After releasing two near-perfect first features, the immigration drama Sin Nombre and this year's moody adaptation of Jane Eyre, it seems there's pretty much nothing director Cary Fukunaga can't do. But does that extend to taking on a sci-fi premise that seems tailor made for an entirely different young filmmaking star? Let me explain. THR reports that for his next project Fukunaga will take on Spaceless, a sci-fi drama about an assassin who wakes up tumbling through outer space in a spacesuit that's running out of air. There's a computer there to keep him company as he puts together the pieces of what happened, and eventually starts questioning his reality, "unsure if he is succumbing to madness or in an artificially created environment."
I know it's lazy to simply compare a new movie to recent films that sound similar to it-- that's how you get all the dumb "It's The Blind Side meets Babe!" pitches in trade articles. But does Spaceless not sound like a perfect mash-up of Duncan Jones's previous two movies? You've got a man alone in space accompanied by a computer and trying to understand his circumstances-- that's the vague outline of Jones's first feature Moon. Then you've got a man locked in a confined space and trying to figure out what trauma led him there, coached by a computer and eventually questioning how real his circumstances are-- that, plus a lot of other things, makes up the spine of Jones's recent Source Code. Of course there's likely a lot more to the plot of Spaceless than this basic description, but between those parallels and the upcoming Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock as a woman trapped alone in space, we seem to be working with a mini-trend here.
Fukunaga's previous two films have been so good, though, that it's worth trusting him to see where he goes with this-- he's also rewriting the script, which gives him an even better opportunity to put his stamp on it. He probably knows as well as anyone that this sci-fi premise runs the risk of feeling tired, and if he's as brilliant as his work so far has suggested, he'll make something imaginative and new out of it anyway. Presumably this project will be coming after No Blood, No Guts, No Glory, the Civil War-set heist film that was announced in May as Fukunaga's next film.
