Thanks to the entertainment industry’s conclusion that moviegoers and TV viewers are jonesing for nothing more than to relive the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013, there are now at least three projects in the works based on those events. However, the latest entry is poised to be a less literal interpretation than either Fox’s planned docudrama miniseries or the presumably heavily accented upcoming movie scripted by the screenwriters of The Fighter and starring Casey Affleck.
Variety reports that Andrzej Bartkowiak—a veteran cinematographer on Speed and Species, whose forays into directing have included no fewer than three movies co-starring DMX, as well as the video game adaptations Doom and Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li—has signed on to direct Altar Rock, a movie “inspired by” the Boston bombing. In a video posted last year, co-screenwriter Kristin Alexandre explains that her movie is based on a novel she wrote that takes a Law & Order approach to the bombing, with a story similar to the prominent news story, but not similar enough to arouse any litigation.
As Alexandre explains, Altar Rock is the story of Nantucket teen Tillie Gardner, whom the movie’s official website describes as “an orphan, like the orphans on 9/11,” having lost her parents in a plane crash. She falls for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s non-union Albanian equivalent, a handsome young cab driver named Niko, but then has to make some hard decisions when she learns that Niko and his troubled older brother may have been responsible for her parents’ fatal crash, and also are going to blow up the beach on the Fourth of July. Altar Rock begins filming in Massachusetts next year.