300 Meets The Ten Commandments?

Posted by sean in Latest News, Movies on October 12th, 2009

The story of Moses is one of the latest properties to be reimagined as a big-budget Hollywood cash cow (or is that “golden calf”?).

Twentieth Century Fox is looking to develop a new film following the biblical figure from his basket-in-the-Nile beginnings to his youth as Egyptian royalty to his final place as desert wanderer and champion of the Hebrews. Adam Cooper and Bill Collage will write the script, fresh off their completion of a Moby Dick script for Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov. Cooper and Collage’s treatment of Moby Dick is a far cry from Melville’s musty old tome, and from the sounds of it, it will set the tone for their biblical adaptation.

“Moby Dick was pitched as a 300-like reimagining of the Melville story as a visually stunning action piece, and the story of Moses is conceived similarly,” Variety reports, “The goal is to give a Braveheart feel to a story most famously captured in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments.”

So, from the sound of it, we’ve got a well-muscled Moses leading an army of shirtless Hebrews through a CGI Red Sea – in slow motion, of course – to look forward to. This is all in keeping, of course, with the little-known eleventh commandment that Moses must have left at the top of the mountain: “Thou shalt remake, reimagine, and create endless sequels – so long as thou seeith a buck in it.”