I originally published this article on Ymag.

As you might have read somewhere (like here, here or here), Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez has just signed a deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures for a future feature sci-fi movie. Raimi was impressed by a short clip Alvarez created and posted on YouTube (see video above), immediately becoming a hit on the video-sharing platform. AtaqueDePànico shows some giant robots attacking the city of Montevideo and destroying all its landmarks, eventually exploding and reducing everything to rubble in a surprisingly good FX spree.

Little else happens in the short movie, which has nonetheless been compared to Neill Blomkamp's Alive in Joberg, the one that eventually led to District 9. Which one is better and YouTube's exact role in hi-jacking the attention of the Hollywood industry's talent scouts are debates I'll leave for other occasions. What I'm really curious about is: where will Alvarez's feature film be set?
As we've seen before, Peter Jackson's support to District 9 has been rather invisible and not patronizing, allowing Blomkamp's movie to become an unprecedented example of sci-fi imagery going global and enriching itself with unexpected locations and social actuality. Seeing Johannesburg taking the place of New York as the theater of human-alien confrontation was one of the reasons why I think the movie is significant: it was also an opportunity to legitimate the ascension of local geographies to the status of global imagery.

Palacio Salvo tower, Montevideo's most famous landmark

But we know Peter Jackson is the New Zealand-born father of wacky pop-culture-bludgeoning underground gems such as Meet the Feebles, and I personally think (wish?) some of that has survived despite his later mainstream exploits (read: King Kong). Rephrasing that: he's not the Industry.
On the other side we have Sam Raimi and his Hollywood-based company. Although the Evil Dead-father has himself been toying and experimenting with genres, famously ranging from horror to comedy in the span of one trilogy, the production background is different than Jackson's and definitely Alvarez's flick will be likely to have a different kind of peer-pressure to begin with.

Will the next alien invasion be an opportunity to extend the sci-fi map and have a fresh look at Uruguayans having to deal (for once) with aliens, or will the rare low-budget prologue to the movie remain a signal for the entertainment industry and commercial strategies 2.0, with Alvarez's robots bombing (yet one more time) the Statue of Liberty?