This past summer Ridley Scott returned to the genre that made him with the sci-fi blockbuster Prometheus and while that film landed with divisive reactions, he’s now set to tackle another beloved property in the genre. First picking up the rights around half-a-decade ago, it looks like things are moving again on an adaptation of Joe Haldeman‘s 1974 novel The Forever War.
While we heard murmurs a few years ago that Blade Runner scribe David Peopleswas circling the scripting gig, Deadline reports that Fox 2000 has handed the reigns over to Dante Harper, whose feature screenwriting debut Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters lands early next year. He’s also got major sci-fi experience with the currently shooting Tom Cruise action vehicle All You Need Is Kill.
While there is no timetable on when we’ll actually see this, the studio hopes this draft will help push it up on Scott’s ever-expanding potential project list. The director is wrapping up The Counselor for a release next year and since I can’t see a sequel to Prometheus moving forward, I’d certainly be happy with seeing this adaptation come to fruition. Check out the synopsis of the novel below.
The book tells the timeless story of war, in this case a conflict between humanity and the alien Taurans. Humans first bumped heads with the Taurans when we began using collapsars to travel the stars. Although the collapsars provide nearly instantaneous travel across vast distances, the relativistic speeds associated with the process means that time passes slower for those aboard ship. For William Mandella, a physics student drafted as a soldier, that means more than 27 years will have passed between his first encounter with the Taurans and his homecoming, though he himself will have aged only a year. When Mandella finds that he can’t adjust to Earth after being gone so long from home, he reenlists, only to find himself shuttled endlessly from battle to battle as the centuries pass.
Do you want to see Scott direct this next?