Dystopian Short Film True Skin Should Have Been A Major Movie Or Series
What happened to True Skin? It offered such cool potential. Look, there are quite a few things I’d change about myself if ever robotic augmentation came into humanity’s everyday reality. I’d definitely want to correct my vision and dental malfunctions, and relieve some back pain. I guess I’ll save all the other stuff for my wishful blog about enlarging, well, other parts of my body.
When we had last heard about the augmentation-themed film True Skin, it was just a short film directed by newcomer Stephan Zlotescu that managed to combine wacky Asian imagery with a future dystopia. But back in 2013, Variety reported that Warner Bros. had mechanically grafted the short into its upcoming slate of films, with Zlotescu set to adapt his own film.
The screenplay was to be written by Tucker Parsons, a creative director and executive VP at the marketing agency Ignition Creative. In his spare time, he had written a script for a 14th-century Scottish whale hunter film called Whaleman that made the most recent Blacklist for unproduced screenplays. Whale hunting and quasi-cyborgs are about as far-flung from each other as anything I can imagine.
True Skin tells the story of a future where non-adaptive humans are left to beg on the street, sick and dying, while people wave around neon virtual advertisements for nudie shows.
The main character enhances his body with a top-secret prototype, which puts him on the run from government agencies worldwide. So he tries to hide out in Korea, changing his opinion and inserting his memories into some kind of cloud-based system, setting himself up for death.
The film ends without any real indication of what a feature would show, but it’s intriguing nonetheless. Check out the original film below, and remember that burning your Casio calculator watch onto your skin doesn’t make you an Android. It just makes you cooler than everyone around you.
The Warner Bros. deal for True Skin ended up not going anywhere and then in 2016 Amazon announced they had acquired the rights to adapt the short film into a one-hour sci-fi TV series. But that’s where the trail ends up stopping. It’s a shame.
True Skin had all the makings of a dystopian sci-fi tour de force. The images were very cool, lending itself to some seedy world-building we would have been on board for. And the character-on-the-run piece would have lent itself to some cool action.
But it doesn’t seem that the True Skin movie or series was meant to be. At least not for now.
