While it maybe easy to think that contemporary Hollywood cinema is a torrent of sewage like fads threatening to drown out art and intellect with the foul stench of consumerism with 3D, remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, Pirates, Transformers and the art of cinemas Osama Bin Laden, James Cameron: much of the coming twelve months is sufficiently bleak that the only solution appears to be the construction of a vast wall around the people of Los Angeles, only to be brought down when they have learned to behave themselves. Mercifully, there are always chinks of light from behind the darkest of veils and, currently, this is a propensity for the sort of conceptual, intelligent science-fiction cinema that fell out of vogue at the end of the 1970s. Last years Inception by Christopher Nolan was an obvious indicator of this trend, but more importantly this demonstrated how such cerebral cinema can be popular, but there are other smaller- possibly better- examples, including the Duncan Jones films, Moon and Source Code or The Adjustment Bureau to name but a few. Apparently keen to exploit this counter-trend are Paramount Pictures who
have optioned the rights to American science-fiction classic
The Martian Chronicles.
Ray Bradburys novel, released in 1950, comprises of a series of interweaving stories across a generation of people living on Earth and Mars and the war, loss and romance that colours the lives of the Martian inhabitants and their colonizers. Regarded as a superlative example of the genre, The Martian Chronicles has once before been adapted for a television series by fellow lauded sci-fi writer Richard Matheson- of which Bradbury did not approve- and was optioned by Universal in 1997 with a view to Steve Spielberg producing which never came to fruition. With Universals option agreement now relapsed, Paramount have stepped in and hired
John Davis (Gullivers Travels) to oversee the development of the project as producer although, currently, there is no writer or director attached.