With multiple “whistleblower” accounts hitting headlines over the past few years, Hollywood has greenlit yet another UFO movie — or, as it’s recently been rebranded in the mainstream, UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
As upcoming projects from Joseph Kosinski, Steven Spielberg and Colin Trevorrow take shape — not to mention last year’s buzzy doc “The Age of Disclosure” — it’s now Scott Cooper’s turn to ask if the truth is out there, and he’s decided to tackle one of the earliest and most famous stories concerning this subject.
Cooper is teaming up with 20th Century to write and direct a film based on the famous 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, conspiracy. That’s when a rancher supposedly found debris scattered around his property, and the government closed ranks as conspiracy theories took flight about a possible UFO event. To make matters more conspiratorial, the U.S. Army Air Forces initially issued — and then quickly retracted — a press release claiming they had recovered a “flying disc,” later saying it was a weather balloon.
Despite its place in pop-culture lore, the Roswell incident has never actually been turned into a theatrical feature film. It’s been explored on television and in a made-for-TV movie, but Hollywood has never brought a direct adaptation to cinemas. The closest we’ve come to a feature inspired by Roswell is “Hangar 18” (1980), a thinly fictionalized take on the crash and the alleged government cover-up, even if it never names Roswell outright.
It sounds like Cooper is still figuring out what his actual next film will be — maybe it is, in fact, “Roswell,” or it could be “Commanche,” an Eric Roth script that Michael Mann was originally set to direct before personally bestowing directing duties on Cooper.
Cooper is coming off this past year’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” which has seen its Oscar hopes deflate in recent weeks. His other directing credits include “Crazy Heart,” “Black Mass,” “Hostiles,” “Out of the Furnace,” and “The Pale Blue Eye.”
Not a fan of Cooper — a decent filmmaker, but nothing more than that. I can’t say I’ve ever deeply connected with any of his films, which are just not that visually interesting to me, and his storytelling abilities fairly standard.
That's about as direct as an A-lister gets about a major studio, and Affleck can probably say it now since most of the 2017 Warner Bros. brass is no longer in charge.