James McAvoy & Alicia Vikander currently filming Submergence based on book by J.M. Ledgard

To be honest, I could care less if they never make another X Men movie. I'm just not at all interested. What I am interested in is what Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are up to on screen away from the blockbuster film franchise.

This year, for instance, I'm eagerly awaiting Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as a lighthouse keeper and his wife in the adaptation of M.L. Stedman's gorgeous book, The Light Between Oceans. That's coming out this September 2nd. Vikander is currently one of the most in-demand female actors.

Not to be outdone by his onscreen rival, James McAvoy is currently shooting a movie with Alicia Vikander too. The two are starring in Submergence based on the best selling book by J.M. Ledgard. Here's the lowdown on that:

 

In a room with no windows on the coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water expert to report on al-Qaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions, and forced marches through the arid badlands of Somalia. Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders, a biomathematician, half-French, half-Australian, prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. She is obsessed with the life that multiplies in the darkness of the lowest strata of water.

Both are drawn back to the previous Christmas, and to a French hotel on the Atlantic coast, where a chance encounter on the beach led to an intense and enduring romance. For James, his mind escapes to utopias both imagined and remembered. Danny is drawn back to beginnings: to mythical and scientific origins, and to her own. It is to each other and to the ocean that they most frequently return: magnetic and otherworldly, a comfort and a threat.

I haven't read the book but the reviews are mostly of the outstanding "I read it through in one sitting" variety. Plenty of time to check it off your reading list; directed by Oscar-nominated documentarian and filmmaker Wim Wenders, Submergence doesn't hit theaters until sometime in 2017.