You would think that at this point in cinema, every famous text has been adapted for film, but that’s not the case. In fact, it’s some of the older texts out there that are the hardest to adapt, as they are often grand epics where the lines between reality, the supernatural, and even the divine get blurred. Hollywood used to love mining ancient texts, historical events, or legends for grand sweeping epics like The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, Ben-Hur, Antony and Cleopatra, and so many others. Yet in the era of blockbuster budgets, few studios are willing to take the risk.
Universal Pictures is rolling some major dice on Christopher Nolan, who is bringing a $250 million-dollar adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey to theaters this summer. It seems Nolan may have started the wheels turning in Hollywood, because now another major ancient work is headed for the screen, despite being deemed one of the most “unfilmable” works there is. And why is now the time to do it? Because artificial intelligence has finally made it possible.
Roger Avary is known for penning some divisive literary adaptations, which include old texts (Beowulf), new texts (The Rules of Attraction, which he also directed), and even video games (Silent Hill), as well as his writing contributions to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Now, Avary is looking to keep that tradition going with his adaptation of Paradise Lost, the Biblical epic poem written by John Milton in the mid-17th century. However, the catch is that Avary will be making the films for Ex Machina Studios, a new production studio that is driven by, and oriented around, it’s own proprietary Artificial Intelligence system. Studio co-founder and CEO Marco Weber has been producing films since the 1990s (The Thirteenth Floor, Igby Goes Down, The Informers, Brooklyn’s Finest), and will act as producer on Paradise Lost. Executive producer will be Kirk Petruccelli, who is a longtime production designer (Geostorm, White House Down, Ghost Rider, Blade, Anaconda (1997), 3 Ninjas, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider).
According to the first synopsis for the project, this movie version of Paradise Lost is looking to be “the ultimate faith-based heroic saga: a cosmic war in the heavens where the charismatic, rebellious archangel Lucifer defies God, is hurled into the abyss of Hell, and vows revenge on all creation. From the fiery lake of damnation, Lucifer rises as Satan to seduce humanity’s first parents, Adam and Eve, in the flawless Garden of Eden, triggering the Fall of Man and the loss of Paradise itself. At its core, Paradise Lost asks the question every generation must answer: When faced with reckoning and crisis, do we obey, rebel, or redeem?”
Milton’s Paradise Lost was an epic poem divided into ten “books.” The story chronicles major biblical events starting after the angel Lucifer and his followers have fallen from grace after going to war with God and Heaven. Lucifer (aka “Satan”) finds himself and his followers banished to Hell (or “Tartarus”), and decides to embark on the dark mission of rallying his closest followers (demons of legend) to ruin God’s favorite new creation: humanity, and the paradisical planet (Earth) that was gifted to them. The poem follows both Satan’s story arc (recounting the Angelic War from several perspectives) and the story of Adam and Eve, living in the Garden of Eden. It culminates with Satan taking the form of a serpent, and convincing Eve to eat an Apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which God forbid them to do. Adam willingly eats the apple as well, so that his fate is tied to Eve’s; the pair is banished from the Garden, and God stops appearing to them (as “the father”), forever severing humanity’s direct tie to the divine, after Adam is given visions of mankind’s apocalyptic end in the Great Flood. Meanwhile, Satan and his followers are cursed to take on the forms of snakes, as punishment for their corruption of the innocent.
It’s understandable why Hollywood has taken so long trying to get a Paradise Lost movie off the ground. The challenge of depictig the poem’s otherworldly realms (Hell, Heaven) and creatures (angels and demons) has been a substantial one, not to mention getting the depiction of Adam and Eve, and the story of the Garden of Eden, all correct. Strangely enough, it’s exactly the kind of fantastical project that actually sound like it would be well-suited for an AI-generated film. In fact Ex Machina’s whole mission statement is to make “expansive worlds to be realized at a responsible budget while preserving the primacy of real actors, human-authored narratives, and guild-aligned production practices.”
That said, Roger Avary was lock-step alongside director Robert Zemmeckis when they adapted the English epic poem Beowulf for the screen in (2007). That films is forever infamous for being the boldest attempt to use real actors and motion-capture CGI performance in a pre-Avatar era. The end result was an unnerving visual experience, as mainstream audiences came to learn firsthand of the “Uncanny Valley” that keeps computer-generated images and/or characters from being convincingly “real.”
With Paradise Lost, Avary is confident that film technologhy has come far enough to avoid another Beowulf situation: “Beowulf was a revisionist reimagining made on a massive budget, but with Paradise Lost I’m taking a more faithful approach at a fraction of the cost, using cutting-edge generative AI to bring Milton’s vision to life in ways unimaginable just a few years ago,” Avary said. “This project brings together everything I’ve learned as a filmmaker and proves that powerful storytelling doesn’t require blockbuster budgets, but the right tools and team. Partnering with Ex Machina and Marco Weber, we’ve created something I believe will move audiences, spark conversations, and remind us why we tell stories in the first place — to wrestle with what it means to be human in the face of the divine. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share it with the world.”
Paradise Lost is currently in production. Discuss the future of AI filmmaking with us over on the ComicBook Forum!
Via: Deadline
