Instead of doing another big franchise film after Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow's next project, Intelligent Life, will bring him back to his Safety Not Guaranteed roots. Fingers crossed that this film will continue to put him on a upward trajectory.
Intelligent Life will be directed by Trevorrow, and was written with his Safety Not Guaranteed and Jurassic World collaborator Derek Connolly. The script is a re-worked version of an older script the duo had, called The Ambassador. So while no details about the new version are available, we do know that The Ambassador was intended to be the follow-up film to Safety Not Guaranteed.
Back when it was announced in 2012, The Ambassador was said to follow a low-ranking staffer of the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs. His office monitors the universe for other intelligent life and prepares for first contact. The shy staffer makes accidental first contact when he meets a beautiful woman who turns out to be an alien, and the pair have to survive being threatened by otherworldly forces.
At the time, Trevorrow and Connolly said the film "is about a pair of emotionally dysfunctional people forced into a situation beyond their control. This is exactly how we feel while shooting a film, which makes the support of trusted collaborators like Big Beach an absolute necessity."
The focus on pair of dysfunctional people does seem to echo Safety Not Guaranteed. And the UN office dealing with aliens matches the new title of Intelligent Life. The Hollywood Reporter says that Intelligent Life will take the "kernel" of The Ambassador and has the same tone as Safety Not Guaranteed, " big idea surrounded by rich characters."
The Ambassador was going to be a smaller-budget science fiction thriller. No word on whether Intelligent Life, under DreamWorks, will keep that sort of mentality. I kind of hope so, since that makes it more likely that Trevorrow will be able to keep his voice strong and not get lost in everything a big-budget action piece — which the description makes very possible — brings with it. It'd be great for Trevorrow to escape the sophomore slump that's claimed so many other new directors.
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