Spielberg restarts Kubrick’s AI

Steven Spielberg has officially announced his new directorial project. After months of speculation he has opted to take up AI (Artificial Intelligence), a Science Fiction epic originally developed by his friend Stanley Kubrick.

Before he died in 1999, Kubrick had actually suggested that Spielberg would be the best director for the job. Spielberg is to take the existing draft material and complete the script himself, making it his first self-penned screenplay since Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.

AI is based on a 1969 short story by British SF author Brian Aldiss called Super-Toys Last All Summer Long. In typically studious fashion, Kubrick collaborated with Aldiss, Arthur C Clarke and other writers on the potential film which gradually synthesized over the years. The premise is believed to involve a child who interacts with new kinds of hyper-intelligent, self-aware computers.
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New Line reopens Forbidden zone

Another SF milestone due to be re-made is 1956’s Forbidden Planet. New Line, the studio behind Lost in Space, Blade and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, has been after the re-make rights for years.

There is no cast or crew attached as yet, although Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) has reportedly been in discussion with New Line’s Michael DeLuca after James Cameron declined. DeLuca told Ain’t-It-Cool News, “I was interested because the original film, plus its source material, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, offer up an incredible opportunity to make the most imaginative and emotional Science Fiction epic since 2001...

"I want to base it in NASA’s ponderings today of what life and interstellar travel could be like 300 years from now. I promise we won’t make it ever unless it’s stunning and warrants it."

The lost generation

Veteran X-Files director Rob Bowman (whose work includes the big-screen version of that series) is to helm Generation Ship.

Based on Phoenix Without Ashes by Edward Bryant and Harlan Ellison (who penned Star Trek’s City on the Edge of Forever and many a classic 1960s Outer Limits) and adapted by Bowman and David Goyer (Blade), the story follows a giant spacecraft that houses all that’s left of humanity in a series of giant domes, so large that the inhabitants don’t yet know they’re on a ship.

Bryant and Ellison’s book was previously developed into The Starlost, a little-known Canadian TV series in the 1970s.

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