After Earth | La Fortuna de San Carlos — the rainforest town that hosted the shoot

La Fortuna is a grid of nine or ten streets around a park, a white church at one end, and the volcano filling the gap at the end of every northbound block. In early February 2012 it absorbed a Hollywood unit: cast and crew arrived on the 4th, cameras turned on the 6th, and for several weeks the soda counters and hardware shops of a town of about ten thousand people were servicing a hundred-million-dollar science fiction film.

The district of La Fortuna, in the canton of San Carlos, was the production's base and its location pool at once. Everything the script needed — closed-canopy rainforest, river gorges, the volcano itself — sits within a half-hour drive of the plaza. Costa Rican coverage at the time treated the shoot as a test case for whether the country could host large foreign productions, and the answer turned out to be yes.

You can see why they stayed here rather than commuting from San José. The Río Fortuna drops 70 metres into a plunge pool fifteen minutes south of town, reached by a 500-step concrete staircase. Hot springs run along the road west. Everything is close, and everything is green in a way that reads as prehistoric on camera.

Order a casado at a counter on the main street and watch the tour vans stack up outside. This is a working tourism town that happened to be a film set for a month, and it has never made much fuss about it. That is part of the pleasure.

Locations reported by The Tico Times and M. Night Fans production updates. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.