Will director Cary Fukunaga graduate to the big league with 'Spaceless'?

By Sarah Sluis

Director Cary Fukunaga made an assured debut in 2009 with Sin Nombre, the tale of poor Honduran who hitches rides on trains in an attempt to make it to the U.S. Shot with beautiful cinematography, the movie had a socially conscious premise and a thoughtful arthouse plot along with one of those maddening endings that refuse to let everything settle at the most comfortable conclusion. It was hard to believe this was his first feature (not including his student work, which won an award at the Sundance Film Festival). He followed that well-regarded movie with 2011's Jane Eyre, a higher-profile picture from the same distributor, Focus. With up-and-comer Mia Wasikowska as his lead actress, Fukunaga again showed himself to be a poised, competent director. Not many people could adapt a book that's been done close to two dozen times before, confident that they could bring something new to the table. But he did.

Now Fukunaga's signed on to direct Spaceless, a sci-fi tale from Universal. Could this be his chance to bring his cinematic sensibility to a wider audience? The plot is more 2001: Space Odyssey than Star Wars. An assassin wakes up, floating through space. A computer stands by to keep him company before his air supply runs out. He doesn't remember much about what happened before, just some fuzzy memories about being ordered to carry out a hit on a space station. As he continues to amble through space, he wonders if he's actually in space, or part of a simulated reality. Any plot that blurs the lines between reality and virtual reality is a win in my book. In this sense, the plot reminds me of Moon, the 2009 low-budget sci-fi tale with a twist ending. Besides Fukunaga, another plus for the project is the screenwriter, Jeff Vintar. As expressed in his Wikipedia page (which actually feels like it was written by Vintar himself, just saying), his work is firmly in the camp of sci-fi. I, Robot was based on his screenplay, and Spaceless itself has been in development for over a decade at Fox. He's the kind of screenwriter who has a ton of unproduced work and gets rewrite work, but has yet to see much of his work actually hit the big screen. Perhaps because of this, Vintar recently reacquired the rights to the movie and set it up at Universal, where it's finally moving forward. Gore Verbinski, a longtime fan of the screenplay, will executive produce.

A few "smart" sci-fi pictures have been released in recent years (such as Moon), with more on the way. Alfonso Cuaron is directing Gravity, a sci-fi romance with a "two people alone on a desert island" kind of concept. The author Daniel H. Wilson has seen a number of his sci-fi tales acquired. Steven Spielberg is directing Robocalypse, and the more comedic How to Survive a Robot Uprising has Jack Black attached. If there are two types of sci-fi movies, cerebral (2001: Space Odyssey) and action-filled (Star Wars), it appears, for the time being, that the cerebral ones are winning out.