Steven Spielberg is heating up as he has two films due this December with War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin, another film already slated for next year in Lincoln and he is now teaming with Fox and Dreamworks for the previously announced Robopocalypse, due to hit theaters on July 3, 2013 (via EW).
The film is an adaptation of Daniel H. Wilson‘s novel (buy it here) penned by Drew Goddard (Cloverfield). The book was actually picked up by DreamWorks Studios and Doubleday back in 2009 when it was an unpublished manuscript. The book finally hit shelves this past June and review snippets at Amazon carry quotes from Janet Maslin at the “New York Times” calling it “an ingenious, instantly visual story of war between humans and robots.” And the Wall Street Journal is quoted saying, “It’ll be scarier than Jaws: We don’t have to go in the water, but we all have to use gadgets.”
The quick synopsis is to say it’s about humanity’s struggle to survive a global robotic uprising, but the book description is a bit more in-depth:
They are in your house. They are in your car. They are in the skies… Now they’re coming for you.
In the near future, at a moment no one will notice, all the dazzling technology that runs our world will unite and turn against us. Taking on the persona of a shy human boy, a childlike but massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online and assumes control over the global network of machines that regulate everything from transportation to utilities, defense and communication. In the months leading up to this, sporadic glitches are noticed by a handful of unconnected humans – a single mother disconcerted by her daughter’s menacing “smart” toys, a lonely Japanese bachelor who is victimized by his domestic robot companion, an isolated U.S. soldier who witnesses a ‘pacification unit’ go haywire – but most are unaware of the growing rebellion until it is too late.
When the Robot War ignites — at a moment known later as Zero Hour — humankind will be both decimated and, possibly, for the first time in history, united. Robopocalypse is a brilliantly conceived action-filled epic, a terrifying story with heart-stopping implications for the real technology all around us…and an entertaining and engaging thriller unlike anything else written in years.
So it would seem Spielberg is venturing back to the world of sci-fi, a genre he hasn’t explored since 2005’s War of the Worlds.
The Fox and Dreamworks co-production will have Dreamworks distributing domestically with Fox handling the overseas release.
