The new Charlize Theron Netflix movie APEX delivers on exactly what it promises viewers: Theron—looking amazing as always—battling the Australian wilderness while fleeing from a deranged serial killer (Taron Egerton).
Directed by Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur, with a screenplay written by Jeremy Robbins, APEX stars Theron as Sasha, an experienced climber grieving the death of her husband (played by Eric Bana). She embarks on a solo hiking-and-kayaking trip in the Australian wilderness, where she meets a friendly local (Egerton) who offers her travel tips. But when she follows the route he suggests, she quickly realizes he isn’t friendly at all. He’s a deranged serial killer, and he wants to hunt the most dangerous game: her.
Without revealing too many spoilers, the movie ends with a news broadcast, which had some viewers wondering if this was a ripped-from-the-headlines, true crime thriller. But Australian hikers can rest easy knowing that the APEX movie is not based on a true story.
Is the APEX movie based on a true story?
No, APEX is not based on a true story. The characters and situations were invented for the movie. It is a work of fiction, which means it was made up, and not based on any news story or anything that happened in real life.
The original APEX script was included on the 2021 Black List, an annual list of the “best” un-produced scripts. In a recent interview for The Black List newsletter, APEX writer Jeremy Robbins shared where he originally got the idea for the movie, which he wrote during the 2020 lock down.
“This was a story I had pitched to my wife a year earlier on vacation in Hawaii,” Robbins said. “I pitched her the opening that now exists in the movie. It just kind of came to me and I pitched it and she was like…”You should write that movie. I kind of took a year before I was ready to write it, but the idea stuck around, which I always take as a pretty good indication that there’s something there worth writing.”
The script that Robbins originally wrote was set in the United States, based on areas where Robbins himself has gone hiking in the the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. “I was kind of piecing together The Narrows from Zion and Half Dome from Yosemite and cobbling together an imaginary national park that doesn’t exist,” the writer explained.
But, as director Baltasar Kormákur explained to Decider in a recent interview, the production need to shoot in Australia for a variety of practical reasons. Kormákur didn’t want to use Australia to stand in for somewhere else, so he worked with Robbins to re-toll the script to be set in Australia. “Let’s make our reality build the story, rather than the opposite,” Kormákur told Decider. “We found these Blue Mountains [a mountain range in New South Wales, Australia], which are crazy, those walls—I love the color of them and how exotic they are. Then I decided, let’s oppose that with with the coldest wall in the world, which is the Troll Wall in Norway.”
So, even though APEX is not based on a true story, the APEX filming locations featured in the movie are real places, and, in some cases, the production was even filmed in those places.
Even the characters in the movie are not based on real people, Robbins did do research on extreme climbers to help him build Sasha’s character. “I watched a lot of docs and read a lot of memoirs,” Robbins said. “I was so drawn to the psychology of a climber and that kind of larger than life, out-of-time, explorer mentality that brings people to the mountains in a kind of extreme way.”
And yes, extreme climbers really do pitch their tents off the side of mountains like you see Charlize Theron and Eric Bana doing in the opening scene. It’s called a portaledge, and it’s terrifying!