J.J. Abrams isn’t big on conventional projects. It’s unlikely we’re going to find him directing Sandra Bullock in a fluffy, pink rom-com anytime soon. Which is why we hardly raised an eyebrow upon hearing his plans to make a robot movie set in the Victorian era.
HeatVision has revealed that Abrams is producing an adaptation of quirky comic-book Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel , the charmingly bizarre tale of “the world’s first robot.”
And the old rust-bucket has quite the tale to tell, having knocked about with Lawrence of Arabia, travelled to the South Pole and weighed in against the Germans in the First World War, not to mention a brief spell dabbling in silent movies.
All of which is a load of old rubbish of course, but the comic-book’s excellent gimmick is to craftily draw-in Boilerplate to pictures of the age, deceiving more than a few of its more gullible readership.
How Abrams intends to approach this one is unclear, although we’d imagine it will cost a few quid to do it properly, particularly if Boilerplate is up to his usual era-hopping antics. Hopefully he’ll still look as endearingly naff as he does on the page though.
We can only really imagine Abrams will play it for laughs, in any case. Dropping some sort of high-tech cyborg into WW1 would be rubbish, but having Teddy Roosevelt ask a walking dustbin for help…that’s more like it!
An ace idea or one for the scrapheap? Let us know…
In cinemas this week...
