How's this for a story pitch?

"Boilerplate purports to tell the story of the world's first robot, who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt and Lawrence of Arabia, journeyed to the South Pole and was involved in the silent movie business before disappearing on the battlefields of World War I."

Great movie concept or greatest movie concept? When reduced to a single sentence synopsis, this sounds like the coolest movie ever.

Either way, Heat Vision is reporting that JJ Abrams' Bad Robot production company has picked up the rights to Boilerplate, which I've never heard of until right now, but it seems to be sort of a graphic novel by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett that found release last year. I say "sort of" because the book's style is half "history" text and half art/doctored photographs depicting the journey of a Victorian-era warrior robot.

This being a Bad Robot production, we can safely assume that information on the production will be scarce at best and will probably be slowly doled out via some sort of viral game. Boilerplate doesn't even have a script or a director yet, so this is definitely not something you want to start shaking in your boots over quite yet.

What I love about Boilerplate's concept is the straight-faced melding of history and science fiction. This is the chance for a filmmaker to take a great fantastical character and send him/it on a journey through one of the most fascinating periods in the world history, like Forrest Gump, but with a more realistic protagonist. If the folks at Bad Robot pay as much attention to history and period detail as they will on the robot lead, this could be a truly fascinating movie.