Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that Paramount and Skydance execs are “sweet” on Attack The Block‘s Joe Cornish to direct the third Star Trek film. A great payday for Cornish if it happens, but the the ability to be a kind of visionary traffic cop on a costly, CG-laden Trek film is exactly what Cornish has shown he’s not adept at doing. He’s looking for a big-time career and that’s fine (he co-wrote fucking Ant Man), but when I think of Cornish I think of a guy who was clever enough to make a good monster-invasion film on a nickle-and-dime budget.
Attack The Block “is a smarter, more character-flavored, more tightly constructed entertainment than Cowboys and Aliens,” I wrote in my review, “and I don’t mean solely in terms of tension and thrills. Block is also about something — i.e., community values and urban-jungle teens learning to take responsibility and fly straight and become men. Cornish seems to be emphasizing the metaphor with his use of cartoony growling furries. He’s almost saying ‘forget the realism factor…these monsters are obviously bullshit and you and I know it, so let’s forget about our technical efforts and concentrate on what the threat of these monsters mean to the characters.’ None of us believe in movie monsters. Not really. But there’s something curiously liberating about beasts that are excessively unbelievable.”