Deus Ex movie 'moving like a rocket,' core approach prioritizes cyberpunk elements

The in-progress Deus Ex film, which will focus on Human Revolution, is being approached as a cyberpunk movie rather than a "video game movie" and draws inspiration from films including District 9, Looper and Inception, according to a recent interview with director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill

Speaking with Crave Online, the pair said production is "moving like a rocket," and that the script draft they recently turned in to CBS Films has stirred excitement.

"It's not a rehashing of the game," said Cargill. "What [viewers] want to see is, 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. So it's really allowed us to expand upon the things that happened in the game, and the game has such a great cinematic story to begin with that those elements are very easy to extract."

Derrickson said that it's "impossible" to include the entire game's aesthetic into one movie, so the film will borrow some of the more iconic elements of the game and adapt the rest. He noted that simply packing game features into the movie would result in "another bad video game movie," and cited the Resident Evil series and Mortal Kombat film as movies that captured the games' essence but failed to be overall good productions.

He also expressed his idea that the maturation and growth of video games aspiring to "lofty ambitions" could in turn contribute to better films based off them.

"I think that we're going to see the first generation of video game adaptations made by people who grew up playing video games, and who grew up watching science fiction films," he said. "So there's kind of a love for both, and also a very clear understanding of the difference between both. What makes a good game versus what makes a good movie."