Busy at work on filming an adaptation of the Michael Morpurgo novel War Horse and finishing post-production on the first film in a planned Tintin trilogy, both of which will be released within 5 days of each other, you would have thought the Oscar winning director Steven Spielberg would be too busy to consider another project. However one of the most prolific filmmakers in Hollywood has ‘commited’ to directing a screen adaptation of the upcoming sci-fi novel Robopocalypse. Based on a novel by Daniel H Wilson and scripted by Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard, set in the future, it tells the story of the human races struggle to overcome a robot uprising. Spielberg has always been fascinated with how advances in technology will negatively affect the future, whether it be A.I. or Minority Report or even Jurassic Park, and this could be a further development on those themes.
The novel is yet to be released, but storyboarding is reportedly already taking place so Spielberg will have a running jump at getting casting and sets well underway when Tintin and War Horse are done with. Filming is reportedly starting in January 2012, eyeing for a 2013 release. While I always await the arrival of a new Spielberg film with excitement, will Robopocalypse successfully manage to do something we haven’t seen before?
Robot uprisings are an old cliche that have too often supplied the main plot for bad Hollywood blockbusters, of which Spielberg hasn’t been entirely unrelated (Transformers 2 anyone?). We can’t forget however the man’s legendary back catalogue, which features some of the most iconic images, soundtracks and characters in cinema history, so we all should have faith that he could produce something extraordinary.
On the other hand it is also disappointing that we aren’t seeing any further developments in the speculated Lincoln biopic or the Jonathan Nolan scripted Interstellar, maybe if we see critical and commercial success with War Horse and Tintin Spielberg might announce those two long running projects for the near future.
