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Butler, McConaughey & Worthington Team for CG 'Thunder Run' in 3D

by Ethan Anderton
October 27, 2011
Source: Deadline

Australian actor Sam Worthington is already used to working in an all-CG, 3D motion picture, and Gerard Butler got a taste of that world with his work on Gamer, and now the two actors will join forced with Matthew McConaughey for the action thriller Thunder Run, based on David Zucchino's book of the same name and yet another project heading to the American Film Market next month. Using the same technology from Avatar, this will be the first conventional war film using facial and motion capture technology along with CG and 3D to bring the action from the frontlines of Baghdad to the big screen.

Deadline reports Robert Port and Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down) are scripting the film which follows the untold story of the dangerous and bloody capture of Baghdad by American Forces at the onset of the Iraq War. In April 2003, three battalions and fewer than a thousand men launched a violent thrust of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles into the heart of a city of five million, igniting a three-day blitzkrieg, which military professionals often refer to as a lightning strike, or “thunder run.” Con-Air and The Mechanic director Simon West will sit in the director's chair for this ambitious feature, which basically sounds like Call of Duty: The Movie, complete with a video game visual style.

The trick here will be creating human-like CG and motion capture (unlike the Na'vi created in Avatar) that will still bring the drama and realism that a live-action war film depicts so well on the big screen. The projects been in the works for five years though, so it sounds like producers Brian Presley, Carissa Buffel and Kevin Matusow of Freedom Filmsknow and Jib Polhemus of The Graphic Film Company know what they're doing. At this point, it's not clear how long this film will be in production and when it might see release, but it certainly sounds like one of the most ambitious war films in a long time. Thoughts?

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