There was no bigger news sitting around waiting to be broken than Christopher Nolan’s next project, and here it is.
And it’s huge.
Taking over directing duties of his brother Jonathan Nolan’s science fiction script, Christopher Nolan will now be directing the science fiction epic Interstellar in the place of the long-attached (since at least 2006) Steven Spielberg. By the sound of one enraged Variety writer, it appears this deal has been in the works for many weeks, and Variety and THR have finally broken it.
The story is a mysterious one, but involves a group of space travelers that travel through a wormhole, setting off a story of time-travel. Obviously this is up the director’s alley for a variety of reasons, but it will also mark the director first foray into space. Most interesting is that Nolan makes this decision right as a wave of such films is already starting to break- as I ran down in CHUD’s most anticipated of 2013 list, not only is Alfonso Cuaron’s long-awaited Gravity tackling a similar story this year (and in apparently groundbreaking fashion), but we are in fact at no loss of epic space-faring films in the queue; Star Trek Into Darkness, Oblivion, Elysium, Upside Down (kinda), Ender’s Game, and After Earth are all on their way this year alone.
That said, if anyone can bring something new to the genre, one hopes it will be Nolan. Divorced from the mythological constraints of the Bat franchise, let us hope that the director has many more Inception-level achievement in him, of which Interstellar will be the first.