I’m surprised to see any recent news about this at all because it’s been in development for about ten years or more, but apparently things may be moving forward on the remake of Logan’s Run.
Logan’s Run is the 1967 novel written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson about a future society devoting itself to pleasure, but your life must end when you’re thirty. (In the novel, you are forced to die at twenty-one.)
Those who flee society are chased down by futuristic police named the Sandmen, but as a Sandman named Logan’s own lifetime is drawing to a close, he suddenly questions everything and flees himself.
The consensus among many people with the 1976 movie version of Logan’s Run is good ideas, not so great execution.
I often got the impression that Logan’s Run tried what Star Wars ultimately achieved, which was a special effects spectacular sci-fi movie that crossed over to bigger audiences. Logan didn’t quite make it, and like many remakes today there’s been talk of going back to the book, with of course state of the art special effects we didn’t have back in 1976.
Bryan Singer of X-Men and Superman Lives was going to direct the film for several years for producer Joel Silver (Die Hard, The Matrix), and now Ryan Gosling will star as Logan for director Nicolas Refn. The star / director team just did the movie Drive together, which is already building pretty strong buzz and is due in September. To pull Logan’s Run out of the dated mid-seventies, as well as keep the remake from getting dated quickly after its finished, won’t be easy.
As Refn told the L.A. Times, “Logan’s Run is dated in the sense that everything came true. They’ve been trying to make it for years with the notion of just trying to remake the original movie. And it has to be rethought…We’re still in the stage of trying to figure out the rules of the road.”
Refn also told Movieline, “The iPhone is more advanced than the Logan’s Run of the ’70s, so it’s rethinking that…I would love to make it more with sets and designs and less with CGI.”
As with the work of Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, The Truman Show), perhaps a more minimalist approach to the future could help keep things from becoming dated. Interestingly enough, Niccol is also coming back this October with In Time, a movie with a similar theme where modern society stops aging at twenty five, and you have to keep working to buy more time for your life.
