Remember The Day the Earth Stood Still remake? Of course you don’t, no one does. If you did remember it though, then you’d probably be less than excited about having the guy who directed it mining the Bible for action movie fodder. His name is Scott Derrickson and he’s been hired to helm a movie version of David versus Goliath. They’re calling it Goliath
For the biblically unaware, David was this sheepherder kid who ended up hanging out with the Israelite army. As told in the book of Samuel, at the time the Hebrews were engaged in sort of a cold war with the Philistines, a constant thorn in the side of god’s chosen people. Their armies lined up and faced each other and just sort of sat there while the Hebrews cowered in their sensible sandals and the Philistines stood opposite them taunting them. Every day the Philistines sent out a champion named Goliath and dared the Israelites to send out someone to fight him. They didn’t, because Goliath was an actual giant, a man of massive size, and they weren’t stupid. David, being a kid and not knowing any better, decides he can take this guy and walks out to fight him with only the ancient world equivalent of a slingshot. As luck would have it, he kills Goliath with a single shot, and thus beings a meteoric rise which would eventually leave him King of Israel.
So how do you turn a story in which the final battle is finished with a single shot and most of the rest of the story is just a bunch of guys sitting around looking scared while a bunch of bullies in armor make fun of them? Deadline says you do it by turning it into 300.
From the sounds of it the Goliath script from John D. Payne & Patrick McKay is going to pretty much ignore the actual story of David and Goliath and instead turn it into an epic chase through the ancient world with Goliath hot on David’s heels. No really. Apparently Goliath is now some sort of bounty hunter hired to track down and kill David, who has been foretold as the future king of Israel.
Might be fun, as long as you don’t mind someone remaking the Bible and turning it into a big, dumb, Hollywood blockbuster. What of it Bible lovers? How do you feel about this wildly inaccurate adaptation of God’s word?
