David Goyer is a busy fellow. He’s more or less the main man in charge of bringing DC Comics to the big screen; a sort of shadowy, unofficial Kevin Feige, if you will. And with that responsibility comes a hefty workload. Goyer’s had to churn out drafts of Batman vs. Superman, supervise the writing process for Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Sandman adaptation and executive produce Constantine for NBC. Soon he’ll be in charge of sedating Jesse Eisenberg, thus allowing a team of hair and makeup professionals to safely shave off those chestnut-brown curls.
That’s a lot for a single Goyer to manage. Especially so when it’s all comic book films; the genre may appeal to the inner pimply-faced nerd who lurks within us all, but a strict diet of superheroes isn’t enough to sustain a full-grown human being. And so Goyer, who’s reportedly been jonesing to helm something non DC-related, is now attached to direct The Breach, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Originally a 2009 novel written by Patrick Lee, The Breach is the story of a corrupt cop who loses his job and is trying to turn his life. His quiet, introspective self-improvement gets put on hold, however, after he finds a crashed plane in the Alaskan wilderness with the body of the First Lady amongst the casualties. Somehow, this leads our hero towards “a beautiful survivor, assassins, a secret organization, alien technology and an end-of-the-world scenario.” It may not sound like the subtlest film ever created, but it also sounds like a film where the hero doesn’t own a cape, and rarely (if ever) leaps from rooftop to rooftop by cover of night. That’s definitely a plus for Goyer.
But which David Goyer will be directing The Breach? Because we live in a world where two seemingly parallel David Goyers exist: the Goyer of Batman, and the Goyer of almost everything non-Batman. Batman Goyer is a sharp and effective screenwriter, and responsible for one of the all-time great superhero origin films in Batman Begins. Yes, Christopher Nolan might get most of the credit for today’s modern movie Batman, but Goyer was chugging along behind the scenes the entire time, writing the screenplay for Begins (that, alone, is no small feat) and helping Nolan shape the stories for the film’s two sequels. On his own, he scripted a short film for the anthology Batman: Gotham Knight that’s a perfectly thrilling piece of Batman action in its own right. For the curious, the short can be viewed for free on Warner Brothers’ Youtube channel.
Then, of course, there’s Non-Batman Goyer, a Goyer with a soft spot for low-budget, low-brow horror. It’s the genre where his career began, penning the screenplays for films like Demonic Toys, Arcade, The Puppet Masters and The Crow: City of Angels. It’s also the genre he’ll occasionally return to, having done a little writing for the direct-to-video DevilDolls two years back. This fellow’s work does, on occasion, bleed into the writing of present-day Goyer; films like The Unborn and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (in which Nicolas Cage describes flaming pee as both “awesome” and “like a flamethrower”) have a similar cheese-laden horror aesthetic. It goes without saying that, unlike Goyer’s take on a certain caped crusader, his horror films don’t have a whole lot of merit to them.
If we’re lucky, it’ll be the former Goyer, and not the latter who puts his mark on The Breach. But given how over-the-top the premise sounds, with assassins, aliens, the apocalypse and some kind of shadowy conspiracy all lumped into a single film, I’d put my money on the Goyer of flaming urine rather than the Goyer of eternal, incorruptible Bat-justice. But hey, if the guy can get his goofy horror jollies out of the way before returning to the eventual Justice League movie, that might not be so bad after all.
