Reuniting with Russell Crowe for Gladiator 2 (aka Robin Hood) which is being followed up by a prequel to his much admired Alien movie that could shoot next year - there's seemingly a motivation behind Ridley Scott's recent decision-making to revert back to what he knows and what has proven fruitful for him in the past. Today it's been revealed the British veteran director has set his Blade Runner screenwriter David Webb Peoples to re-write The Forever War, Scott's epic sci-fi movie based on Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel that is now on it's fourth draft. It's unknown whether Peoples, an accomplished screenwriter who also wrote Unforgiven and Twelve Monkeys, has wrote all the drafts to date. Peoples name on the adaptation is fitting given Scott initially described the novel as "a bit of The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner, built upon a brilliant, disorienting premise'. The news was spotted by First Showing, who saw this announcement on Haldeman's blog;
"Scott has a script; last I heard, it was the fourth rewrite. I've talked to the writer he has good credits, like 'Unforgiven.'"
is about elite soldiers in an interstellar war and how they deal with time dilation, a side effect of superfast space travel that causes them to age much more slowly than their planetbound friends and family. While only a few months seem to pass for the fighting men and women, decades are actually passing on Earth.
Scott has been wanting to adapt the novel for twenty years but only aggressively went after it when he secured the rights at Fox 2000 in 2008. The novel seems to have a big fan following and its premise is way more complicated than laid out in this article. WIKI seem to have it nailed down, if you wanna read more. Scott is expected to shoot Alien Harvest next year but after that his next movie could be one of at least two dozen projects, as well as anything else he might become attached to in the meantime. Those include a potential Robin Hood sequel, The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio, that bizarre Monopoly movie, a biopic of Gucci, an adaptation of Brave New World (a similar sci-fi sized epic as The Forever War), The Kind One with Casey Affleck and so many more. IMDB has his name listed to 23 projects. Personally - we would like to see The Forever War over any of them.