Congrats to Scott Stewart! First of all, the guy’s career is sort of cooking – even before his ‘Angels with Automatics’ movie, Legion, opens, the former The Orphanage FX guy is shooting his second feature, Priest. And now he’s got a third feature lined up (without anybody seeing his previous two! That’s how you make deals in this town – be two steps ahead of yourself) and he’s managed to get an original concept right past the gatekeepers in Hollywood.
Maybe he tricked them by calling the film Psy-Ops, which is sort of generic enough that it’s been used in other media, like video games and books. Here’s the basic premise, via The Hollywood Reporter:
“Psy-Ops” revolves around a covert U.S. military unit of
psychological operatives who specialize in exploiting their
target’s deepest fears. When on a routine mission to the Amazon
Basin, they discover something more terrifying than they could have
imagined.
Bold is hoping to combine the elements of such 1980s action flicks
as “Predators” and “Aliens” with the psychological tone and visual
realism of such 21st century movies as “Black Hawk Down” and the
“Bourne” series.
Bold in that sentence is the indie production company that picked up the pitch from Stewart and Gus Krieger. So I guess it’s not exactly “Hollywood,” but hey, close enough. It’s not based on a comic book!
Krieger wrote The Killing Room, a film I saw at Sundance that was intriguing but flawed. I liked many of the basic ideas, though, so it’ll be interesting to see what Krieger does here. And The Killing Room was very much character-driven, and I think this sort of movie needs to be character-driven. It’s why Predator is a classic and nobody likes Predator 2 (at least nobody who isn’t posting on the CHUD message board B Action Movie Thread).