STAR BLAZERS Getting an Americanized Feature Film Adaptation
It looks like the 1970's Japanese animated series Space Battleship Yamato a.k.a. Star Blazers is going to get an Americanized big screen live-action feature film adaptation. The Japanese recently adapted the series into a live-action film that looked pretty freakin' awesome.
The story is set in the year 2199, and here's a story description... An alien race known as the "Gamilas" or "Gamilons" in the English Star Blazers dub unleash radioactive meteorite bombs on Earth, rendering the planet's surface uninhabitable. Humanity has retreated into deep underground cities, but the radioactivity is slowly affecting them as well, with mankind's extinction estimated in one year. Earth's space fleet is hopelessly outclassed by the Gamilas and all seems lost until a message capsule from a mysterious crashed spaceship is retrieved on Mars. The capsule yields blueprints for a faster-than-light engine and an offering of help from Queen Starsha of the planet Iscandar in the Large Magellanic Cloud. She says that her planet has a device, the Cosmo-Cleaner D (Cosmo DNA), which can cleanse Earth of its radiation damage.
The inhabitants of Earth secretly build a massive spaceship inside the ruins of the Japanese battleship Yamato, the Space Battleship Yamato for which the story is titled. Using Starsha's blueprints, they equip the new ship with a space warp drive, called the "wave motion engine", and a new, incredibly powerful weapon at the bow called the "wave motion gun".
The movie is being set up by True Grit co-financier Skydance and producer David Ellison. They've hired Christopher McQuarrie to write the script for the film. McQuarrie is a great choice, this is the same guy who wrote The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, The Wolverine and Jack The Giant Killer. The film will be set up at Paramount Pictures where Ellison has a deal to make four to six films. He's also trying to get the Top Gun sequel made.
For those of you who didn't know about ten years ago Disney was trying to get this live-action adaptation into production, but it never got off the ground. The story was a re-telling of the Season 1 plot, and followed a ragtag crew of misfits (most of whom are not named after any of the original show's crew) aboard the rebuilt United States battleship Arizona (which, ironically, was sunk by the Japanese during the attack on Pearl Harbor) on a mission to save Earth. The project was shelved following Michael Eisner's departure from the company.
I'm excited for this to happen, but I'm also really looking forward to seeing the Japanese film that was made, but it doesn't have U.S. distribution, so who knows if we'll ever get to see it here on the big screen. I've heard some pretty incredible things about it. Click Here to watch the trailer.
I just hope this Americanized version will be done right. What are your thoughts on this?