All Things:Science Fiction/Fantasy

Dan Trachtenberg to Direct VALENCIA. Bad Robot and Paramount Insurge Producing VALENCIA | Collider

After his short film based on the video game Portal went viral, director Dan Trachtenberg has been attached to several projects including Crime of the Century and Y: The Last Man. Nothing has come to fruition yet, so Valencia is poised to be Trachtenberg’s feature directorial debut after closing a deal with Bad Robot and Insurge Pictures (a Paramount division for low-budget projects). The Wrap provides the synopsis for the Dan Casey script:

“The majority of the movie takes place in an underground cellar, home to a teenage girl and a caretaker. The girl woke up in the cellar after a car accident, at which point her eerie companion tells her a nuclear attack has devastated society. The girl still hopes to escape.”

Paramount greenlit the $5 million production for a fall start date. Check out Trachtenberg’s Portal: No Escape after the jump.
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Nice micro-budget/Twilight Zone concept. Look forward to it.
 
I just finished watching Europa Report! What an astonishingly good piece of hard science fiction filmmaking!!
 
Review: Johnny Depp looks bored by the silly science-fiction ideas of Transcendence

The film is handsomely made for the most part, but considering how big the story they're trying to tell is, there's something sort of low-rent about the way they actually imagined it. For all of the world significance that these events supposedly carry, everything seems to happen between a few characters in one of the blandest settings imaginable. The big climax to the film boils down to a couple of characters standing around in a solar panel farm arguing while things blow up. I feel bad for the cast. Rebecca Hall tries to give some sense of inner life to a character that exists mainly to react to expository dialogue dumps, but it's a battle she can't win. Bettany doesn't fare much better, and poor Kate Mara is stranded as the leader of the terrorist group. She has to glower a lot and snarl a few speeches, but it's a terrible role, and she's unable to make it work.

More than anything, I find this kind of film dispiriting. Science-fiction is an amazing genre. Our greatest authors have used it to look forward and imagine all the ways that we as a species might flourish and evolve, while this sort of thing falls closer to the people who believe that evolution is a lie and cavemen rode around on dinosaurs, scared to death that science might offer answers that simple faith cannot. This is a movie that is terrified of the future, and it seizes on all the worst possible versions of the ideas that it attempts to discuss. "Transcendence" implies something wonderful, some moment where we become something else, but as a film, this is resolutely grounded, afraid to fly, and it offers up the most pedestrian, familiar version of a story that deserves better.
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Well, there ya go.
 
Check Out the Trailer for EJECTA - From PONTYPOOL Scribe Tony Burgess! - Ain't It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news.

PONTYPOOL remains one of my favorite horror films from the past few years. It is a fantastically creepy, creative and fascinating take on the zombie genre that sets it apart from many of its contemporaries. Much of this is thanks to its writer, Tony Burgess, who managed to take his rather unorthodox book and turn it into a modern day indie horror classic.

Which is a good reason to get excited about his next project - EJECTA.

EJECTA is the story of two men who witness an unexplainable event in the atmosphere on the eve of a historic solar storm and must survive a terrifying life form that's hunting them. An anonymous group will stop at nothing to unearth the truth behind what happened to the men that night and prove to the world that we were never alone in the universe.

The film is being billed as something of a love letter to 80's low-budget sci-fi - a fact that really comes across in the trailer footage.
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F yeah...Pontypool!!!!!!
 
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