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The newest movie ever made

July 19, 2019   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

It’s about a sudden, spontaneous global strike. Not involving every human – just the relevant people and completely changing history – for better or for worst is the story, of course. I took my “what if” and created a newest movie idea..

I pondered how to make this happen. Aliens are always an option; we all love aliens [from outer space!] but it would mean that people could absolutely not make such a change for themselves. Anyway, aliens have already tried and failed, many times. 

The vast majority of these people are common folk, some are where they are as a last resort to make money for the family, as there was little other choice. What matters is that the decision they make, on the same day as all the others in the rest of the world, is matched by those at the top of the pyramid. 

It’s a time very like this time, with the usual conflicts, each more pointless and increasingly vicious as technology adds power to assault. Politicians are madly off in all directions, as the old saying goes, threatening, cajoling, negotiating – achieving nothing.

In many ways, the reality is that we never know what prompts a person to reach the end of tolerance and acquiescence. So, that is precisely what happens in this film. Not one person or many people but all of them, all at once, finally reach the end of their tolerance and acquiescence. It may have been another incident of wholesale slaughter or another looney speech by some raving leader or the one order that a person could not follow but the moment came and everything is different afterwards. 

They drop their guns. They stand up and turn and walk. 

They land their airplanes, disembark and walk. 

They drop their anchors, go ashore and walk. 

Even those manipulating drones make them self-destruct, put down their controls and walk.

Soldiers guarding massive weapons, missiles, bombs readied to do much more harm than anyone was admitting, disarm them, break them, render them forever non-functional; they lock them with secrets and keys that cannot be replicated and walk. 

For the whole 24 hours of that day, which comes to be known as the Dawn Day, every soldier on every field, in every street, bolt hole, around the world – small or large, the battles stop because no one will fight them anymore.

Since this was unimaginable, the reaction to it is, at first, strictly local, with villagers stunned and suspicious, yet, soon enough filled with wonder and fear in case of their being forced back to killing. For, no one is threatening the soldiers when their leaders are likewise abandoning the fields of battle.

Local press people are taking photographs of sergeants walking side by side of low ranking soldiers, joined by generals, pulling the insignia off their chests. The enormity of what is happening barely makes the news; reporters assume the strike is local, here and there; they don’t understand its universality – until they do.

However, the politicians have not walked. They have been left without power, without generals or anyone to push the buttons. They have been left with empty rhetoric – left to negotiate without threats, warships, dangerous airplanes, bombs – nothing is moving or being borne to kill and hurt any more. 

It is a film with many stories from corners all around the world, of Philip Grice, who hitches across three countries to go home, and has an easy time of it – everyone is happy to give him a ride and try to understand his story.

There are tales to tell of the home-comings and the new beginnings; of how governments faced with this irreversible reality find ways to govern differently, when force of arms is no longer an option. 

There will be those who are angry at the “deserters” but, as they look into the eyes of the soldiers at whom they are yelling, they realize that it’s over and that they will never be allowed to pick up those guns.

Meanwhile, many of the soldiers go into the criminal world and convince those soldiers too, to walk.

When the many scientists and environmentalists of our present day talk about the climate crisis in which we find ourselves and plead with us to carry on into the future, as a bright shiny new day, with new but well known ideas of living in a completely different way, they rarely go to the trouble to talk about the devastation to the environment that war inflicts. The ruin of every field of crops, to water and forests. 

Think how much good it will do when those soldiers are all part of my movie.

Those men and women will all find useful employment and camaraderie in rebuilding this once beautiful earth and humans can put their mighty minds to good inventions which will never be turned into weapons.

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