Award-Winning Protégé of Harold Pinter Hired to Write an Asteroids Movie. No, Really.

Today in movies we can’t believe are actually being made: Asteroids. As in, an adaptation of the classic Atari game that had no real story or anything, just a white triangle shooting white dots at white blobs against a black background. The movie’s been around for a while, but I must have blocked it out. Can you blame me? Anyway, Universal has just hired someone new to work on the script: The improbably named Jez Butterworth.

Butterworth is better known for his work in theater than film. He was even a protégé of legendary Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. Writes the A.V. Club‘s Sean O’Neal, having a bit of fun with the news:

Indeed, like the plays of his hero Pinter, Butterworth’s Asteroids will surely deal with the unsettling ambiguities of being a triangle shooting rocks in space. The question, never answered, of how that triangle got into space. The futility of its being called upon to shoot rocks, over and over, when more rocks will just spawn to replace them. The identities and source of those flying saucers that periodically traverse the screen, seemingly just to taunt the triangle. (God?) The crushing inevitability of the triangle’s fixed place in the universe, as it tries to escape in one direction, only to find itself hurtling, again and again, back to the middle of those damned rocks.

I’d see it.

So. Asteroids is being produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, whose illustrious list of credits includes the Transformers trilogy and the G.I. Joe movies. And Butterworth, an award-winning playwright, is the third to take a crack at the script, after the writers behind The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and a boatload of direct-to-DVD Disney sequels. What the hell is going on with this movie?

(via: The A.V. Club)

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