You can understand why motion-capture is a great technology to use in sci-fi and fantasy movies, but could it also be the future of war films? It appears Freedom Films thinks so, as THR reports they’re putting together Thunder Run, an all CG 3D action thriller, using their proprietary facial capture technology and the motion capture technology utilised in Avatar.

It appears they’ve also got a good cast together who’ve agreed to get in the morion capture suits, as it’s been announced Gerard Butler, Sam Worthington (who, of course, is a mo-cap veteran thanks to Avatar) and Matthew McConaughey will star, while Simon West will direct.

Thunder Run is based on the novel ‘Thunder Run – The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad’, by Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent David Zucchino, with the screenplay being handled by Academy Award-winner Robert David Port and Ken Nolan, screenwriter of Black Hawk Down.

It tells the story of the dangerous and bloody capture of Baghdad by American Forces at the onset of the Iraq War. In April 2003, three battalions and fewer than a thousand men launched a violent thrust of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles into the heart of a city of five million, igniting a three-day blitzkrieg, which military professionals often refer to as a lightning strike, or “thunder run.”

It’s certainly an intriguing idea, although it’s very uncertain whether audiences with buy into a war movie where everything is CG. The idea is to be able to tell the story on a huge scale (without it being prohibitively expensive to make) and to capture the feel of Call Of Duty on film, but we’ll have to wait and see if it actually works.

General movie news courtesy of Movie Muser