Deus Ex movie won’t be a videogame movie

It will be a cyberpunk movie

So it looks like we’re still getting that Deus Ex movie, whether we like it or not. The tragic history of film adaptations of videogames makes me less than enthused about the project; however, the setting and philosophical quandaries of Deus Ex: Human Revolution do make for an interesting set-up, even if I felt that the game itself dealt with them in a rather lackluster fashion.

C. Robert Cargill, who has been working on the screenplay, and director Scott Derrickson attempted to put folks’ minds at ease in a recent interview with CraveOnline. “The chief philosophy is we’re not making a video game movie, we’re making a cyberpunk movie,” Cargill explained. Seeing as that I love the latter and despise the former, it’s certainly reassuring to hear this — if it actually turns out to be true.

Cargill has been doing a spot of research in an effort to avoid the many mistakes made by other videogame movies. “We’ve taken a look at what’s worked in video games and what hasn’t, and really what we’ve broken down is what we think the audience really wants, [what] the audience that loves Deus Ex is going to want to see out of a Deus Ex movie. And it’s not a rehashing of the game.”

Since cyberpunk isn’t exactly a genre that has seen much love in cinema, Cargill and Derrickson have been drawing inspiration from other recent science-fiction flicks that attempt to do something a wee bit different.

“We’re looking at movies like District 9 and Looper, and Inception,” Cargill clarified. “Those are the molds of what we’ve been doing. It’s… Let’s push this and do something new with concepts people love, but tell a story that they’ve never seen before, that just melts their brain.”

Derrickson believes that now is the time when cyberpunk movies can really do well. “There’s a reason we haven’t had a great cyberpunk movie yet. There’s a reason why a sci-fi movie as great as Neuromancer has never made it to the screen. I do think there’s a new wave coming, and not just because the technology and the effects are up to speed, but I think that there’s a sensibility to cyberpunk that the movies are catching up with.

If they truly are just using the setting and some of the themes from Human Revolution, I could actually get onboard. Trans-humanism is a fascinating subject, and Eidos Montreal did a pretty good job in creating their near-future dystopia, but I fret that it may devolve into some horrible action-packed spectacle more reminiscent of Human Revolution’s boss battles rather than the title’s more thought-provoking moments. 

It Will Be Cyberpunk… [CraveOnline via PC Gamer]