The pitch:
It’s the Time Machine meets Passengers meets Meets Logan’s Run without a time machine or a spaceship or a society that kills anyone over 30.
Intriguing, right?
—
In the not too distant future, a man and a woman with movie star good looks but average joe jobs live their lives in a way that would be recognizable and sympathetic to a general audience. We establish this during the opening credits of quick cuts set to frenetic music. They start their mornings together eating cereal at the breakfast bar of a small but comfortable looking condo. They kiss each other goodbye at the subway station. She works as the executive assistant of an obviously important person where she sits behind an imposing desk next to a big door looking bored most of the time. He works in a cubicle farm where he spends a lot of time on the phone fielding calls that obviously frustrate him. Each day ends with them having dinner together on the couch watching television. This cycle happens three times in the first three minutes without dialogue. We establish in this fast montage their lives are routine, mundane, and the details don’t matter, but their happiness is in being together.
The first sound we hear from the two of them after the opening credit music ends is the sound of running water. He’s in the kitchen washing the dishes after dinner. She’s still on the couch. The news is on. A familiar television anchor’s voice is saying something we cannot quite make out over the sound of the water. The tap is turned off abruptly. “What did he just say?” She asks.
“Turn it up,” he says, returning to join her on the couch.
The anchor continues that the president will be addressing the nation in the coming hours, but that a breaking story confirmed by many sources suggests an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth and will make impact within the week; that the government has known for years and kept the information under wraps to avoid a panic because there is no realistic way to divert or destroy the asteroid. More information will be coming soon. The anchor cuts to a talking head asking, “Professor, what does this mean?” Outside there is the sound of squealing tires as drivers panic behind the wheel. There are car horns and sounds of collisions. A cutaway to the condo tower shows the lights coming on one by one in every suite, something we can see from buildings in the background is being repeated throughout the city.
We can also see a constellation of drones continue to fly in their organized, automated pattern without any confusion or consternation at the life-altering news. This establishes in the audience’s minds both that this is in fact the not-so-distant future where technological advances have happened, and also that technology continues to function as intended even in the face of the apocalypse.
The next day plays out as a longer, distorted version of what we saw in the opening montage. The music is slow and unhappy. The man and woman with movie star good looks begin their day at the breakfast bar eating cereal, but the television is on with the volume down low as morning talkshow hosts breakdown the president’s address from last night. The chiron reads, “Is this really the end?”
He goes to his job. Most of the other cubicles are empty. He sits in his chair, shuffling papers, flipping through files on his computer. He looks over at his telephone. It doesn’t ring. Someone somewhere has a television on. It is also talking about the president’s address, even though it’s a different channel. The chiron reads, “How will you spend your last days on Earth?”
She sits behind her desk. Her telephone rings regularly. She takes the calls and transfers them. At one point important-looking men appear at her desk and she escorts them through the important-looking doors. When she returns to her desk she pauses for a moment, picks up an empty water glass, puts it to her ear, and stands at the door to listen. Someone walks by giving her a look, but she waves them away, concentrating.
That night, back in the condo, he has made dinner and lit candles. She arrives late. He asks her how she could be working late when no one anywhere is working at all. It’s less than two days until the end of the world. He left the office at noon, and he was one of the last ones to go. Where has she been?
She takes two glasses out of a cupboard and pulls a bottle of whiskey out of a drawer and pours for both of them. “My boss is still working,” she says.
He begins to say some awful things about the money-hungry boss who would spend his final hours working and making his employees work too.
She interrupts him. “Everyone else is panicking. My boss isn’t panicking. The richest people in the world aren’t panicking. Don’t you wonder why?”
We cut to a view from outside the condo looking in through the windows as the two talk. We can’t hear what they are saying. The exterior sounds are of a city descending into chaos. Gunshots, screams, barking dogs, breaking glass.
The next scene is from the same position outside the condo, looking in through the windows. The early morning dawn light against the building is in stark contrast to the previous night’s illumination from the streetlights below. More shocking still is the difference in sound. The city is so quiet now you can hear morning doves and other birdsong.
