How It Could Have Been Done

Rating: 4/10 (28 February 2010)

Roland (Independence Day, 2012) Emerich may be in the same special fx league as Paul Verhoeven, Ridley Scott and James Cameron, but they have vision. Emerich is blind.
The high concept is one our children (and their children) will all be taking seriously. And it could have been so easily developed into a meaningful story instead of a platform for big-screen computer games sfx.
I'd have built the film around the main character of a veteran conservative pol who's seen the light but can't get his party on board because the constituents are so anti-scientific. Chairman of a powerful Senate committee, he has the opportunity to push a climate change agenda, but he caves in to pressure. We see him watching his committee kill the bill on C-SPAN with his grandson. He looks at the boy, wondering...
The pol's taken enough bribes to stash sufficient money to have himself frozen when he dies... and buried in the Northern Canadian permafrost. They wake him up 70 years later. They =had= to. The ground's thawed.
His grandson's there. =He's= a Congressman now. Canada's part of the US. The Chinese have taken over Siberia. The Indians (that are left) have taken over Tibet. Antarctica is an Islamic state where the Australians have been turned into slaves.
You can guess the rest.
Yeah; I've written a few. But if I can dream this up in two minutes, why can't this guy?