Deus Ex movie hopes to avoid "video game movie" tropes

Deus Ex will be a cyberpunk movie, not a video game movie, filmmaker C. Robert Cargill has said.

"The chief philosophy is we’re not making a video game movie, we’re making a cyberpunk movie," Cargill told CraveOnline.

"We’ve taken a look at what’s worked in video games and what hasn’t, and really what we’ve broken down is what we think the audience really wants, [what] the audience that loves Deus Ex is going to want to see out of a Deus Ex movie."

The movie is not a "rehashing" of a game, he added, so there ought to be something new for franchise fans.

"They want to see elements of the game that they love, but they want to see things that they hadn’t quite seen in the game, that the game didn’t allow them to see," Cargill explained.

Noting that Eidos Montreal "really understood the nature of cyberpunk and made 'the' cyberpunk game", Cargill agreed that movies are yet to furnish a similarly genre-defining title, so he's hoping to 'break the mold'.

"We’re looking at movies like District 9 and Looper, and Inception. Those are the molds of what we’ve been doing. Let’s push this and do something new with concepts people love, but tell a story that they’ve never seen before, that just melts their brain," he said.

"And that is just hyperkinetic and smart and just hits all the right buttons that genre audiences want to see. That’s what we’ve gunned for. We haven’t tried to build it around Johnny Mnemonic or New Rose Hotel."

The undated film, which is based on 2011's Human Revolution rather than earlier Deus Ex games, is "moving like a rocket", colleague Scott Derrickson said. Cargill and Dickerson signed on to direct and write the project in November last year; their previous collaborative efforts include horror effort Sinister.

Thanks, PC Gamer.