The two are getting dressed, not just like they are going to work, but like they are going to a very important business meeting. She is straightening his best tie. He is helping her brush invisible lint off her beautiful blazer. They leave together, and the camera descends down the condo slowly, taking in scenes of despair in other condos where people have torn down curtains, ransacked cupboards, built barricades against their doors. There is a window with bullet holes in it. When the camera arrives at ground level it seems the protagonist couple walk out of the lobby and into the street holding hands, confident and purposeful in a world gone mad.
The parked cars they pass are all obviously futuristic models. The cars and the drones buzzing around overhead remind viewers that this is happening in an unknown time in the future.
Our next scene is outside the city along a coast. We see it all from a birds-eye view. There is a road with little traffic winding through a forest. There is an unmarked driveway off that road that goes for quite a distance through the trees to a gate in a high fence. Beyond the fence, the trees thin out until there is a large, grassy estate with a series of beautiful, modern buildings and glass domes and greenhouses and beautiful gardens overlooking the ocean. All the cars parked out front are obviously owned by the elite. We watch an older man and woman get out of their car to be greeted by two subordinates in bright red jackets who usher them inside.
Our next scene is inside a car driving through the forest. There are dashboard ornaments and things hanging from the rearview mirror that make it clear the car was stolen by our protagonists. They are going over their plan. She has her employer’s credentials in her hands. She is prompting him, ‘If they ask you this, the answer is that. If they say this, say that.’
He is repeating, “I know. I know.” They are both obviously nervous and stressed.
“Here’s the turn!” She points at the unmarked driveway. The car turns and approaches the gate. They can hear on the car’s radio the president addressing the nation again, saying he is praying for them, and asking that everyone meet their end with dignity and peace. At the end of his address, a band begins playing, “Nearer My God to Thee.”
The car comes to a stop at the gate. There is no gatekeeper. No obvious way in. He uses the one ‘Fuck’ a character can say in a movie without losing a PG-13 rating. He slams his hands into the driving wheel in obvious distress.
She tells him to hop the fence. He protests he can’t hop the fence in a suit. She tells him it’s the end of the world. He can hop the fence in a suit. He gets out of the car, takes his jacket off, loosens his tie, and scales the fence. The gate opens. He walks back to the car, puts on his jacket but forgetting to straighten his tie, and they drive on.
The car radio has been playing the whole time. “Nearer My God to Thee” has ended, and now a choir is singing, “Abide with Me”
“How much time?” He asks.
She looks at her watch. “Not enough.”
The car accelerates. We can for the first time clearly hear it is an electric motor, again reminding the viewing audience that this is happening in an indeterminate but future time.
The beautiful buildings appear ahead. The car zooms towards them, fishtailing into a parking spot. They exit the car in haste, leaving the doors open so the choir singing can still be heard. They walk briskly towards the door, obviously wanting to run but trying not to show their panic.
The two men in red jackets appear at the door, asking who they are. She holds up credentials. He starts repeating the things he told her to say. The red-jacketed doormen are not having it. There is a commotion. He shoves one out of the way and pushes her through the door, following her into an elegant lobby, tastefully appointed with expensive furniture and objet d’art.
Now that we are indoors there is no music or outside sound of any kind. There is an eerie kind of calm to the quiet, as if all the tension and despair we have experienced up to now does not exist in this space.
“I want to speak to the man in charge!” He demands, still pretending to be her boss and putting on his best pompous airs as she straightens her blazer and pretends to be his executive assistant.
“It’s five minutes until the end of the world,” a new voice says. “If anyone is in charge, I guess it’s me?”
An older man stands at the far side of the lobby. In terms of casting, this should be a well-known character actor: A Christopher Walken, a Steve Buscemi, a Willem Dafoe, someone with a distinctive look and cadence to his voice. He wears a black version of the red jackets of the door men. The front of his jacket is open, and an undone bowtie hangs from around his neck, as if he has just finished an important task and was about to relax.
