My movie pitch
If you are reading this, and you are concerned about climate change, please send this to 10 of your friends, via social network, whatsapp, messenger or email and ask them to do the same.
Elevator Pitch
It is the year 2075. Queue opening shots of a destroyed planet ravaged by climate change, small wars, the results of a few nuclear wars, mass biosphere destruction, extreme weather and superstorms, major ocean die-off and anoxia, mass migration, Europe suffering a decade of extreme winters, sea level rise, political corruption and unconstrained runaway technological advances. Big letters on screen say…
3.2 degrees
The planet is clearly dying. Population may have levelled off at 10.5 billion and remaining state systems have reverted to a global tyranny just to keep everyone alive. The state is disfunctional and constantly held ransom by rich elites, radical factions, irreconcilable religious factions, terrorists, climate radicals – each demanding an ever larger share of what’s left. Most people have no work, no discinable sense of purpose, living on a subsistence level basic income, are close to suicide and despair.
In this bedrock of bad news the viewer gets to see a series of event where the state starts persecuting those it holds responsible. Emphasis that due to advancing life extension technologies people that were in their middle ages at the start of the 21st century are now physically younger due to medical treatments intentionally rationed to only benefit certain elites. And now the state is out to punish those it deems responsible.
Scenes depicting mass murder, pogroms, lynchings, people blamed for “the mess” trying to flee assassinations and mob vengeance. The movie is about a seemingly young, very attractive couple that turns out to have been middle aged oil company PR people in 2020. Back in the 2020s they tried to get data published on catastrophic climate change, but nobody listened to them so they just kept their heads down for fear of being fired from their comfortable careers. They didn’t do enough, and now blind hysterical justice is out to get them. They lived in a beautiful estate in Florida but it flooded so they fled to the Midwest in the 2030s. Then the Midwest turned to desert and a complete collapse of state services, and they fled to Canada in 2040. Then Canada started to aggressively deporting US citizens in the 2050s and they ended up in a refugee camp in Wisconsin. Then the camps became dystopian hellscapes and they fled to the New York camps in 2060. Those were struck by epidemics in 2070 and now they live in the gargantuan refugee arcologies in Queens. And now the kangaroo courts are closing in on them, and they are trying to flee New York by boat. Problem is, half a million people are trying to fix the same thing. Difference is they still have money and they have a plan. And they have four children.
Opening scene
The planet from space. Visible are all continent one by one – most are pale yellow. Parts of the oceans are tinged brown, reddish or in some parts a pale violent. The camera zooms in the North American easterm coast. It’s clearly visible that the US midwest has become a desert and very few people live there. New York has become unrecognizable – protected by massive sea dikes. Military presence everywhere. Major parts of the surrounding burroughs innundated by refugee camps. The camera shoots over the city depicting massive fusion energy reactor complexes and surrounding these are endless teeming agricultural structures tens of stories high. It is raining, and the city looks in major dismay and squallor. Some buildings are vaguely recognizable, most buildings are new, exhibiting strange new design technologies. Everywhere the world looks conceptually unrecognizable in numerous ways, as if visiting a strange country. Icons on commercial buildings look unlike any language, mixing with many known languages. Very few concepts of corporations look recognizable. Buildings look brutalist.
The couple has to contend with a society which is significantly more alien than the year 1969s is when compared to 2019. Clothes are alien. Technology is alien. The couple has major problems adapting to modernity, despite their medically rejuvenated bodies. Flashback scenes show them in their 40s, and overweight and not all that attractive – scenes set in 2075 show them as very fit, attractive but just gaunt due to malnourishment and stress and medical neglect. The couple tries to build a sailing yacht to try to flee to Iceland, but it turns out Iceland has been commandeered by rich elites as refugee spot, and during the movie suffers a government coup by former military elites that start murdering the other former millionaire and billionaires elites there. Scenes of iceland that’s completely unrecognizable. So the couple and their kids start deliberating how to leave. The movie is a constant back and forth of scenes from their life, and it depicts how society quickly devolves due to the compound effects of climate change until it reaches a free-fall global collapse and die-off by the 2040s. The movie constantly hammers down the consequences of climate denialism, and how humanity did “too little to late” and “nobody was willing to give up their standard of living”.
The couple and their four kids then find a totally bizarre way out – one of their daughters is married to a scientist that has been developing a technology that allows for interdimensional travel from world-line to parallel world-lines. This person claims to have a portal system that allows for the couple and their four kids to flee to a world line that’s painted as “one where things went right” and the world was saved. Scenes of such a world.
As the couple scrambles ruthlessly to secure access to the portal the law closed in on them. They are cornered, no where to run. They sell their boat and bet all on the portal escape route.
It is then revealed there is no portal escape route. There are no parallel dimensions. It was all a scam. They liquidated everything they had and are now as poor as everyone else. They have nowhere to run, and the alleged scientist flees New York with their money. One but last scene of the movie is they are lynched by a hysterical mob out for vengeance. You see them die, one by one murdered by people that have absolutely no idea how to fix the world’s problems but can only lash out blindly against those it holds responsible.
End scene – scientist sails on a large improvised sailing yacht to a mid atlantic island out of the hurricane lanes, where things are more or less survivable and clearly will do great. To do this he betrayed his wife (the daughter), his kids, and the family. He has a decade of fairly acceptable life left because he betrayed the family but eventually the desintegration of the planet is likely to catch up with him as well. He has only postponed the inevitable. You see signs of guilt on his face.
