Pitt's production company, Plan B, is teaming with Indian company Reliance BIG to adapt the upcoming videogame Dark Void, with an eye to it being a vehicle for Pitt himself, according to Variety. The game centers around a character who disappears in the Bermuda Triangle, only to reappear on an alternate Earth besieged with alien invaders. No writers or directors have been hired for the project yet, so we're keeping our hopes up for an unexpected (and utterly unlikely, we know) Soderbergh connection.

Brad Pitt could fight (video game) aliens [THR Risky Business]

The animated film picks up after supervillain Oobermind (Ferrell) has finally bested the city's handsome superhero, played by Brad Pitt. With nothing left to do the villain sits around bored, until he comes up with the idea to create another enemy.

After some evil science maneuvering, Jonah Hill's character is created, except it turns out he's super evil, and now Oobermind is forced to go on the side of justice, to bring down his terrible creation. Tina Fey plays the town reporter, who we're assuming will stop at nothing for the story, like all female reporters in these sorts of stories. But it's Fey, so hopefully she'll improvise a little reality into her character.

Okay, not literally. Literally, Benjamin Button is about a guy who's born old and ages backwards, until he reaches childhood and then dies. But in a larger sense, David Fincher's movie is about deja vu. It feels very much like a dozen other movies you've seen before. And it seems to be saying that familiarity is underrated and nostalgia is renewal, by looking at the life of someone whose past is always in front of him.

In particular, Benjamin Button will remind you a lot of Forrest Gump, another literary adaptation by the same screenwriter, Eric Roth. It's got the same sort of heartwarming, quirky feeling, and the protagonist lives through a nice selection of big historical moments. (Although he doesn't meet any famous personages.) Pretty much every situation that Benjamin Button gets himself into will feel cozily familiar, and most of the characters he meets are ones you've seen before. But because he's living backwards, he outlives people who seem to be his age or younger. And the movie seems to be saying, "Take another look at these familiar situations and archetypes, because they won't last forever, and you'll miss them when they're gone."

Here's the story, in a nutshell: Benjamin Button is born old, and his father abandons him. He's rescued by Queenie, a good-hearted African American woman, who devotes herself to him. Luckily, she works in an old-people's home, where he fits right in with the cast of quirky characters. (One of these characters has a running gag that's jaw-snappingly funny.) He meets a little girl, Daisy, and they become playmates. Later, he goes off to sea on a tugboat, and then fights in World War II. And sleeps with Tilda Swinton. Then he comes home and courts Daisy, who's too busy being a fancy dancer. They finally get together, and are rapturously happy, but Benjamin worries his impending youth will ruin everything. (It does.)

There's also a frame story, where Daisy is on her death bed (as Hurricane Katrina looms) and she gets her daughter to read Benjamin's memoir to her. That stuff is like what I imagine The Notebook would be like.

There's nothing wrong with any of it, and it's all quite skillfully executed. Except that Cate Blanchett, as Daisy, and Brad Pitt, as Benjamin, have very little chemistry, and Pitt's performance in general is somewhere between understated and vacant. (I really only like Pitt when he's doing manic nutjob, to be honest.) But apart from that problem, the performances are all great, and some of them are terrific. Tilda Swinton is never anything but amazing, for example.

The movie is three hours long, and there are a few sequences that feel beyond padded. (In one sequence, in particular, the narrator drones that if A, B, C, or D had happened differently, then E wouldn't have happened. But A, B, C, and D did actually happen the way they did, so E happened as well. I felt like I was being spoon-fed by an arthritic.) To some extent, the movie's slowness is a function of its mission: to show us that time is passing, that as Benjamin Button sheds his years, he's still racing towards a grave like the rest of us.

That's in a sense what Benjamin Button is about — paradoxically, by dealing with a character who miraculously won't get old, it aims to make us think about the fact that we will. And by separating aging from death, it reinforces once again that death is universal. All of those heartwarming characters we meet in the course of the movie end up dying, and we linger over their deaths. There's even a gratuitous black preacher who drops dead right after meeting Benjamin.

