‘Dead Space’ Adaptation Lands Director

Space! Zombies! Monsters! Futuristic mining equipment!

Plans for a Dead Space film, based on the popular video game, were announced yesterday. Variety reports that director D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye, Disturbia) is set to helm the film, while EA and the two Twilight producers, Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey, will produce. No word on how Dead Space will affect the Y: The Last Man, film based on the comic of the same name, that Caruso is known to be in development for.

Dead Space is a sci-fi-horror telling the story of an engineer who boards an inactive space mining ship after receiving a distress call. Problem is the ship is overrun with nasty aliens and infected humans.

Typically I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a film adapted from a video game, but I recently sat down and played the game and was blown away. Though it’s not of the same story-telling calibre of Bioshock, Dead Space is an awesome little slice of sci-fi. The game itself is your typical Resident Evil style third-person space shooter, but the creators have balanced out a really decent story with some fun features like a complete lack of extra interface and some unique gameplay – you get to fool around in zero gravity and use telekinesis-like abilities, among other things. There’s also a ton of decent scares and a lot of holy shit my screen is filled with blood-thirsty monsters moments.

My real red flag with this news though is that for one, there has never been a good video-game adaptation, and two, D.J. Caruso has yet to really impress me. Disturbia was alright if not slightly unremarkable and Eagle Eye was a huge steamer.

More as it develops, in the meantime check out the Dead Space game if you haven’t (available on Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC).

Also, hey Caruso… labeouf is an okay actor, but please don’t cast him as the lead – it is not creepy nor atmospheric to hear ” no no no no no no no no” every time an alien comes round the corner.

Source: Variety