At this year’s Academy Awards, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty received a handful of nominations, including Best Picture, riding the wave of public support for the SEAL team that took down Osama Bin Laden. I’m not trying to tell anyone how to do their job, but it’s obvious that all Bigelow’s film needed in order to take top honors was to pit the military against not Bin Laden himself, but the evil that he represented in supernatural form. That’s the basic plot behind MGM’s upcoming paranormal thriller Seal Team 666, which has landed a huge star in Dwayne Johnson to lead the film. The Rock vs. ghouls and monsters? We’re always up for that, so long as he brings a couple of fitting one-liners to the table.
Beyond saving the world, Johnson will also be executive producing the film alongside Macmillan Films, with Johnson’s former assistant Hiram Garcia producing. No directors have been sought out just yet, according to THR, but it already has a screenplay written, and it’s bound to attract some notable names now that it has such a bankable star in place. The script was written by Evan Spiliotopoulos, who was most notable for penning a slew of direct-to-video Disney features before landing the job scripting the recently wrapped Brett Ratner actioner Hercules, which Johnson also stars in. Apparently he’s got a knack for telling big bold stories for big buff men.
Seal Team 666 is based on the 2012 novel from Bram Stoker Award-winning author Weston Ochse (which you can find here), and follows the plainly named Jack Walker (Johnson), whose SEAL training is interrupted when he is called away with a handful of other SEALS and a dog for a special ops mission where the risks are a tad more severe than bullets and landmines. The team will take on demons, killer cults, possessed people, and above all else: EVIL! As it happens, an ancient cult is "dead" set on bringing out a more monstrous force to take on not just the U.S., but the entire world.
Common sense is telling me to be guarded about what this project might turn into, but films like The Mummy and 300 prove that CGI-heavy some-against-all flicks can work quite well on the large scale that it looks like Seal Team 666 will shoot for. I just hope the demons are actually scary, and not cartoonish like the bad guys in Van Helsing. Look at that, I mentioned two Stephen Sommers movies in the same paragraph. Did he utilize a wishing well to get this movie into production, hoping he gets the job?
Johnson is currently filming James Wan’s Fast & Furious 7, and will star in the HBO pilot Ballers in the near future. But maybe after that, we can finally get a chance to watch him break a demon’s kneecaps.
