JUST WATCH THIS SPACE...

A couple of weeks ago I waxed lyrical about Tom Cruise and his enthusiasm for doing dangerous things on camera. Sooner or later, The Cruiser will end up in space. It just seems to be the natural evolution of his brand.

If James Cameron had his way, it would have already happened by now.

In a recent interview, the Oscar-winning director talked about a project he pitched to Cruise back in 2000: a space movie actually made in space. Cameron said: “I actually talked to [Cruise] about doing a space film in space, about 15 years ago. I had a contract with the Russians in 2000 to go to the International Space Station and shoot a high-end 3D documentary there. And I thought, ‘Man, we should just make a feature.’ I said, ‘Tom, you and I, we’ll get two seats on the Soyuz, but somebody’s gotta train us as engineers.’ Tom said, ‘No problem, I’ll train as an engineer.’ We had some ideas for the story, but it was still conceptual.”

Obviously, it never happened in the end, and culture is all the poorer for it. Cruise has decided to train as a fighter jet pilot instead of a zero-gravity engineer, and James Cameron will be working on sequels to Avatar for the rest of his natural life.

But, God, I want to know more about this film. What was the plot? Would there be aliens? How would The Cruiser find a way to ride a motorbike in space? Joking aside, could this film have been feasible at all? Shooting a feature film in the ISS would be an almost impossible endeavour. But then again, Cameron and Cruise specialise in impossible missions (sorry). As we know, Cruise will sacrifice life and limb for his craft, while Cameron loves to innovate. For example, rather than simulating underwater environments for the next Avatar film, he went and filmed it all underwater, saying: “We’ve thrown a lot of horsepower, innovation, imagination and new technology at the problem... it’s taken us about a year and a half now to work out how we’re going to do it.”

That’s the kind of person who would go to space with Tom Cruise.

Maybe one day...