Yesterday Variety announced that Scott Derrickson has signed on with Skydance Media to take over their long-stalled project Bermuda, an action-adventure film based on the infamous Bermuda triangle, a region in the Caribbean sea where countless aircraft and sea vessels have allegedly disappeared without a trace. The American company has been working on this project since 2013, and subsequently the script has gone through many hands and adaptations, but now Derrickson will be in charge of both rewriting the script with his writing partner C. Robert Cargill, directing the movie and also exec producing it. Chris Evans is said to have the leading role.
Given Derrickson’s trajectory — he was the director of Doctor Strange, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still— I feel this movie (if it does manage to get the green light) has a lot of potential to revive interest in the old Bermuda triangle mystery, and give it an entertaining treatment which may or may not involve time warps and interdimensional wormholes. I remember how pleased I was when I watched Doctor Strange at the movie theater because it was obvious Derrickson was getting a lot of cues from the works of Terence McKenna and other psychonaut authors (the scene when the late Stan Lee is shown holding a copy of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception was particularly hilarious) so I wouldn’t be the least surprised if the story gets to incorporate a lot of really ‘out there’ elements –maybe even a slight mention of the recent UFO sightings by Navy pilots, perhaps?
And it also seems the movie will not be without a few bits of ‘synchromysticism’ as well. Consider the fact that Chris Evans became a superstar thanks to his role as Captain America —“the first Avenger”— and the legend of the Bermuda triangle got started due to Flight 19, a squadron of five Avenger torpedo bombers who got lost during an exercise on December 5, 1945.
