If you’re an avid gamer, chances are that you will remember a 2005 game called Condemned (subtitled Criminal Origins in the States), a survival horror in which a lone cop was forced to battle hordes of normal people who’d been transformed, by something (ooh, spooky), into terrifying psychos.
Well, now Condemned is being brought to the big screen by Warner Bros. – albeit in a slightly different guise and with a new name that won’t be difficult to remember: The Unforgettable.
Director Tarsem Singh – director of REM’s Losing My Religion video, the Jennifer Lopez freakout thriller The Cell, and the forthcoming low-budget fantasy The Fall – will call the shots on the movie, which is written by Kurt Sutter, and produced by David Goyer, Basil Iwanyk and Jason Hall, who actually co-created Condemned.
Still, the fact that the title has been changed (twice – it was originally called Species X) would indicate that all concerned are keen to stress that The Unforgettable will be a very different beast from Condemned. But the plot is basically the same, in that it follows a cop who discovers two things during the course of a murder investigation: a) he’s not human and b) there’s a war on Earth between nice and nasty aliens. Does our hero hold the key to ending this war? What do you think?
The cop – Ethan Thomas in the game – hasn’t been cast yet. Greg Grunberg – psychic cop Matt in Heroes – voiced the character in the game, but we’re not laying any bets on him reprising the role for the big screen.
And will The Unforgettable be, well... you know? We'll know for sure sometime in 2008.