The career of writer Christopher McQuarrie has been an uneven one. He, of course, started off his career with the unforgettable The Usual Suspects, for which he won an Oscar. He then moved on to both write and direct The Way of the Gun, which, while not as good as his first film, is still fairly solid. The same can't be said for McQuarrie's list two efforts, Valkyrie with Tom Cruise and the now-infamous The Tourist with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. The writer already has two major projects in the works, having been assigned to script both Darren Aronofsky's The Wolverine and Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Killer, but now another film has been put in his lap.

Deadline reports that McQuarrie has been hired to adapt the 1970s animated series Star Blazers into a feature film. The cartoon was based on a Japanese animated series called Space Battleship Yamato, which was also turned into a movie last year. Set in the year 2199, an alien race from a dying home world has come to Earth to colonize and has irradiated the entire planet, leaving the human race forced underground. The humans then receive a message from a far off planet saying that there is a device that can save their world. Building a giant ship called the Argo, a crew heads into space to try and retrieve the device and save the world. The project will be backed by Skydance Productions' David Ellison, who is currently negotiating for the movie rights.

While I have never seen the show it actually does sound like a pretty good basis for a feature film. I'm sure there are still some hardcore fans lingering out there who would hate to see this happen, but provided they can work the pacing out, the A to B plot structure is well-suited for a feature. I don't say this often about TV adaptations, but this really could work.