By Dark City is arguably one of the best sci-fi films produced in the 90s, notable for it’s pre-Matrix notions of psycho-social control and the highly stylized world that director Alex Proyas and his team created. Since those days, Proyas has gone on to make big-budget sci-fi vehicles, like 2004’s I, Robot and 2009’s Knowing, of which I wasn’t particularly impressed with the former (I would have preferred a more faithful treatment of Asimov’s collection of short stories) and haven’t heard any positivity surrounding the latter.
This makes me sad knowing that Proyas is taking on the impossible adaptation of Paradise Lost, as well as the Dracula origins story, Dracula Year Zero. Both projects sound interesting and touch on my childhood obsession with Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, and a newfound academic obsession with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. I can only hope that Proyas will bring back some of the awesome he showed in Dark City for these deserving projects. Happily, I find that Proyas will focus on the battle between Heaven’s seraphim and Lucifer’s rebel angels, a far less cinematically impossible segment of the epic poem to recreate, but, by the gods, he better do it right. Milton’s work is a masterpiece of originality and craft that should be treated with the sort of reverence Peter Jackson gave LoTR, except WAY more for being one of the most seminal works of the past five centuries. Okay, tangent over.
Looking beyond these two projects, Proyas is in talks to produce and possibly direct sci-fi thriller AMP, according to Deadline, a film set in the near-future where advanced technology renders the disabled whole again, but also turns them into supermen, leading to moral and violent repercussions. That’s what I’m actually here to report. Summit has purchased the rights to the story, and hired Daniel H. Wilson, who wrote the novels that both AMP and Robopocalypse are being based on, to script the adaptation.
[via Deadline]