Long has man gazed up at the stars and seen in them poetry, pulling from the obsidian depths and their faint pinpricks of light the inspiration to illuminate us all. He has seen that infinite vastness and given it shape—a blocky, rectangular shape—and drawn it closer to us, slowly, in a sort of side-by-side march.
And now you must sing again in screenwriter Dan Kunka, O Cosmic Muse, in your 8-bit bleeps! And through him tell the story of alien blocks that have journeyed the heavens, and who have arrived to plunder our stronghold of a bunch of other blocks. Tell him, Muse, of Atari’s Space Invaders.
According to Deadline, Kunka has been drafted by Warner Bros. to pen the screenplay for its upcoming adaptation of the classic video game, which long has captured that eternal conflict between mankind and the unknown. For we fear what we do not know, and as those fears advance upon us relentlessly, we regress to scared little children—hiding behind our block-wombs, symbolically squeezing small pixels of life from our mother’s block-nipples. And all the time there is no stopping these fears, unless we figure out their highly predictable pattern of moving in horizontal lines.
Translating those rich narrative themes into a movie should prove no obstacle for Kunka, who recently vaulted onto the hallowed Black List with his spec story Yellowstone Falls. That script tells the dialogue-free tale of a pack of wolves left to fight off a swarm of mutant zombies, a story that similarly captures the eternal conflict between wolves and zombies. Now Kunka must take that deep understanding of things’ need to fight other things and hark to the watching skies, and draw down to Earth a tale of the blocky jellyfish things it holds within its celestial wonders. In other words, he must allow the space to invade him, so that it may invade us.