Our male protagonist introduces himself as our female protagonist’s boss, but the man in charge says, “No you’re not. I just took care of [our female protagonist’s boss] an hour ago. You’re not him.”
The two stand there in the lobby and begin to tremble with their despair. All their hopes hung on this one thin plan to bluff their way in, and now it was not going to work. He begins to weakly protest, but the man in black holds up one hand to silence him while another checks his watch. “In four minutes the world is coming to an end. I have spaces for people who are not here yet. You two are here. You can have the spaces. Congratulations. You are going to live if you follow me right now.”
The man in black turns on his heel and walks away. The man and woman promptly follow him. The red jacketed men return to their stations on either side of the door with hands neatly crossed. They are strangely calm considering the asteroid will be hitting the Earth in mere moments.
The camera follows our protagonists through the beautiful estate. There are ballrooms and libraries and indoor gardens. As much as possible things have glass walls or skylights or even glass domes. It is all obviously expensive, new, beautiful, and very, very empty.
Two minutes of brisk walking brings the three to a spotless white room whose exterior walls and ceiling are all of glass with a view of the ocean. The one wall that is not of glass is low and sloped as if to withstand a blast. It is pierced by a long line of doors with porthole windows. Most of the doors are shut. Five doors at one end are still open. The man in black walks our protagnoists down to the open doors. “Normally there is a little speech, but we haven’t the time,” he says apologetically. The man in black puts our female protagonist into one of the open doors, closes it, turns the handle. There is a flash of blue light from behind the door. The male protagonist looks through the porthole to see the female protagonist frozen there, suspended in time.
“Now wait a minute,” he protests.
“We have exactly one minute,” the man in black jokes, pulling the man over to the next open door.
The camera now faces out through the open door at the man in black. We are looking at the man in black from our male protagonist’s perspective. We hear him ask, “What’s the plan here? When do we get out?”
“When it’s safe again,” the man in black says.
“How will we know when it’s safe?”
“I’ll decide that,” the man in black says. He begins to close the door.
“How will you know when it’s safe for us to come out if you’re frozen in here with us?”
“I am not going to be frozen,” the man in black says.
“What?!”
Over the man in black’s shoulder, an impossibly bright what light is shining. The asteroid has come down through the atmosphere somewhere over the horizon. The explosion begins as one point of light but quickly stretches out to go from one end of the horizon to the other. There is no sound, though. The light is travelling much faster than the sound.
“I will see you again one day,” the man in black says as the door shuts.
There is a flash of blue light, and then we hold black for a solid five seconds as a sound editor has fun imagining what the shockwave of a civilization-ending asteroid sounds like. If the movie has the budget for it, maybe we can have some fun with an aerial shot of the shockwave blowing all the trees over, evaporating cities, kicking up tsunamis. If this is a low-budget feature, we can leave all of that to the viewers’ imagination. That might even be better.
The sound falls away, and we endure five more seconds of black without sound.
Then we see a flash of blue, and the sound of an old door handle protesting at being asked to function after a very long time. The door opens to reveal the man in black. He appears no older, although his uniform is tattered and faded and has obviously been mended many, many times.
“You will have questions for me,” he says, and he sounds exhausted. “They always have questions for me.”
“What happened?” Our male protagonist asks.
“Come out of that cupboard and sit with me. We can talk,” the man in black suggests.
Our male protagonist steps out to reveal the spotless white room is now a lawn with rich, thick, uncut grass. The outlines of where the glass walls once stood stick up out of the sod as ruins. The wall full of doors now stands alone, pitted and dirtied and much abused by the passage of time and the wear and tear of the elements. All of the doors are now open. Many have fallen off their hinges. A few are completely gone, and the small room they once protected are pitch black inside. Our protagonist looks around and realizes three or four of the buildings of the estate have been maintained as a kind of attractive ruin –like the Parthenon—but everything else is gone, buried under and grown over. The grass extends for hundreds of yards from the sea back towards a forest than now has different kinds of trees than the forest our male and female protagonist drove through earlier. If it was coniferous trees before, it’s deciduous trees now, or vice versa. There is also a stout looking wooden palisade separating the forest from the lawn. Two men in tattered red jackets march a beaten path inside the perimeter of the palisade with spears and shields. They are a long way away, but they appear to be the same two men who worked the door just minutes earlier in the movie.
