by Ravi Sinha
In the words of second-hander extraordinaire Ellsworth Toohey from The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand’s other philosophical paperback cataclysm),“Who is Gore Verbinski actually? What’s his particular God? The one thing he would go to pieces without?” That’s not to say the man can be reduced to a perpetual mess of a jigsaw, much like, say, a flick about two upbeat stars and a gun with a Mexican mind of its own.
However, for this American director and writer who is not only directing the new Bioshock movie but also Light House: A Trifle, an adaptation of William Manmohan’s “refuge from the Mafia in a lighthouse full of nuts,” and Butterfly about a man who, for all intents and purposes, is trying to drive his wife insane (probably by playing too much Patapon), you have to marvel at his micro-management on a macro scale.
Verbinski graduated from the UCLA in 1987 and quickly made his way up from music videos to commercials for companies like Nike, Coca-Cola, Skittles and more. His most popular ad would be the Budweiser commercial featuring frogs pronouncing the brand name, for which he won four Clio awards and one Cannes advertising Silver Lion.
Though known for his comedies Mouse Hunt and The Mexican (comedy would probably be the loosest generalisation for this potpourri of “whatever”) and his blockbuster Hollywood adaptation of the Japanese horror flick, The Ring (and not the abysmal sequel), Verbinski is responsible for one of the biggest box-office trilogies of all-time: Pirates of the Caribbean. All three were hits, with the third, At World’s End, qualifying as the third box-office film to ever rake in $1 billion worldwide, alongside Titanic and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
Not to say the Bioshock brand is exactly in good hands, but at least Verbinski is several thousand leagues above Uwe Boll. Universal Studios, the studio behind the film, have already expressed hopes of using green-screen technology to recreate the aquatic-Objectivist-utopia-gone-wrong to life in a way similar to the awesome visual antics of 300 (the motion picture).
Not much else has been confirmed with several sources stating the movie to still be a rumour, but John Logan, screen-writer for Gladiator, The Aviator and Sweeny Todd, all great movies, is also on-board. Perhaps this one will swim rather than sink, unlike past movie adaptation affairs (why vampire cowboys, Boll? Why?).
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