are produced and reproduced through clashing, rivalrous and unequal projects. Structures of power and inequality are the result not simply of inherited, given structures, but of repeated success and failures in a churning melee of projects and counter-projects.
You can build a revolutionary party and discipline its member. You can organize a large labour movement, but if you want to change the world you have to size up your putative friends as well as your enemies, gauge your relative strength, and pick the moment to strike. That was a bitter lesson learned by the CCP in Shanghai in 1927.
One might, for instance, distinguish between the production of heterosexual desire, the rules of dating at a specific time and place and the logic of a dramatic declaration of love. They are all interrelated, but each involves a different logic of agency and power.
Of course, the exercise of hegemony has involved both production and discipline. It is constrained and shaped by geopolitical givens. But US hegemony, the only version that has ever operated at a truly global scale, is best understood as a project.
8. The aim of these series of notes is to describe US hegemony as project. Not as a monolith, not as a natural sequel to earlier forms of global power, but as an original, precarious innovation, one that has had to be repeatedly renewed and reorganized.
It may fragmented and exhausting itself in the current moment but it is not doomed to extinction by a quasi-natural sequence of historic cycles. And whatever global power structure emerges in the future is unlikely to resemble the past.
9. As Foucault taught us, power and knowledge are intimately imbricated. Different kinds of power constitute different kinds of knowledge and visa versa. So this raises the question of what kind of knowledge is particular to project-power.
If one had to generalize, one might say that the form of knowledge that is particular to project-power is historical knowledge. As discreet interventions located in time, interventions that make a difference, projects are necessarily located in histories.
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