These New Uncanny Valley Images from the Britney Spears Biopic Will Drive You Crazy
In psychology, there is a concept called the uncanny valley, which refers to that creepy feeling you get when you see something that looks almost just like a person’s face, but not quite. This also applies to celebrity biopics. When you watch a movie about someone you’ve seen pictures of all over the place for your entire life, and the actor playing that person looks almost just like that person, but not quite, you get the same creepy feeling. That feeling abounds in these new images from Lifetime’s Britney Spears movie, tentatively titled Britney.
As an early birthday gift to the Princess of Pop herself (whose birthday is December 2), whether she wants it or not, Lifetime debuted five new images from the movie, giving us a sense of what to expect when we all tune in to the cinematic event of 2017. We have a very Taylor Swift-looking Natasha Bassett as Spears in a very gold outfit, Nathan Keyes playing a beanie’d Justin Timberlake, her ex-husband Kevin Federline (Clayton Chitty), and, possibly the most disconcerting of all, a photo of a bizarro-universe N*SYNC, who look like the low-budget live-action movie version of an anime about a swim team. That green lace-up crop sweater Bassett wears really takes me back to the good ol’ days when I wasn’t allowed to wear that kind of thing in elementary school.
Britney Spears herself has not authorized the film, and her representatives said that she would not be contributing to it “in any way, shape, or form.” Which was probably a good move, seeing how weird the whole thing looks now. Lifetime has a habit of trying to kinda make their movies cool and edgy, but that probably won’t be the case here. We should be so lucky.
Britney premieres sometime in February 2017.