Metroid The Movie

Cast your mind back to the eighties, when the BBC Micro was the pinnacle of home computing and the Nintendo Entertainment System was a gamer's best friend. As you sat cross-legged in front of the telly in your fluorescent pink tank top stylishly ripped jeans and freshly puffed mullet, clutching that two-buttoned controller in your hand, you may remember laughing with joy as you feasted your eyes on a little game called Metroid. Taking computer games to new depths, it saw you guiding a little armour-clad spacewoman through rampaging alien hordes and brutally gunning them down with all the firepower that futuristic military budgets had to offer. Fun indeed, and it didn't end there. Metroid 2 and Super Metroid soon followed, with a recent GameCube incarnation proving that there's still a demand for the mindless slaughter of extra-terrestrial scum. Never ones to let a potential cash-cow go un-milked, the moneymen in Hollywood have now snapped up the title and a big screen Metroid is on the way. Boasting a feisty female lead, this sci-fi actioner will see the game's heroine, bounty hunter Samus Aran, commissioned by the Galactic Federation to help them out of a bind. Her task? To get medieval on the Metroid, an airborne life form that consumes the energy of other beings and multiplies at a rate just sufficient to provide a decent amount of plasma-fodder. Getting in the way of Samus' xeno-bashing, however, is a band of space-pirates who have stolen a sample of the beast to breed an unstoppable Metroid army. Not the stuff that screenwriting Oscars are won for, but it's the people behind American Pie and Final Destination franchises who are on the lookout for someone to adapt the game so don't write old Samus Aran off just yet.