Monday, October 12, 2009

Moses to Get High Tech Action Film Treatment

From the Guardian

The life of Moses is to be the subject of a 300-style action film, Variety reports. It will the inaugural project for Chernin Entertainment, the company founded by former Rupert Murdoch lieutenant Peter Chernin after stepping down as president and chief operating officer of News Corporation in June.

Twentieth Century Fox, where Chernin is chairman and CEO, is developing the story of Moses using the same green-screen techniques as Zack Snyder's stylised version of Frank Miller's graphic novel about the battle of Thermopylae.

The film will retell the story of Moses's life from his near death as an infant to his adoption into the Egyptian royal family, his defiance of the Pharaoh and deliverance of the Hebrews from enslavement. The best known elements of the Book of Exodus – the plagues visited on Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea – will also be present, as well as new elements of Moses's life sourced from rabbinical literature.

The script will be written by Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, who most recently gave a graphic-novel spin to Herman Melville's Moby Dick for Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov.

The life of Moses has of course been seen on the big screen before, most famously in two films produced and directed by Cecil B DeMille: the 1923 silent film called The Ten Commandments, remade in epic style in 1956 with Charlton Heston in the lead. More recently, Val Kilmer voiced Moses in the 1998 animation The Prince of Egypt and Mel Brooks took on the role – as well as a bunch of others – in 1981's History of the World: Part I.


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