Says Fincher:

“It looks like it’s not going to happen. There’s no script and as you know, [star Morgan Freeman’s] not in the best of health right now [after an August car accident]. We’ve been trying to do it but it’s probably not going to happen.”

The veteran actor had been attached to the project in various forms for roughly eight years now. And when previously interviewed, it appeared as if Fincher had been giving the execution of the pic great thought:

“It’s probably technologically within striking distance right now. That was always the thing: You couldn't afford to build these things as sets. It’s just too huge.… I think it’s more along the lines of motion-capture.”

Like the curious beings with their cryptic motives at the helm of the Rama, it now looks like we'll never quite know what really could've come of this long-anticipated movie.

Updating fans on his Millarworld messageboard this weekend, Millar explained the Hollywood math surrounding the movie:

[H]ere's the deal... had this movie's opening weekend hit 30 million then we would have a sequel. Had it hit 35 I'm told that's a franchise. Advance tracking yesterday suggested we could be looking at 40. But after Friday night it looks like opening weekend could be upwards of 50 MILLION DOLLARS, with the movie scoring as high with women as men (unusual for an action movie, oddly, as all the girls I know love action movies). I thought we'd be in trouble up against that wee robot guy, but everything's going great.

As producers as well as creators, this obviously delights JG [Jones, co-creator of the comic] and I. We're discussing the idea of the overseas Fraternity led by Mister Rictus making a play for the US territory Morgan Freeman left behind (ie, the middle section of the book), but this is nothing more than chat at the moment. Nothing will be greenlit until final weekend numbers are in. It's all looking very, very good, though. Thanks for supporting us with your hard-earned dollars.

At time of writing, the movie looked set to have earned upwards of $51 million dollars on its opening weekend, which probably translates into "massive franchise you'll be sick of four movies later" or something.

Wanted's Opening Weekend Set To Break Records [Millarworld]

Call this the summer of Chuck — we're suddenly ass-deep in movies about pathetic nerds who suddenly become super-spies or super-assassins. Get Smart was the story of Steve Carrell's analyst who pores over his computers and analyzes obscure "chatter", until he gets his chance to prove himself as a spy. Both Incredible Hulk and Iron Man had nerd-boy heroes whose experiments turn them into powerhouses. But Wanted may be the first summer escapist movie whose hero is just a weedy accountant.

As you may be able to tell, I'm somewhat conflicted about Wanted. Even star James McAvoy admitted, on the Daily Show, that reading the movie's script he thought it "could just be another awful action film." He only took the gig because he knew that director Timur Bekmambetov was an "evil genius." And he is. That pretty much sums up Wanted: toilet-paper script, poetically wonderful action sequences.

In Wanted, McAvoy plays Wesley Gibson, an office peon who's terrorized by his fat binge-eating boss — who's a caricature straight out of a 1980s Twisted Sister video. She harangues him, clicking her stapler next to his ear, and making impossible demands until he has a panic attack and snarfs anti-anxiety meds like candy. Meanwhile, when his whiny girlfriend isn't waking him up by bitching at him, she's fucking Wesley's vapid best friend on the table Wesley bought her. McAvoy's running voice-over, and cartoony touches like an ATM that calls Wesley a broke asshole, hammer home his loser status. He's surrounded by dumb bitches, and they're dragging him down. If only he could meet a woman with a killer bod and no personality whatsoever, apart from a vapid smirk. Enter Angelina Jolie.

And here's where it starts to veer away from its source material, the graphic novel written by Mark Millar. It turns out Wesley's the son of a super-assassin, a member of an assassin "Fraternity" led by Sloan (Morgan Freeman). And those anxiety attacks that he's been medicating himself for? Turns out they're actually his super-senses kicking in, allowing him to slow down his perceptions to the point where he can shoot the wings off a fly. They only work when his heart rate accelerates to 400 bpm — making Wesley the second hero of a recent movie who gets superpowers when his pulse races (the first being Bruce Banner, of course.)

