Peter Jackson, the reigning enfant terrible and anti-Christ of overbaked, overcranked CG movies, is threatening to produce a remake of a well-regarded British World War II flick called The Dam Busters (1954). Jackson’s King Kong animator Christian Rivers will direct…an animator! Obviously there’s a determination to play heavily with the visual element, or Rivers wouldn’t have the gig.
The original film told the true story of how Britain developed “bouncing bombs” that destroyed German dams during that conflict. “There’s that wonderful mentality of the British during the war,” Jackson told Screen Daily. “That heads-down, persevering, keep-on-plugging-away mentality which is the spirit of Dam Busters.”
Trust me — the spirit of the Jackson-Rivers film will be a war against history. What you will see on the film will be CG’ed within an inch of its life and will in some ways resemble the true reality of wartime England in the 1940s, but it will create an alternate reality as well. It’ll be primarily about Peter Jackson’s pumped-up ego and imagination (i.e., his determination to re-imagine whatever he feels like re-imagining and to piss on accurate historical detail whenever the whim strikes), and dollars to donuts it’ll run well over two hours.
The ’54 film, based on Paul Brickhill‘s book, costarred Michael Redgrave and Richard Todd.