House star Olivia Wilde will be hitting science fiction hard in the coming year with roles in hotly anticipated 3D extravaganza, Tron: Legacy, and Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens, whose teaser footage garnered good buzz at this year’s Comic Con in San Diego. Now 24 Frames has revealed an impending hat trick as Wilde has signed on to the latest Andrew Niccol sci-fi thriller, which is currently untitled.
Starring opposite Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake, Wilde will play Timberlake’s mother – despite being three years younger than the pop star. Thankfully, there’s no sign of the poor aging prosthetics that were applied to Winona Ryder in Star Trek. Instead, this film is set in a world where cosmetic rejuvenation has hit a whole new level of absurdity.
Heat Vision reveals the film, which was previously called I’m.mortal, is “set in the not-too-distant future where the aging gene has been switched off. To avoid overpopulation, time has become the currency and the way people pay for luxuries and necessities. The rich can live forever, while the rest try to negotiate for their immortality. The protagonist is a poor young man who comes into a fortune of time, though too late to help his mother from dying. He ends up on the run from a corrupt police force known as ‘time keepers.'”
So in this bleak new future, the rich will live forever and the poor will be tracked down and murdered.
Niccol is an old-hand at infusing science fiction with socio-political topics with features like The Truman Show, Gattaca, and S1m0ne to his credit. Recently, social sci-fi’s done well as fleets of fan rushed repeatedly to the glory of a world unspoiled in Avatar. But with the wealth divide being such a heated topic at present, will audiences turn out to a science fiction flick that’s not much of an escape?
Are you looking forward to Andrew Niccol’s latest thriller?