“Where am I?” The male protagonist asks.
“You haven’t moved,” the man in black says, gesturing stiffly towards a small table with two chairs set up on the lawn. “Although you might say the world has turned and left you here.”
“Who are you?” The male protagonist asks.
The man in black introduces himself with a first name that doesn’t really matter. For the purposes of this treatment I will continue to call him the man in black. He takes a seat and insists with a hand gesture that the male protagonist do the same. There is something in how he moves that seems awkward, as if his joints do not work as well as they used to.
“How long have we been frozen?” The male protagonist asks, sinking down into the chair.
“I told you, I was not frozen,” the man in black says.
“How long have I been frozen, then?” The male protagonist asks, looking around in a daze.
“In round numbers, 80,000 years,” the man in black says.
The male protagonist explodes at this information, and rightly so. Dialogue can be written later, but obviously the shock is enormous. The male protagonist had only a vague idea of what the female protagonist was suggesting when she pitched him her plan. The enormity of the passage of time had not occurred to him. The scene can be played for comedy or pathos. That can be discussed with other filmmakers. Either way, after he calms down he asks, “How are you still here? I saw the explosion coming when you froze me. You had time to freeze yourself? You said—”
“I said I was not frozen,” the man in black finished the male protagonist’s sentence. He smiles, “Forgive me, I am enjoying this. You and [female protagonist] are the only two people who did not know.”
“Where is she?” The male protagonist looks back at the door the man in black put her through. It hangs open and in a similar condition to his.
“I do not know, which I will admit is worrying,” the man in black says. His tone is of a man who rather enjoys the novelty of not knowing and having something to worry about.
“Start over from the beginning, and pretend I’m a stupid man,” the male protagonist insists.
“I may not need to pretend too hard,” the man in black says. “Would it surprise you if I told you I am the smartest person you have ever met or will ever meet?”
The male protagonist admits most things would surprise him at this point.
The man in black stretches out his arm, grabs it with his other hand, twists, and with a distinct clicking sound his forearm detaches at the elbow. He sets the forearm on the table between them and gestures at it with his remaining hand. “Like that? Does that surprise you?”
The male protagonist admits it does.
The man in black laughs, and again it is a tired, knowing laugh. He has lived a very long time, and he knows to find pleasure in rare new experiences. He picks up his arm, puts it up his sleeve, and reattaches it. When he is whole again, he explains. “I wasn’t supposed to do any of this, you know. I was supposed to be a proof-of-concept butler for some billionaire. Eventually, once they got all the kinks worked out, there would have been a million more like me. Maybe a billion more like me. If they got that far, I imagine there probably would have been a lot less of you, to be honest. What would rich people need poor people for when they could have me? Still, the asteroid was discovered while I was still a prototype, and so Door Number One cooked up this idea instead.”
The man in black pointed with his reattached arm at the first hole at the far end of the ruined wall. There was no door, and the room was pitch black. “Brilliant guy, Door Number One. He figured out a way to suspend time. It takes an enormous amount of power to do it and undo it, and it only works in a confined, unmoveable space, but you’re living proof that it works. On the other hand, unfortunately, he’s not-so-living proof that it doesn’t always work perfectly. Sometimes when you turn it off, it explodes.”
The male protagonist asks again where the female protagonist is, but the man in black waves him to be calm. “Let me get there. Let me get there. She didn’t explode. The last time I saw her, she was fine.”
The man in black continues. “So with the asteroid coming, Door Number One talks to Door Number Three and Door Number Four about his invention being a way to save the whole world. Isn’t that good of him? He wanted to save everybody. Of course, Door Number Three and Door Number Four pointed out there wasn’t enough time and money and power to freeze everybody. Hell, there was barely enough time to build this place. I think there might still have been paint drying in some of the hallways when you barged in on the big day.” The man in black laughs an indulgent, nostalgic laugh.
