Friday, November 26, 2010

From the department of "are you fucking kidding me"?

Me, in Blood & Treasure comments, four years ago:

I keep getting this idea for a screenplay about some Al Qaeda terrorists who hijack the Eurostar, aiming to run it off the rails at the Waterloo end for a massive coup de theatre and huge loss of life. The tension builds and builds throughout the film until the final denouement, when it is revealed that the Al Qaedas had a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of points switching and end up in a siding outside Clapham.

Unstoppable. An entire movie based on this intrinsically fucked premis. Based on a true story. A true story under which the problem was handled sensibly and with a minimum of drama, as it obviously would have been.

The experiment with reality clearly isn't working. Back to the Philip K Dick psychotropics for me.

8 comments:

  1. Sounds like big-budget remake of the Konchalovsky film "Runaway Train", originally a screenplay by Kurosawa.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_Train_%28film%29

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  2. Had it really not switched to the St Pancras terminus by then?

    (I'll get my duffle-coat either way.)

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  3. How about this:
    Bunch of knuckleheads get together and form a cell that mostly rant about Amerika. They get infiltrated by an agent provocateur who persuades them to carry out a bombing of a plane.

    He plans it and gives them what is supposed to be fake explosive, but due to a mishap it ends up being real explosive. Then because they're knuckleheads they fail to follow the plan, and end up boarding the wrong planes. Cue various mishaps and eventually an explosion, ironically in part aided by the official butt covering/cover up as they realise the scale of this disaster.

    The sequel's a farce about conspiracy theorists and aging radicals.

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  4. It's actually Runaway Train meets John Frankenheimer's The Train

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  5. It reminded me of The Silver Streak but I don't think I would enjoy it as much.

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  6. Cf the final pages of Zola's La Bete Humaine also.

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  7. So, who remembers The Big Bus then?

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  8. This movie has been nominated as the worst movie of all time by one Portland Oregon critic.

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