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David Goyer's The Invisible Man Going Steam Punk!

by Alex Billington
August 9, 2008
Source: MTV, ShockTillYouDrop.com

From writing The Dark Knight to directing the horror film The Unborn to future projects including X-Men Origins: Magneto and The Invisible Man, it's obvious that David Goyer is one hell of a busy guy. Just last week we brought you a brief update on the Magneto spin-off, now today we've got updates on The Invisible Man, another project we first announced last year. The updates come from both MTV and STYD and provide some rather interesting details on the project, including its steam punk direction. Goyer is planning on bringing us another adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic story and will be building off of the story in James Whale's 1933 film. "My take is kind of an extrapolation. It actually deals with a nephew of the first character. It’s got some of the characters from the H.G. Wells book, but it’s kind of a continuation."

Goyer first told MTV that "I'm in the process of doing [Invisible Man] right now, and I'm working with some conceptual artists in tandem with writing the script." Who did he decide to bring on? None other than Jamie Rama. "Rama is a great conceptual artist who worked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, he's one of the primary conceptual artists who worked on the Bat suits." Unfortunately Goyer still doesn't know whether Magneto or Invisible Man will end up being his next project, as he's currently finishing The Unborn and is dedicated to that until November. Goyer's interest in The Invisible Man first began when he found a tattered copy of H.G. Wells' book and re-read it, which hatched the idea for a big re-imagining.

This time the story picks up months after the events in Wells' novel and includes prominent historical figures like William Melville, the head of Scotland Yard and founder of MI6. Goyer told STYD that Melville "instituted fingerprinting and was friends with Harry Houdini. He's where the 'M' comes from in MI6. In my story, he's the one who captures the Invisible Man in my story and says, 'Listen, we want to turn you into a secret agent and send you into Imperial Russia.'" While moviegoers will get more out of this new version by seeing the old 1933 film, anyone can obviously walk into this and still be fine. So where does all this steam punk come from? Goyer told MTV that "It kind of crosses a lot of genres. It's very steam punk." And if you don't exactly know what steam punk is (and why it's cool), we'll let Wikipedia do the explaining.

Goyer also adds this last little exciting tidbit. "I don't want to give too much away, but I took what being invisible could mean to the next logical extreme. We do a lot of crazy things in it that are sort of far beyond what anyone’s done with it yet." With a statement like that, I'm imagining something like Jumper, which had a great concept (involving something like invisibility) that was executed terribly with a bad cast - and I fear for the same with this. I truly hope Goyer is as good at directing thrillers like this as he is at writing screenplays for comic book movies. All of these updates that Goyer has given actually make me quite excited for this, maybe even more than Magneto. It sounds like Invisible Man may eventually be the next big thing - so keep your eye out for it! Does Goyer's Invisible Man sound like it has potential?

Conceptual photo at the top comes from this ThinkQuest page.

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