Despite being almost completely shut out of this year’s awards race, it’s hard to argue with the fact that director Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners was one of 2013’s stronger efforts. Though he’d experienced substantial success in the past, most notably with his Oscar nominated film Incendies, it was really the aforementioned kidnapping drama that put him on the map. Now, he’s using the goodwill he earned with that film to put some other projects into development, one of which is a sci-fi drama titled The Story of Your Life, based on the short story by Ted Chiang.
The Eric Heisserer-scripted film will tell the story of a “linguist hired by the military to communicate with an alien craft to try and figure out why they’ve come to Earth. And in the course of her communication with the aliens, she has flashbacks that could reveal the answer of why they have arrived.”
As I mentioned before, Prisoners was certainly one of the better films of last year, and some of the director’s other efforts, most notably Incendies and Enemy, have been pretty impressive as well. It seems that Villeneuve is on a real hot streak at the moment and given that I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen from him thus far, I can definitely say that I’m excited to see what he does next.
The Story of Your Life sounds like a neat sci-fi story and with a talented filmmaker like Denis Villeneuve behind the camera, I think it has the potential to really stand out in a genre where originality is becoming increasingly hard to find.
