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Screenwriter Graham Yost Dishes Details on 'Major Matt Mason' Film

by Ethan Anderton
January 18, 2012
Source: Reuters

Just last summer we learned that Forrest Gump team Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks were going to team up again for Major Matt Mason, a big screen adaptation of the Mattel action figure from the 1960's. Mason was a unique toy because it debuted in 1966 and was a line about an an astronaut who lived and worked on the moon. Eventually we actually landed on the moon and for some reason the toy just wasn't as cool as the real astronauts. We've been wondering just what the story will be for Major Matt Mason and now screenwriter Graham Yost (Speed, Broken Arrow) has revealed some brief details on the film's plot.

Yost, who is also the man behind the successful FX drama series "Justified" recently spoke with Reuters (via The Playlist) and talked about the film's setting and what we can expect from Major Matt Mason's return:

"The story is set on the moon, near future, and it's a team of people on a base on the moon, on the south pole of the moon. And of course everything goes wrong. There's no bad guys. There's no aliens. Nothing like that. It's just, can you survive? It's really fun, and it's just been a blast working with Tom on that. We had such a good time on 'From Earth to the Moon' that it's sort of like, 'We've got to go back to the moon. Some way, somehow, let's go back to the moon.'"

That's kind of how I feel about the space program now. Anyway, it doesn't sound like this is going to be just a blockbuster summer venture, and it might have the same kind of depth and gravitas that something like Apollo 13 or his HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon" which Yost work on with Hanks as well. The Playlist speculates that the film could follow the 1968 book Moon Mission which featured Matt Mason joined by the only female character ever to appear alongside the space hero. You can read the book in its entirety right here and judge for yourself, but either way, I'm excited at the prospect of Zemeckis returning to sci-fi, and Hanks returning to space. Zemeckis has made anything incredible in awhile and Hanks needs something big like this for his career right now too. Sound good?

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