Joel Silver has revealed that the long in gestation Sgt Rock movie (so long in gestation it was an Arnold vehicle long, long before he had a political twinkle in his eye) will leave behind the comics’ traditional WWII setting and instead take place in the near future.
Ugh.
Silver tells the LA Times: “As a war movie, it’s not going to be ‘where it’s been,’ it’s going to be ‘where it’s going.’ We didn’t want to do Iraq, we didn’t want to do a contemporary war. We wanted to do a sort of futuristic war. It’s pretty strong.”
The Times speculates that Inglorious Basterds hit the Sgt Rock aesthetic a little too much, but if that’s the case this decision is bonkers. First of all, Basterds did well, so it seems there’s an audience for this. Second of all, Basterds was missing most of the big war action that would be integral to a Sgt Rock movie. While I think Basterds is not just Tarantino’s best film but one of the best movies made for the last decade or two, it didn’t quite deliver on the men on a mission action many fans expected. A Rock movie would deliver that.
Maybe Joel Silver is just buckling under the pressure of developing this movie for two goddamned decades. A Sgt Rock set in the future sounds like a terrible new comic series that lasts 7 issues (and DC probably already tried it at some point).