Hathaway And Whishaw Join Spielberg’s Terrible Sounding ROBOPOCALYPSE
Anne Hathaway and new Q, Ben Whishaw are talks to join Chris Hemsworth in Steven Spielberg’s latest science fiction extravaganza, Robopocalypse. It also looks like former 20th Century Fox Chairman Tom Rothman will produce the film which will be will be distributed by Fox and Disney.
The thing is – this project (based on a novel by Daniel H. Wilson) sounds so…terrible, a Terminator rip-off. And don’t even get me started on the title!
Here’s the Wikipedia synopsis of the book:
“In the near future, an increasingly robot-reliant society faces extinction after a computer scientist accidentally unleashes a sentient artificial intelligence named Archos.
After failed attempts at making a non-homocidal artificial intelligence, the safeguards in a computer science lab are compromised. Archos, a supremely intelligent AI, becomes self-aware and immediately starts planning the decimation of human civilization in an attempt to preserve Earth’s biodiversity. After infecting all penetrable networked electronic devices (cars, airplanes, elevators, robots, etc.) with a “precursor virus”, Archos begins planning a systematic attack on the human race.
Before a full blown attack on humanity commences, Archos launches probing attacks to analyze the technical feasibility of its strategies and to assess human response. The random attacks are designed to look like sporadic malfunctions of devices that humans depend on for their everyday routines–a domestic robot attacking innocents, planes intentionally set on a collision course, smarts cars driving out of control.
Finally, at the Zero Hour, the entire automated world turns against humanity. Small bands of survivors find ways to circumvent the eradication and survive without modern technology. This is a story of those survivors in the months and days leading up to and following the cataclysm.
A group of Native Americans (whose leader has a son that is a POV character) lead a group that fights back, their base being a reservation, cumulating in an attack where some of the group turned into a robot/human hybrid with zombie-like behaviour.
In the end, a “freeborn” robot allied with a human squad, cuts off Archos’s communication with its robotic hordes. Archos’s base is infiltrated and the genocidal mastermind is destroyed by a stone age assault–bombardment with boulders–ending the war.”
Why would Spielberg want to make this when he has a conveyer belt of films that he could potentially make? It’s sure to be a cash cow, and it’s easy to see why the cast signed on (working with Spielberg), but (on the surface), there’s nothing new here that James Cameron didn’t cover in the Terminator series.
I think that Hemsworth and Hathaway are good casting choices and I’ll throw my hands up and admit that I was wrong if this is a genre ‘game changer’ (god, I hate that phrase), but I don’t expect that to happen.
Robopocalypse is scheduled to open on April 25, 2014
Sources: THR & Wikipedia
