We reviewed Meyer's novel, The Host, when it came out a year or so ago. And we were pleasantly surprised: It's a cheesy beach read, to be sure, but it's also a genuinely thought-provoking, fairly original science fiction story that manages to ask some questions about what it means to be human. So we're cautiously optimistic about Niccol's adaptation, to be produced by the people behind The Road.

There aren't that many stories which start with the Earth already having been vanquished totally by alien invaders — I can think of a few, most notably William Barton's When Heaven Felll — and Meyer has a neat twist on this premise. The Earth has been peacefully overtaken by parasites that control human host bodies. They're more peaceful and mellow than we are, and Earth under their rule has become a placid, rational place — it's not unlike if the pod people from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers had won.

But Meyer adds another twist on top of that — which is really where The Host gets interesting. The alien parasites are "going native," and they're being influenced by their host bodies' desires and habits and ideas. It's not unlike the relationship between the Trills and their host bodies in Star Trek, except that the creatures in The Host are accustomed to taking over bodies that are more docile and easier to control, unlike our belligerent, adrenaline-and-hormone-ruled selves. The central love story in The Host is actually just our way into thinking about what it means for the alien invaders to go native — the invader known as Wanderer falls for the man her host body, Melanie, loves, and finds herself being subsumed into Melanie's identity rather than the other way around. She becomes a passenger in Melanie's body rather than the controller.

So... you have a story about a voyeur who lives inside a woman's body. You have a world where people are all controlled by creatures, but the boundary between controller and controlled is getting increasingly blurry. And you have a paranoid thriller about a seemingly perfect society that has cracks. It's not hard to imagine the man who brought us the panopticon nightmare of The Truman Show, the man-controlling-ideal-woman story of S1m0ne and the flawed-utopia of Gattaca making The Host into a great film. I'm actually eager to see what he does with it.

The only downside to a Niccol-directed The Host would be if it delays The Cross, the dystopian future movie he's already working on, which we ran some concept art from the other day. Here's hoping he finishes The Cross, and then creates a smarter, sharper version of Meyer's admittedly schlocky novel. It could be that rare movie adaptation that outshines the book. [Variety]

Niccol, was also responsible for S1m0ne and The Truman Show, is writing and directing The Cross, which features Orlando Bloom, Vincent Cassel, John Goodman and Olga Kurylenko as residents of a grim, future city from which they cannot escape:

Mylar (Bloom) and his younger brother Castro come to a town to cross the border in search of a better life. The two travelers, full of hope, all too quickly realize that their journey leads them to an inescapable world full of doom. The enigmatic border is strictly enforced under the command of a guard, Guideon, who prohibits anyone from ever leaving. Castro doesn't make it alive past two weeks, but Mylar defies all odds and becomes the first to successfully cross the border. And he also becomes the first to come back… all for the love of a woman, Vera. Mylar must now devise a plan not only to set himself free, but all of his fellow citizens as well. But perhaps crossing the border is not the answer. Perhaps the key lies in altering the border and whatever it may represent…

You can check out more concept images by artist Jean-Vincent Puzos at Quiet Earth.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, The City That Sailed

follows a New York City street magician whose daughter, because of family circumstances, lives in England. In exploring a lighthouse one day, the girl discovers a room with magic candles and wishes to be reunited with her father, causing the island of Manhattan to break away and drift across the Pond.

It sounds much, much more interesting than finding out exactly how things got messed up in the run-up to I Am Legend. Of course, this being Hollywood, Lawrence can't simply film an Andrew Niccol script and have done with it — instead, says Variety, the script is being rewritten by Oceans Thirteen writers Brian Koppleman and David Levien. But even a dumbed down Niccol story sounds much, much better than I Was Legend Before I Was Legend. The film may not be their next project, since Lawrence is also talking about directing Water For Elephants, the adaptation of the Depression-era circus novel, with Reese Witherspoon starring.

Image by Notes Of Intelligence.

S1m0ne has some of the same themes as the Niccol-scripted Truman Show, about celebrity and our addiction for fake "real" personalities. Pacino, desperate to finish a movie after his star walks out, turns to the virtual persona Simone, but he's not prepared for how popular she gets — and how curious people are about her. In a totally demented scene, he attempts to destroy Simone's career by having her direct and star in her own bestiality movie, where she crawls around a pigpen in a wedding dress, bobbing for apples in the pigs' trough. And people still cheer for the (by now Acadamy-Award-winning) Simone. What to do?

Sure S1m0ne is contrived as heck, and features a few too many speeches about how people really prefer fake actors to real ones, and what is truth anyway, yadda yadda, but it's worth it all for the thought-experiment, and for Pacino's coquettish performance as Victor playing Simone. [IMDB]

You could always borrow "mundane science fiction," a term that's sweeping the literary SF world. But the word "mundane" doesn't conjure up images of a taut thriller, does it? There's also "near future," but that could encompass films set in 2027. The Village Voice has used the five-minutes-into-the-future tag to describe films as diverse as Fight Clubhttp://www.villagevoice.com/livoice/9942,movies,9396,0.html and Demonlover. So what do you think? What's a snappy term for a movie that takes place in a few minutes?

Famous names: Peter Weir, Jim Carey, Laura Linney, Ed Harris

Crunchy goodness: 5

Stunt casting: Jim Carey, known mostly for slapsticky comedy, turns in an amazing performance as an unwitting sitcom star who wants nothing more than to face the drama of real life.

Copycats: There have been countless flicks about being trapped in a television show, from the irritating Pleasantville to the campy Stay Tuned, but none has done what The Truman Show does: extrapolate into the future what the hellish results could be of a present-day world obsessed with reality television, where people's lives are little more than the property of entertainment corporations.

The shit: Truman Show scribe Andrew Niccol wrote and directed contemporary SF classic Gattaca, as well as the slipstream arms-dealer flick Lord of War.

Truman as Archetype

Famous names: Andrew Niccol, Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke

Crunchy goodness: 3

Design breakthrough: Filmed at futuristic-looking malls and factory farms near Los Angeles and Marin County, Gattaca offered a fascinating glimpse of city life after the genome has been throughly hacked.

Life lesson: As we always suspected, Ethan Hawke is a genetic defective.

Elevator pitch: It's like 1984 - with genetics!

Gattaca, early draft, by Andrew M Niccol