I always think, when reviewing a non-genre film like Button for io9, it's important to focus on its genre elements and how they're functioning in the story. In Button, the main character's mutant superpower functions as a metaphor for the way the past gets more and more important as you get older. Especially with the framing story, where we see the old Daisy reliving her life with Benjamin on her death bed, the point is driven home that love, and death, make time travelers of all of us as our future shrinks away.

The movie is a triumph of makeup and special effects, by the way. The whole business of making Brad up as an old man, and superimposing his features onto various other people's bodies, is weirdly convincing.

Major spoiler alert: The thing that really turned me off this movie, once and for all, is when Benjamin decides to ditch Daisy after knocking her up. At this point, they're both about 40, and he's courted her for two decades. Now that he finally has her, he suddenly freaks out about the fact that they're "meeting in the middle" and he's doomed to keep getting younger. "I don't want you to have to raise us both," he tells Daisy, referring to her baby and him. But it literally makes no sense to me — why can't he stick around until the baby and he are both roughly 20 years old biologically? Or if I'm doing my math wrong, at the very worst, he would appear 16 or 17 when Daisy was 18 or 19. Again, still not seeing why Benjamin can't help raise his kid.

It feels like the movie has some kind of weird pro-deadbeat dad agenda. Benjamin's own father abandons him, and then later they meet up and gradually become friends. They bond, and we're meant to forgive the dad for being completely absent. And in the case of Benjamin, after he abandons Daisy and goes off to India to "find himself," he selfishly comes back when his daughter is grown and he appears to be a young adult. Then he hangs around New Orleans (Daisy's hometown) and eventually she's stuck nursing him after he's turned into a senile infant. So even though he ran away, she still takes care of him in his old/young age.

It didn't feel like much of a love story to me, but maybe I'm too cynical.

I'm afraid I didn't like Button very much, but you may like it just fine. It has a 76 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and I'm sure it'll do great at the box office. It's very Oscar-ish, too. I'd say, if you liked Forrest Gump, you might like this, although it's not quite as good.

I can't remember the last time I heard someone call a movie "magic" and "life-affirming" but according to Variety's write-up, that's what Fincher is delivering. Then again I don't really trust anyone who would use the word "magic" and isn't talking about Wizards. Here's a little part of the review:

It's magic realism propelled by extraordinary filmmaking technology but it's not remotely what I'd call cold. It creates a world of oddities and wonderful, off-kilter characters but the whole piece is anchored by a decades long relationship that gets strained, frayed, breaks and rebuilds into something profound and moving.

The achievement is big and bold and ambitious and life-affirming, but the sentimentality is always toughened by the continual sense of loss and deep sadness at the transitory nature of the human condition. If it sounds like an art movie, it absolutely is, but it's a four quadrant art film!...

Whole bunch of Oscar noms across the board in all the major and tech categories, would seem almost certain noms for Pitt and Blanchett, Fincher, Roth, Dp, editor, etc etc. There are so many supporting roles that it will be hard to sort out noms in those categories, but if I had to call out one, it would be Jason Flemyng as Benjamin's father, as he really adds great gravity and humanity to this key role.

Hey maybe Fincher can make a believer out of me, but as of right now I can't see this film as anything more than a good looking holiday flick to see with the family. But I hope I'm wrong and I leave the theater affirmed about my life (gag).

Creator Pope explained the plot of Battling Boy - to be released as a graphic novel in 2010 - like this:

Battling Boy is the son of a god or a super hero—it is left unspecified—who comes down from the top of a mountain (or rather, from inside a cloud/UFO contraption/contrivance from above a mountain top) at this father's behest, in order to rid a giant city from it's plague of monsters. Hercules had his labors, Batman has his Gotham, Battling Boy has his Monstropolis.

