While most Hollywood stories tend to favor man versus machine, the fact is many major blockbusters end up endorsing the robot worldview in their quest for crushing human flesh. The one-two punch of “Terminator Salvation” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” was especially dispiriting: the former falsely painted a portrait of an impotent robot revolution (we know those fuckers would NOT fail to kill John Connor in the middle of a goddamned Terminator factory), and the latter was as close to robot pornography as we’re gonna get. Let’s face it, robots are evil and want to kill us, and Hollywood isn’t helping.
One man seems to want to turn this around, based on the early impressions of a manuscript he’s written entitled “Robopocalypse.” Writer Daniel H. Wilson, a PhD in robotics, has seen his unpublished work purchased by Dreamworks. The manuscript itself will be published in 2011, so we’d guess the publisher is expecting the film would be fast-tracked to coincide with the book release. Either that, or the “manuscript” is one page of scientifically-accurate robot carnage, ending with the phrase, “Who Will Survive?”
Wilson’s had experience with the movies before: his previous nerd-bait book “How To Survive A Robot Uprising” was set up at Paramount with Robert Luketic directing a script by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant. The likely now-dead project was revived briefly with Mike Myers attached to re-write and star, but we read the Lennon and Garant draft, and… well, it’s from 2006, and it featured a robot singing “Baby Got Back.” That project might come back to life, but that shit needed major re-working.