It’s been a while since we last saw a sign of progress on the Bioshock movie. It’s been a bumpy road with staff changes aplenty but it has never once been canned. Bioshock designer Ken Levine assures gamers everywhere that the film still has a future. In fact, he says that he himself is currently working on the “active” project . Unfortunately, “active” is the only thing he could say about the movie. Here are some comments he made to DC radio station 106.7.

“I will say that it is still an active thing, and it is something we are actively talking about and actively working on. I can’t tell you whether — you know, the movie business is complicated — I can’t tell you whether it’s going to happen for sure or it’s not going to happen for sure, but it’s something we are actively discussing, quite actively, and actively working on.”

Yes, that’s a direct quote. He really wants us to be totally sure that this project is “active”.

However, any active project is sure to have some active issues. For example, Levine said a big problem with the game is the very nature of the First Person Shooter genre. In First Person Shooters, the character you control is mostly a non-entity. It’s really just a hand with a gun, and the game developers rely on the gamers to put themselves in the protagonist’s shoes. Unfortunately, you can’t do that with cinema. So Levine is trying to think of a way to flesh out Jack, the Bioshock protagonist, in a way that doesn’t override or derail the Bioshock plotline.

Gore Verbinski, once director of the project, now producer, had his own thoughts on the story as well. For one, he thinks that the movie certainly had to be rated R. This is a problem, as Hollywood normally sees the video game demographic as a PG-13 demographic. However, Verbinski made it very clear that a PG or PG-13 Bioshock movie won’t do, though he also has no intentions of stretching the boundaries of the R rating either. Bioshock has just the right amount of violence in it already, and it shouldn’t be candy-coated or turned into an outright gore-fest.

Verbinski’s successor as director of the project is Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (known for his work on 28 Weeks Later). Verbinski took up the producer role due to budget snags, but Fresnadillo hasn’t been very vocal on the project. This leads us to believe that Verbinski still has quite a bit of creative control.

With any luck, perhaps we will see a Bioshock movie by the time Bioshock Infinite comes out. Of course, by then we will have ditched capitalistic utopias under the sea for flying steampunk cities in the sky that eschew the thought of immigration. We can only hope that the legacy of Rapture holds up long enough to make the movie a hit. Ah, who the hell are we kidding, it’s a video game adaptation. It will most likely suck just like the rest of ‘em.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Bioshock Is Too Much for Gore Verbinski
• A Bioshock MMO? Yes Please!
• Bioshock Infinite — Beyond the Skies
• Jonathan Levine Adapting Warm Bodies
• Wii Fit and Wii Active
• Castlevania Movie Project Updates