Monstropolis is a city the size of an entire continent—and it is absolutely overrun with monsters. These are horrible, Grimm's fairytale, Beowulf-ish monsters, awful things. Child-stealers. Plus some of the vampires and mummies and wolfmen we remember from the old black and white Hollywood horror films. Which—if you remember—aren't very funny. And they don't all like each other, either. Even a monster can't stand another monster, this has been proven time and time again.

While the movie version has move past this initial option (No writers, directors or stars have been linked to the project yet, and no release date has been announced), we're ready to get in line right now, just to see this kind of thing on the big screen:

Paramount gets behind 'Battling Boy' [Variety]

Who doesn't want to grow old backwards with Brad Pitt? It's kind of creepy how much he looks like Robert Redford, but even stranger is the old man baby, yikes. The short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald has Button being born as an old man with a long white beard, but only about 3 feet tall. I wonder is the old man baby the beginning or the end of his life? I tend to think the beginning, because his surrogate family still appears to be very young when they are handed the bundle.

Also in the short story, Button's mind gets changed by his age: when he was older and in a child-like form he regressed into the mind of a baby. From the sound of the trailers it doesn't sound like his mind changes. So he looks like a baby but has the mind of an old man. Which brings it much closer to Andrew Sean Greer's classic novel The Confessions Of Max Tivoli.

Over at Ain't It Cool News, a reviewer who saw an early cut of the film writes:

The special effects and make-up in this film are truly amazing. Brad Pitt’s descent into youth is never once unbelievable; it looks tremendously authentic. The same goes for Blanchett’s aging process . . . [But] the film is somewhere near three hours. By an hour and a half/forty five, the audience was getting restless. I could hear them squirming in their seats in front and behind me. The last hour is ultimately weighed down by a lot of repetition that has to do with the romance between Pitt and Blanchett. The film is truly great up until the final hour where things begin to feel muddled and unnecessary.

I'm intrigued by the premise of a gothic-style love story where one person grows old and another grows young. And I'll watch Blanchette in pretty much anything. Hopefully Fincher will cut down that flabby third act, or at least bring in some alien technology or something to keep us entertained.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Review [via AICN]

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably one of the best American writers. Mork & Mindy was written by Garry Marshall, arguably one of the best American television creators. Winner: dead heat.
• Mork's son Mearth was born after Mork and Mindy got it on and Mork laid an egg, freaking everyone out. Benjamin Button was born in a hospital (against the common wisdom of the day which was to give birth at home), and freaked the hell out of everyone. Winner: Benjamin Button.
• Mearth was played by TV funnyman and impressionist Jonathan Winters, while Benjamin Button will be played by tabloid target and one time Pringles pitchman Brad Pitt. Winner: Mearth. Winters used to crack me up when I was a kid, sue me.
• Mearth ages backwards, which means you have Jonathan Winters asking like a baby and talking in a goo-goo voice most of the time. Benjamin Button also ages backwards, but talks in a normal voice. Winner: Benjamin Button. Jonathan Winters is definitely funny, but that baby voice gets annoying.
• As evidenced in the photo above, Brad Pitt has to wear some old man makeup to look like the elder Benjamin Button, whereas Winters was already fairly older when playing his part, so no makeup was required. However, the movie is also putting the cool new Contour 3D cgi mapping systemto use in order to make synthetic old people, which is a catapult to coolness. Winner: Benjamin Button. We love high-tech aging systems.
• Mearth's special "aging problem" led to much hijinx and sitcom wackiness and Mork and Mindy tried to hide their rotund, overall-wearing son from the neighbors, while Benjamin Button gets to examine his life in reverse, leading to lessons and touching moments, probably with swelling music. Winner: Benjamin Button. We're a sucker for a good musical score.
• Mork & Mindy was directed by a slew of different television directors, including Garry Marshall. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is being directed by David Fincher, who also gave us The Game (yes!), Alien 3 (boo!), Fight Club (rad!), Panic Room (bad!), and Se7en (woot!). Winner, Benjamin Button. David Fincher's worth the risk.

Early Buzz: David Fincher's 'The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button' [/Film]