In the past few days, awesome concept art has given us a peek into what George Miller's Justice League: Mortal movie could have been - but that project is far from the only cancelled comic book project from the last few years. Filmmaker Vincenzo Natali also had some big ideas in the past to make a new Swamp Thing feature, and while that film never got off the ground, you can now read the first four pages of the script:
As you can see, Natali posted the pages himself on his own personal Twitter page, and while the material isn't necessarily what you might call the most "original" stuff (it's very heavily inspired by Alan Moore's work with the Swamp Thing character), it's also a pretty thrilling little treatment that makes you want to read more.
Opening with a shot of red ants devouring a beetle on the ground of a swamp, the action in the scene begins as we see a group of uniformed soldiers hunting for something in the damp, green environment. Lurking around them - and narrating about the meaning of the swamp and his own personal connection with it - is the titular Swamp Thing. In four quick pages - which equates to about four minutes of screen time - the movie establishes that the titular horrific beast used to be human, was once deeply in love with a woman, and is pretty damn hard to kill. The whole scene is pretty well summed up in the comic book cover below:
Vincenzo Natali, who is best known as the director of movies like Cube and , was first attached to a big screen reboot of Swamp Thing back in 2009/2010, and blockbuster producer Joel Silver was on-board to help make it. Sadly, the project wound up fizzling, and is now apparently so dead that Natali feels comfortable posting pages online for everyone to see.
Swamp Thing's most famous experience on the big screen came in the eponymous 1982 Wes Craven film, though that movie isn't exactly regarded as one of the best examples of comic book feature genre. Hopefully the character's opportunity for a new big screen adaptation hasn't passed completely, as modern technology could really make the "live-action" version of the creature shine. For now we'll just have to cross our fingers and hope that at some point a studio executive will see the potential in the fantastic source material that's available.
