Pages

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Human Revolution on Film

"The unplanned organism is a question asked by Nature and answered by Death. You are another kind of question with another kind of answer." 
- Morpheus, to JC Denton

So it appears that there's a Deus Ex movie in the works. Apparently, it will be based on Human Revolution, which is the third game in the series, and chronologically the first one that occurs in the in-game universe.

This should be good news, provided that they do not water down the premise of the game. The thing with Deus Ex is that it explores themes that are still sensitive topics for most of society. Many of the themes are highly controversial, and the story actually revolves around accepting these themes instead of being just tongue-in-cheek references as in other works of science fiction.

The overarching theme of the Deus Ex franchise is transhumanism. It brings to light the concepts and moral implications of human cloning, mechanical (and nanotechnological) augmentation, the ethics of corporate-sponsored viral warfare, artificial intelligence (and how humans can merge their consciousness with them) and the inevitability of a technical singularity. The franchise also explores conspiracy theories about secretive organizations whose aim is controlling world affairs and the resulting struggle against it.

The conversation with Morpheus in-game is probably one of the most haunting and thought-provoking things a gamer will experience. The quote above pertains to the nature of the protagonist, where he and Invisible War's Alex Denton are eventually revealed to be clones with implanted memories. Morpheus also discusses man's necessity for creating deities to validate their worldviews as a species, as well as the deities' obsoletion once mankind finally becomes capable of elevating themselves as such.

Personally, I think the series is unfilmable without toning down a lot of the content so that it could be accepted by the masses. There are just too many things that many people would find morally unacceptable at this point in time. This is the probably the reason why Watchmen didn't sell well: because it was too faithful to the source material for its own good. I liked it, but many others did not because they were expecting a run-of-the-mill superhero movie, which was not the case.

I hope I'll be wrong on this. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

No comments:

Post a Comment