Shawn Levy’s been making genre waves for a while, most notably with Deadpool & Wolverine. He’s also, appropriately enough for the final stretch before the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, part of the Star Wars family. His Ryan Gosling fronted Star Wars: Starfighter releases next year and according to THR he’s already got his next project lined up. Alasdair Stuart assesses what we know.

It’s a Netflix movie, a house Levy’s already familiar with thanks to the underrated The Adam Project, and it’s a script by Max Taxe called Somewhere Out There. Levy will produce and direct what’s been described as a story in the ’emotional sci-fi’ silo. Before you throw up in your mouth a bit at the fact that ’emotion’ is still somehow viewed as a hard sell in genre, the examples cited for emotional sci-fi are Arrival and The Adam Project. Levy produced one and directed the other (and I defy you to get through Mark Ruffalo’s final scene in that flick without crying. Or anything in the back 20 minutes of Arrival for that matter) so he knows what he’s doing and knows how to work with people who do it better than him too.

Where things get a little ‘…must we?’ for me is the description:

‘The story concerns a grieving father who, after losing his wife, sends a message out into the stars… and something out there starts to talk back.’

…Come on, chaps.

I am eternally here for emotionally available male characters because without them you get men referring to women as ‘females’ and the sort of smirking incel bigotry that’s omnipresent right now. That’s not my issue. The millionth case of ‘MY DEAD WIFE!’ is.

Men, hell, stories, need and deserve a better inciting incident than ‘my wife is dead and I’m sad.’ Male emotional needs absolutely need to be addressed, and as the son of a father going through bereavement, I know that viscerally. But this is the one note Hollywood plays over and over and over and over again and it minimises women as much as it assists men in recognising their emotions. We can do better and have, constantly. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Moon, Okja, Donnie Darko, Melancholia, Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die (mostly), Twelve Monkeys, Interstellar even. And when Christopher Nolan, a man who writes some of the least well realised female characters in movie history is better than you at this, then you have some work to do.

The last thing I want to do is pre-emptively dump on the movie, especially as Levy and Taxe know what they’re doing. Taxe wrote Moonshot, a stupidly charming teen space romcom for HBO, a couple of years ago and has a script called Ripple on the way starring genre’s favourite terrified baby faun, Jack Quaid. They know their stuff, and this will be worth your time. But with that starting premise they maybe have their work cut out for them.

 

Here’s a good list of ‘Emotional Sci-Fi’

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls028909048/

 

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