Though his latest effort may have proved to be a turkey in retrospect, David Koepp’s writing and directing work on Mortedcai needn’t be an indication on the screenwriter’s venerable career. And it’s a reputation that means that talent is never far off of a studio’s radar, what with Sony Pictures tapping him to help adapt Sylvain Neuvel’s acclaimed novel, The Themis Files.
Described as a sci-fi tome, Neuvel’s book orbits around a young, 11-year old girl named Rose Franklin, who happens across an ancient alien artefact buried beneath the ground in South Dakota. When word begins to spread life wildfire of its existence, the US government makes an unprecedented move to launch a global investigation into the extra-terrestrial object, and what it could mean for life on earth. Is it a weapon of mass destruction, or something else entirely?
Having worked across Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy not to mention Mission: Impossible, Koepp has had his fair share of experience working on and indeed writing for blockbuster productions, and Sony Pictures will no doubt be hoping that the screenwriter will be the man of the hour to wrangle this high-concept vision onto the big screen with aplomb.
We’ll bring you news of Sony’s rendition of Sylvain Neuvel’s The Themis Files as this story develops. In the meantime, you can gain a gist of the concept of the project via the synopsis below.
The novel revolves around a secret project to assemble the ancient body parts of a giant humanoid relic buried throughout the world by aliens. It’s discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where a young girl named Rose Franklin falls into a huge hole and literally lands in the palm of a giant metal hand. The government swarms, but loses interest after failing to gain any military or technological secrets. By the time it’s demilitarized years later, that young girl is a physicist with the University of Chicago and she spearheads the building project after other body parts are discovered around the U.S. She tries all this covertly in an underground facility in Denver but when her project goes public, the paranoia and greed push mankind to the brink of world war, even as its researchers puzzle over whether they are reviving a weapon of mass destruction or something else.
