The game of Asteroids and Roland Emmerich‘s career have something in common: they both consist solely of sitting in the middle of the action and blowing things up. Thus, it seems more than fitting that he would be asked to direct a feature adaptation of the Atari favorite. According to Vulture, Asteroids is being put together by Universal and uber producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, and they’ve asked Emmerich to destroy giant space rocks in his post-destroying Earth phase. Even purists and game fanatics can’t complain too much here, right? There’s no plot to the game. It could be the dumbest action movie of all time and still stay true to its subject matter (except for those who spent lonely nights coming up with stories about whomever was sitting in the 8-bit ship. This is cinematic obviousness, and it can only lead to greatness. Either Emmerich accepts, and we can expect more explosions, or he turns it down and proves that he really is over giant pyrotechnics. As for plot, the story is about Earth people who have been relegated to living in an asteroid belt after the Earth’s destruction. They see their neighborhood non-Earthlings as friendly, but soon learn that it was actually their film’s director those non-Earthlings that blew up the planet. That’s dramatic irony. This thing is Shakespearean already! Emmerich is perfect.

In a recent press release, NASA has announced that it plans to land astronauts on an asteroid by 2025. This new development in space exploration must have been inspired, at least in part, by the hit 1998 Michael Bay film Armageddon, wherein a group of ultra-skilled oil drillers are sent to an asteroid headed for Earth with the mission of embedding an atomic weapon deep beneath its surface in order to blow it off of its course. What else could explain the fact that astronauts who’ve never quit are lining up right and left to be chosen for the expedition? Dr. Paul Abell, NASA’s lead scientist for planetary small bodies, addressed the issue, saying, “The Armageddon film with Bruce Willis was a very fun movie, but not exactly the most scientifically accurate. This is going to be an exciting endeavor, but not quite that dramatic. It’s going to happen a little bit more slowly.” This probably went without saying, as few things in human history have been as dramatic and harrowing as Bay’s masterpiece. Not to mention that, in a real world situation, I imagine it would be hard to find a rough neck crew of oil drillers quite as skilled as the ones that worked for Willis’s Harry Stamper. His claim that Armageddon wasn’t the most scientifically accurate film could be called into question, but probably he just meant it in the literal sense that The Rock’s portrayal of chemical weaponry is widely known as being the most painstakingly researched [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

So you make a completely original space story about two brothers who fly spaceships and blow things up and call it Asteroids? Does that really count as an adaptation? Can you adapt a game with zero story to it? What exactly are you adapting? Why does my head hurt?