Troubling Signs of the Coming Robopocalypse

When it was announced that Spielberg's next project would be Robopocalypse, a sci-fi epic about a robot uprising, I think I had the same reaction most everyone else did: Seriously? Robopocalypse? I suppose next to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and his upcoming The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn the title doesn't sound that ridiculous, and maybe we should all be grateful it's not eleven words long. But still, Robopocalypse sounds like a title a third grader came up with while smacking his action figures together and making explosion noises with his mouth.

I'm not as upset as some that this seems to be the final nail for his long-planned Lincoln biopic. I'd love to see Liam Neeson play the role as much as anybody, but I didn't think Spielberg was the man for that project. I feared he would try to pack the film full of over-the-top emotional crescendos when sobriety is called for, the way he did Amistad. Here's hoping that the project can pass to a director who is a better fit for the material. Tom Hooper or Peter Weir maybe.

What worries me is that this seems like a step towards joining his directorial peers in forsaking humanity to lock himself away and play with his tech toys for the rest of his career. Have you taken a long hard look at the sorry creative state of his contemporaries lately? Lucas is long gone, and it's looking less and less likely that we will ever get Zemeckis to stop unleashing his army of dead-eyed, animated pod people on the great works of literature. I'd hesitate to include Cameron on this list of lost boys, but the announcement of Avatars 2 & 3 suggests that he's following in Lucas's footsteps to wallow pointlessly in his own success for the next decade.

Spielberg may be hit (Minority Report) or miss (The Terminal) or both at the same time (War of the Worlds) but could any of the guys I mentioned put on the breezy charm of Catch Me If You Can or even attempt the complexity of Munich? Neither of those are perfect to be sure but they give off the sparks of a vital filmmaker at work.

So, while I admit it's silly to make judgements at this early stage, I take Robopocalypse as a cause for concern. Spielberg is too valuable a storyteller and too important a symbol of filmmaking for him to let his gift for emotional storytelling gather dust while he pursues the flashy lure of technology.

If there is any reason for optimism it's that he's poached hot TV talent Drew Goddard, writer on such shows as Lost and Buffy the Vampire, to do the screenplay. If any shows have shown an ability to infuse genre fare with humanity it's those. Maybe Spielberg is not tottering off into artistic irrelevance, but is enlisting one of the brightest young writers to help him take a run at young hotshots like JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon to remind them who's still the alpha dog. Here's hoping.