One of several writers (Frank Darabont, David Goyer, David Callahan and Drew Pearce are the others) to take a crack at Gareth Edwards' developing Godzilla, Max Borenstein is now turning his attention to Mona. The project, a sort of sci-fi cyber political thriller (and not to be confused with William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive), is an adaptation of a novel by Dan Sehlberg, and it's coming together at studio New Regency.

It isn't published yet, so details of the book are only so much hearsay and press release so far, but the thrust seems to be the pursuit of a Lebanese cyber-terrorist. University professor Samir Mustaf's daughter Mona is killed by an Israeli cluster bomb, and he develops a sophisticated computer virus - named after the deceased - to cripple Israel's financial system.

Unfortunately for Mustaf, however, the virus gets into a Swedish academic's prototype system designed to allow disabled people to surf the Internet using mind control. Eric S'derquist's wife was testing the equipment when the saboteur hit, and is now gravely ill, with her only hope of survival the man who created the virus in the first place. Cue a pursuit of Mustaf by S'derquist, which attracts the dangerous attentions of both Mossad and Hezbollah.

The political players involved in that synopsis lead us to suspect there's little chance it'll reach the screen in that particular form, so don't be surprised if some of the political groups involved are changed. Still, at root it has the potential to be a decent international thriller, and the official line is that its sci-fi seeming technologies are actually based on real cutting-edge "developments in the fields of thought control systems and cyber warfare". We'll see about that in due course.

Michael London and Janice Williams are producing, with Niclas Salomonnson acting as executive producer. While the film has no start date yet, the book is published in July. Godzilla meanwhile, is slated to finally go before Edwards' caneras in May.