The male protagonist makes a hurry up gesture. The man in black nods without actually hurrying up.
“So Door Number Three and Door Number Four have the money to build all this, and Doors Two, Five, and Six are for their significant others, which is sweet. Isn’t that sweet? Then someone pointed out the problem of knowing exactly when it would be time to wake them all up. They were rich and powerful enough to know years before everybody else that the world was coming to an end, but no amount of money could tell them when it would be safe to come out, right?”
“Is this where you come in?”
“Pretty much,” The man in black agrees. “Door Number Seven owned the company that made me and my two companions out there.” He waves at the two distant guards. “He figured we could ride out whatever the asteroid did in a bomb shelter, and when the coast was clear we could let them all out together.”
“And you waited 80,000 years?” The male protagonist asks, incredulous.
“You wouldn’t have wanted to come out in the first twenty thousand, buddy, believe me!” The man in black joked. “There was a worldwide firestorm that put so much ash up into the stratosphere that there was nuclear winter. That kicked off an ice age. Near as I can tell, what was left of humanity hunkered down in the tropics. By the time it got warm again they rebuilt civilization enough to reinvent nuclear weapons, which they then used on each other. I’m still not exactly sure why. That was another twenty or thirty thousand years of firestorm, nuclear winter, and ice age.” The man in black throws up his hands like he is complaining about a long line at the drycleaners.
“Anyway, this whole compound was built on a tidal power station that was supposed to be able to run forever. That’s what keeps me and my two companions powered up. It also is what turns the suspended animation on and off. The thing is, we’re just three guys living through several apocalypses. The tidal generator isn’t a perfect system, and so we have to make some choices about when to do what.”
The male protagonist asks if this is where female protagonist comes in, and the man in black nods.
“I’m programmed to let people out in the order they went in, but it takes a lot of energy to let people out, and the more time went on, the longer it takes to charge things up. I’m talking centuries. Once we were up to Doors Eighteen and Nineteen, I was letting them out a thousand years between them just to make sure I had enough power to do it right.”
“You let her out a thousand years before me?” The male protagonist gets up and runs to her door, which looks identical to his in terms of weathering.
“No, and if you will let me finish, you will know what I am trying to say,” the man in black is irritated. “You were freeloaders. You shouldn’t have been here, and by rights you have no rights at all. Still, it’s been 80,000 years. What do I care about how much money all those other doors paid to be here, right? So I gave you all the care and consideration I would give any of my other guests. You two arrived together, and I really put some thought into how I could get you both out together.”
“And what did you come up with?” The male protagonist asks.
“The people on the far side of that palisade are going through the fourth bronze age, and they think of these old ruins the way you think of Stonehenge, if Stonehenge had three immortal beings hanging around tending the grounds and keeping the ruins tidy. I let what passes for the rich and curious among them come in and look around from time to time in exchange for metal bits and pieces I needed to make an energy storage device sufficient for me to open her door and your door within just three years of each other.” The man in black folds his arms proudly and leans back in his chair.
“Three years?” The male protagonist asks.
“That’s right. I guess you owe her some birthday presents, but she’s only three years older than she was the last time you saw her. I haven’t managed anything like that since before the magnetic poles reversed,” the man in black boasts.
“So where is she?” The male protagonist asks.
“I don’t know. She knew I was going to let you out. I waited two weeks for her to turn up, but my device can’t hold a charge indefinitely. I figured it was better to let you out when I could, and you can go looking for her yourself, rather than wait for her to turn up and maybe I can’t let you out after all because she was running late.”
“What would make her two weeks late to see me get out?”
“Hey, I’m the smartest person you’re ever going to meet, but I don’t know everything,” the man in black says. “You’re out. You figure it out.”
– —
And I think that’s where I’m going to stop, at least for now. It’s a good first act and a fun premise that ends with a call to adventure. I would want to watch the rest of this movie. I wrote it in a single two-hour sitting after a dream that had some but not all of this in it. I’m rather pleased with it, to be honest with you!
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