So Wesley has the raw power of gun-fu (including the ability to curve a bullet's trajectory) but he needs to be broken down and rebuilt as a bad-ass. The movie takes us through a long boot-camp sequence, including plenty of montages, showing Wesley training and getting the crap beaten out of him over and over again. He gets smashed up a zillion times, and it's lucky the Fraternity has a nice healing bath instead of the traditional hot-tub. Wesley's a loser. He's a pussy. He's a nothing wimp. He's a fucking nothing. The breaking-Wesley sequences are lovingly over-the-top, including a knife expert who slices Wesley up in a room full of hanging animal carcasses. Finally, after being beaten to a pulp for the hundredth time, Wesley confesses that he doesn't know who he is — and within seconds, Freeman's Sloan swoops in and starts the process of building him up again.

The rest of the movie is a pretty standard action movie about Wesley going after the guy who he thinks killed his father. And the Fraternity turns out not to be what it seems: it has a whole cockamamie backstory about monks a thousand years ago who learned to read binary code in the threads from a special loom, but the real story turns out to be even more cockamamie than that. It's just bursting with cockamamie. Everything rockets towards a completely ludicrous conclusion that will make you feel like your head is full of rocks. Visually, Wanted is comparable to a Tarantino movie, but I would have killed for some of Kill Bill's sharp writing.

So, like I mentioned, Wanted's saving grace is the direction from Bekmambetov, who also directed Nightwatch and Daywatch. He brings a Ringo Lam-esque flair to endless scenes of knife fights in a meat forest, shootouts and car-train-gun battles. Actually, it's not just the action — pretty much every scene in the movie is shot hyper-kinetically and with super-emphasis. If you're in this movie's target demographic, you've probably seen the clips and trailers with the cars flipping over and the slow-motion shooting, or Jolie splayed on the hood of a car Death Proof-style, shooting like a maniac. The whole movie's like that.

This would probably be a good movie to see on crystal meth.

What's more, Bekmambetov does such a good job with the cartoony visuals that you almost don't care if the movie makes sense, or is vaguely evil. It's just a fantastic spectacle, brilliantly shot violence porn with smatterings of real porn. If the Fraternity really existed, and it needed a legion of couch potatoes to serve as cannon-fodder, it could totally use this movie as a recruiting video. It's pure thrilling escapism, with hardly any of the "great responsibility" angst that usually laces escapist fare. What's more, it has total conviction, thanks to a mostly solid cast: you believe that these people are bad-asses who really enjoy killing. And McAvoy makes Wesley's transition from droolbag to super-killer totally believable.

A lot of the film's marketing revolves around the sexiness of Angelina Jolie, but there's no sexual tension between her and McAvoy, or anyone else. We stare at her naked ass, but she acts as though all she thinks about is killing. She's sublimated all of her sexuality into her gun, and the only time she's sexual is when she's using sex to get something. (She does make out with Wesley in front of his weaselly ex-girlfriend, but you get the sense she's just doing Wesley a favor.)

As I said, Wanted isn't too subtle about embodying the fantasy of breaking free of the mindless service job and escaping from the nagging bitches to become a real man. (Early on, Wesley's voiceover talks about his repetitive strain injury, but it never keeps him from practicing the same gun move a few thousand times.) It's significant that the Fraternity's headquarters is a textile factory — obviously it's partly because the factory houses the Loom of Fate, but it's also meant to contrast with Wesley's dumb office. Wesley's stupid "customer account manager" job is emasculating because he doesn't make anything, he doesn't work with his hands, and he just moves bullshit pieces of information around. The Fraternity, meanwhile, works among giant machines, they're manly garment workers who create a physical product. If you want to be a real man, the movie suggests, you should ditch the pointless symbolic labor of the cubicle farm and haul the moldering corpse of the manufacturing economy out of its grave.

