Roger Avary is trying to get his career back on track after a ‘vehicular manslaughter while under the influence’ conviction back in 2009, and he will attempt to do so by directing two new projects. First off, and probably the one that is closer to actually happening, is a film called AIRSPACE which Avary is in talks to direct. It is being described as ‘DUEL in in the sky’ which sounds…a bit bonkers. It’s about a ‘work-absorbed charter pilot flying home to his family who must escape a sudden attack by a heavily armed MiG fighter jet after finding a mysterious briefcase in his plane’. I can’t really see how it can create the same tension as Steven Spielberg managed to get out of DUEL’s premise; I mean, there are only so many different ways you can see a plane avoid another plane, but I’m sure (or at least I hope) that there’s more to it than that. John Cusack is attached to play the lead – and his projects are very hit-and-miss for me – so hopefully this one will land in the hit category.
A more exciting prospect for me personally is an adaptation of the classic PC game series ‘Wolfenstein’. Roger Avary was championing this project before his legal issues and now seems to have resurrected the idea. The film will ‘team a United States Army Captain and a British Special Agent as they infiltrate a castle where Hitler plans to unveil a new secret weapon, pitting them against the Nazis’ Paranormal Division along the way’. No word on whether it will feature Adolf Hitler in a mecha-suit, but one can only hope. I grew up playing Wolfenstein 3D and the idea in itself is not half bad for a borderline crazy revisioning of World War II a la INGLORIOUS BASTERDS. We could potentially be in line for a very entertaining film (fingers crossed).
Source: First Showing & Variety
