I am so sick and tired of these movies where father and daughter find themselves in trouble and then have to work together, bond, and all the other usual shit we’ve seen a million times before. And Neil Blomkamp’s next project, They Found Us is exactly that type of movie. I’m guessing that after the huge success of The Last of Us, they decided to milk this idea dry. Just a couple of weeks ago I had the displeasure of watching 65, a science fiction movie in which Adam Driver must help a young girl survive on an inhospitable planet. Although technically she wasn’t his daughter. Just like in the nineties hit Luc Besson hit Leon.
Speaking of The Last of Us and its star Pedro Pascal, I must mention Prospect, again featuring the same duo. I could go on and on, listing all the movies with this father-daughter relationship just to prove a point. And I will. Probably the most popular one is Taken although Man on Fire is pretty darn close. We also should not forget about Logan and Cargo. Again and again, the studios are trying to take advantage of the relationship between a father and his daughter (did someone say daddy issues?). With great success, if I might add. Well, I feel a little bit better now, after this rant. So, let’s see what we have here. Neil Blomkamp is one of my favorite directors and I absolutely love his science fiction trilogy.
District 9, Elysium and Chappie are still worth watching and I urge you to check them out if you haven’t already. Demonic, his latest movie is not so good and I don’t think you should watch it. Blomkamp just finished working on a Gran Turismo movie, based on a popular video game. It appears to be a standard-issue big-budget video game adaptation but we’ll have to wait a couple of months to see for ourselves. They Found Us is his next project and it follows a father and daughter who decide to go camping in Utah only to end up being hunted by aliens. The aliens want to abduct them and take them to their home planet which might not be such a bad idea considering how things are going here on Earth.
Joel Kinnaman (RoboCop 2014) is the lead and we still don’t know who’s going to play the daughter. The production should begin this year in Australia. Jeremy Slater (Moon Knight) is the writer while the producers are the same as for the summer hit Smile. That’s what we know at this point about They Found Us, another science fiction horror destined to be forgotten. And what makes me say that is the script itself featuring another tale of a daddy/daughter broken relationship. A relationship that they’ll have to work on and blah blah blah. You already know how the whole thing goes. Plus, there will be absolutely no tension in this movie. We already know the daughter is going to live. So the only question is will big daddy sacrifice himself or will they ride into the sunset together?
Finally, I must mention the new Predator movie, Prey that was quite good despite the familiar premise. So, there’s still hope for They Found Us.
