Reaching for the Asteroids

If you're my age or up, you'll remember a little vector graphics video game taking the world by storm. Yes, even before the famous Pac-Man. Asteroids.

You're the triangular ship surrounded by asteroids. Fly and shoot your way through endless space (and levels) and see an occasional U.F.O. that shoots back. That's the whole deal.

Any guesses why I'm bringing it up? That's right! A live-action movie's in the works. Do I even need to rant on this one? All I can say, in earnest, is that if they can pull it off (and be a successful film to boot) then we have found the next Hollywizards.

And it sounds like their dreaming is already explosive:
I had an immediate reaction 'Yes.' The reason was not because playing the game, we thought somehow that game could be translated into a movie, it can't. The word 'Asteroids' connotates a large-scale experience, so the challenge, which was great, was 'Okay, so how do you get a mythology that will support that? We really went after a mythology on the level of Star Wars and we'll see if we succeeded or not but it's not a simple thing of the asteroids are going to hit the earth. We never come to earth. The entire movie takes place in the asteroid field. We do some homages to the game for sure, but I like the sense of scale.*

So says producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Writer Matthew Lopez, a sincere best of luck. You did a great job with Race to Witch Mountain.

Here's an excellent game "re-invention" of Asteroids. Enjoy: Vectoroids

I rather like this video. It's a trailer for Tetris: The Movie. I don't know if it would sustain itself for a whole film, but Bravo to BLACK20 STUDIOS for this wonderfully awful take on Tetris as a narrative. I had stumbled across it and will admit I'd been fooled at first, dreading its coming... all the while hoping it to be a joke. Thank goodness.


* Quoted from this page.