So, bottom line: Wanted works great as a fun, fluffy action movie. It's not up to the standard of Tarantino or any of the great Hong Kong or Japanese directors, partly because nobody in the film is particularly likable. And it may annoy you if you're not in its target demographic. But if you're looking for a fun shoot-em-up with a huge dose of high-energy escapism, it's pretty much perfect for what it is.

According to InstantCast, while filming Wanted in Prague, the production crew assembled a large textile factory jam-packed with destiny looms. These are looms that create fabrics which are interwoven with the destinies of people. And it turns out there's a mythical land where all-seeing weavers determine the balance of the world. Let's all hope Wanted has more flipping vipers and bendy bullets, and less fancy loom analogies. [Wanted]

Finding Glory:
This scifi epic explains the origins of the Union's 54th regiment from Massachusetts. Contrary to popular belief, the all-black troop was assembled by a time-traveling doctoral student, Mary 2669 (Julia Roberts), and her companion cyborgs from the future.

In the year 2126 there is no crime or hatred, so in order to understand these negative human emotions, students travel back in time and involve themselves minimally in many historical affairs. Mary 2669 is a doctoral student who teleports back to the Civil War era with two companion cyborgs #1 and #2 (Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington) to learn about war, hate, death and racism. At first they keep their distance from the primitives, but then something goes haywire with the teleportation device and the three are trapped in Civil War times.

New to these emotional displays, a passionate Mary vows to end hatred here and now and teach the world a lesson. She enlists the help of her cyborg companions and brazenly organizes the first all-black regiment, to demonstrate unity and anti-racism to the Union troops. Knowing she won't be able to command the regiment herself (being a woman), she puts her male cyborgs on it. She disguises Broderick as Major Cabot Forbes, and Denzel as Private Trip. Not wanting them to stand out, Mary makes sure they are in fact the most stereotypical characters they can be: the prissy, rich white guy trying to win the love of a struggling misunderstood black man. From behind the scenes Mary pulls the strings and uses her futuristic free-love attitude which coincidentally leads to her bottom half's big moment (we'll fill in the details on that once we have a script writer).

She takes on the last name Pitcher, and claims to be related to Molly Pitcher's family (stupid future person), but is still the brains of the 54th regiment. In order to unify the regiment Mary programs a back story of hate and mistrust into both #1 and #2, pitting them both against one another. Slowly they demonstrate to the rest of the regiment that by working together they can gain one another's trust. Unfortunately for #1 and #2 while acting out their programmed roles they both realize that they too are slaves, to the future human race. The cyborgs begin to "feel" and emote in new ways, and adopt the 54th's quest for freedom as their own.

But since Mary went quite wild with her past-meddling (i.e. building a regiment) by the time her teleportation device is fixed, cyborgs from the future (in Confederate Garb but more like the T2 terminator) come back to the 1800s with the intent to kill Mary. She flees and leaves her borg friends in the midst of the civil war and without any of their necessary re-charging equipment. #1 and #2 carry on, firmly committed to winning freedom both for the North and from Mary, until their batteries run out at the Battle Of Fort Wagner. In the original Glory, it looks like they're shot, but really they just powered off. Mary is then sent on a wild a desperate chase over river and mountain running for her life all the while trying to escape the Confederate cyborg death squads. Lots of carriage chasing and horse-back riding ensue. Including one robot that just turns into a centaur and chases her through most of Georgia and starts a big fire.

Finally she is saved by Sgt. Maj. John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) who reveals himself as a wise old cyborg from a future so far ahead, Mary cannot comprehend it. He takes her in and explains to her that they have been watching her and while her quest was noble, it was also reckless and aggressive. He then explains that most people who live in the the 1800s are actually cyborgs from the future and that everything is cyclical, or some sort of Life Lesson like that. OK, so this is sort of a prequel and sort of a sequel rolled into one, so maybe we can make it two movies that come out within months of each other because that worked really well with the Matrix sequels.