From empireonline, As you may have heard, Roland Emmerich, the man who obliterated The White House in Independence Day and flooded much of Manhattan in the unfairly maligned Day After Tomorrow, is planning a remake of camp sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage. Empire sat down with the director recently and he talked about his long history with the project and some major changes he's planning to the film before he gets behind the camera.
“I was attached to this project 15 years ago with [former producing partner] Dean Devlin and then we gave it back because we wanted to do some other original projects we had developed,” Emmerich remembers of his long association with the much mooted remake of the 1968 movie, in which a titchy crew in a tiny submarine is injected into a human body to do battle with corpuscles. “Then James Cameron came in and worked on the project. Two years ago Jim called me up and said ‘Roland I want you to look at the script for Fantastic Voyage – it’s not there yet’. And he sent it over and I hated the script.”
Key among Emmerich’s gripes was the screenplay’s futuristic setting. “ I said why have you put this in the future? I said let this happen now. It’s so much more cool and fun when we can say to a normal person from now, 'well we’re going to make you microscopic and put you in some submarine which we will shrink down and you have to do this stuff inside a body.’"
The signature Cameron militarism also didn't sit well with Emmerich's vision. “There were two submarines in the body. It was like a Navy SEALS film. And then the president of production at Fox – me and my partner and him all go surfing together – says 'Well, will you do it with a page one rewrite and we won’t start until you’re happy with the script?' So then I said yes. The key is I won’t do it unless it’s going to be a good movie.”
Marianne and Cormac Wibberley (National Treasure 2) are currently rewriting the script. It seems unlikely that shooting will commence pre-strike, so we could potentially be looking at a 2010 release for the movie.
1 comment:
Damn it!
First of all, Fantastic Voyage is not "camp." What it is, is something else we call "bad." as in "not very well done (especially by today's standards)" combined with an extremely serious tone that makes anyone who catches five minutes of the thing today start laughing and say, "Well, this has to be 'camp,' right? I mean, they can't be serious."
But they are serious (as serious as mediocre sci-fi storytellers get) so it's not camp.
The novelization of Fantastic Voyage was written by Isaac Asimov and it's pretty good. The movie is basically just crap but that doesn't mean it doesn't contain an interesting idea: that they have to get really small and go inside this guy. The plot mechanics that make it CRUCIAL that they do it or it's the END OF THE WORLD is a bunch of cold-war nonsense about how only this man can prevent the Russians from doing something scary.
Asimov gets into the physics and explains how Brownian Motion (like in stirred coffee) can kill you when you're that small, and stuff like that.
What am I really saying here? Nothing.
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