With Disney having passed on this feature by the man behind Tron: Legacy, Joseph Kosinski, he’s shopped it around and Universal now has it and they’ve managed to land Tom Cruise to start in the science fiction film. Cruise doesn’t dabble in this realm all too often, though he’s had his share with Minority Report and War of the Worlds, so it’s not unfamiliar territory. The feature has a good budget set for it at $100 million and is aiming for a PG-13 rating so it’s accessible enough to try and make its money back (yes, we crave some good R rated SF, but it’s almost box office poison). Cruise has been bandied about for a number of movies while he works on Rock of Ages as his name has surfaced in conjunction with Pacific Rim as well, a big budget monster/disaster movie by Guillermo del Toro.
Plot summary: Earth, 2015. The Odyssey travels to Mars to assemble and occupy the Red Planet’s first base station. En route, the sudden appearance of a vast White Cube in space interrupts the ship’s voyage – and the crew of the Odyssey is never heard from again. 30 years later, Earth has become an almost unrecognizable, surreal wilderness with the remains of human cities poking through vast black sand dunes and bizarre geological formations. The White Cube, from a long-dead extraterrestrial race, was to find potentially inhabitable worlds and reshape them into suitable environments for the aliens, who now will never come. It now sits high in the planet’s orbit, dominating the sky, attempting to undo the damage it has caused as well as repopulate the Earth with clones of the comatose Odyssey crew. The only clones on the surface remain those stationed in the looming Watchtowers, scattered around the planet. One such Watchtower crewmember, a clone named Jak, witnesses a burning object fall to Earth. It’s an escape pod carrying Julia Kanan, the one lone survivor of the Odyssey before its capture by the Cube, and a love from Jak’s pre-clone past. But as the authorities close in to retake Julia, Jak’s genetic memory of his love for her drives him to decisions he never would have thought possible-and which could lead to disaster for both of them.
