Viggo Mortensen Is Making A Futuristic Transhumanism Movie
Viggo Mortensen and David Cronenberg are teaming back up for a movie that will look into the future with morality and tech at question
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Viggo Mortensen is a long way removed from his time as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and has shown, over the years the ability to take all kinds of roles, even some that are of the deeper variety. That looks like it will the case again with an exciting announcement coming from The Hollywood Reporter that the actor has signed on for a new film with David Cronenberg that will explore a lot bigger concepts with a decidedly futuristic setting. Viggo is heading off into a dystopian future with the idea of humanity coming really into question.
This new Viggo Mortensen film will be called Crimes of the Future and will take place in some undetermined timeline when technology has progressed to a point where humans are becoming fully integrated with technology. This will mean some blurring lines around what is happening to people as they transition to a world in which the *advances* have begun changing the very aspects of the human makeup.
Viggo Mortensen will play Saul Tenser, a man who has begun forming new organs in his body thanks to both mutations within the human race as well as advanced technology which begins altering people’s core makeup. The character is a performance artist who puts these transformations on display but also draws unwanted attention from the government and other factions in this new world. It sounds like a dense film, meant to really call into question the conflicting ideas around who we are as humans and what will happen as the concepts of humanity and technology begin to blur together.
And if this transformative storyline that focuses on the moral and ethical ideas around mutation sound familiar it’s because Cronenberg has some experience in this realm. His 1986 film The Fly dealt with presumably similar themes around this type of thing. Could we see Viggo Mortensen take the place of Jeff Goldblum in this sense? It’s certainly possible and this could be really interesting to see if this film follows the same kind of path.
For Cronenberg, this also won’t be his first time working with Viggo Mortensen either. The two partnered for History of Violence back in 2005. That was a bloody and dark film that wasn’t apologetic about its intention to make the viewer uncomfortable at times if it served the overall narrative. There’s a good chance this new movie, Crimes of the Future will work in a similar way. For Cronenberg, this will be his first original screenplay brought to the big screen in more than two decades.
Joining Viggo Mortensen in the cast will be Kristen Stewart and Lea Seydoux, though their roles aren’t clearly defined as of right now. Mortensen himself hasn’t taken all that much work in recent years, but when he does it often lands him in awards discussion. That was the case with Best Leading Actor Oscar nominations for both Green Book and Captain Fantastic. Could this next film land him in a similar award setting? The pieces are certainly lining up for that to be the case.
