My TiVo has decided that I need to know a lot about prison, so it’s been recording a bunch of episodes of Lockup on MSNBC for me. My previous fear of going to prison (come on, I would last 48 hours inside) has been magnified to unbelievable degrees as I watch this show. In fact the only thing that would make prison scarier for me is if it was located on a forbidding alien planet.
Enter The Ditch! It’s a spec script picked up by Warner Bros, written by Sascha Penn, a music video director and producer (he produced Chappelle’s Block Party). It’s an action film, set in the future when one of Jupiter’s moons has been turned into a maximum security prison. One guard’s family is taken hostage and he’s forced to help an imprisoned terrorist escape.
I love it. We don’t see enough original science fiction in film – all we get in mainstream movies are remakes and adaptations. What I like even more is that the initial plot summary could be set in a regular prison; from what we know, The Ditch isn’t some mumbo jumbo scifi film, but a movie with a scifi setting. Those are always the very best films.