A trio of burly men have signed on to the Iraq war movie Thunder Run. Gerard Butler, Sam Worthington, and Matthew McConaughey are set to star in the action-thriller from director Simon West (Con Air). However, this isn’t your typical war pic, as Thompson on Hollywood reports that the film will be made using 3D motion-capture technology. The film centers on the 2003 capture of Baghdad, and is based on David Zucchino’s novel Thunder Run - The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad. Black Hawk Down scribes Robert Port and Ken Nolan are handling screenwriting duties, and the film has apparently been in development for five years. Freedom Films’ Brian Presley had this to say:

"[This will be the] first ever conventional war film made to utilize this revolutionary facial and motion capture technology and state of the art CG and 3D.”

I’m not exactly sure how they plan to make this movie not look like Call of Duty, but it’s certainly a unique idea. Since the motion-capture process necessitates a lengthy post-production, it may be awhile until we actually see the film on the big screen. Hit the jump to read the synopsis of Zucchino’s novel.

thunder-run-book-cover

Here’s the synopsis for Thunder Run:

Even a very short, victorious shooting war against a disorganized, dispirited, vastly outnumbered and underequipped enemy is hell. That is the central message that Los Angeles Times correspondent Zucchino brings home startlingly well in this riveting account of the American military's lightning capture of Baghdad in April 2003. Zucchino (The Myth of the Welfare Queen) is an experienced, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, and he shows off his reportorial skills in this reconstruction of the "lightning armored strike" in Iraq that the military refers to as a "thunder run." The narrative focuses on the men who commanded and battled in the tank battles as the Americans fought their way to Iraq's capital city. It is often not a pretty picture, nor one for the faint of heart, because Zucchino unhesitatingly and graphically describes the violent and grisly fates that befell hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqi Republican Guard troops and fedayeen militiamen, their Syrian allies (at the border) and the unfortunate civilians who were killed or wounded by the deadly high-tech American armored vehicles and their well-trained crews. He also does not shy away from intimately describing the deaths and injuries of American troops. The Americans who fought their way into Baghdad engaged in, according to Zucchino's account, a vicious, if short-lived, war. While the Americans overwhelmed the Iraqis on the road to Baghdad, U.S. troops faced periodic stiff resistance; rocket-propelled grenades caused death and destruction among the crews in the Bradley fighting vehicles. Zucchino tells his story primarily from the American troops' point of view, but does include a section describing the experiences of a Baath Party militia leader and some Republican Guard officers in this high-quality example of in-depth and evocative war reporting. [Amazon]