SNAPSHOT
In 2065, a devastating nuclear war between America and China renders planet Earth uninhabitable. Those with access to commercial and private spacecraft escape the planet and the two sides each decide to search for a new home. Seven years into their journey, the crew of The Pegasus and the ship itself are tired and reaching breaking point. As they approach the system containing the planet they must survey, they discover another ship may have already beaten them to it. As they debate whether to board the other ship or continue with their mission, their lives, and the fate of humanity itself, hangs in the balance.Due a 2015 release, The Last Scout is an independent science fiction feature with influences that include Sunshine and Battlestar Gallactica. It stars Blaine Grey (Six Gun Savior), Simon Phillips (He Who Dares: Downing Street Siege), Rebecca Ferdinando (X-Men: First Class), Deji Laray (Bosch), Rita Ramnani (Jack Falls), Paul Thomas Arnold (Revelations) and Peter Woodward (Babylon 5). It is written by Paul Tanter (White Collar Hooligan) and directed by Simon Phillips (Riot). (synopsis via Hey U Guys)
You only have to glance at movie and TV schedules, or peruse bookstore shelves to realise that humanity is not exactly in the midst of its Happy and Optimistic About the Future stage.
With the vestiges of post-World War Two hope for a better world long gone, ripped to shreds by The Cold War, energy crises and nuclear apocalyptic near-misses, and the fall of the Soviet Union top-up of the early ’90s well dissipated, a victim of multiple messy wars around the globe, and lately Ebola and the rise of ISIL, the idea that humanity is marching confidently to a future aglow with perfect possibility is looking just plain laughable to a lot of people.
And where goes the general sense of the people, so goes popular culture – often in the case of visionaries like George Orwell. H. G. Wells and Isaac Asimov it is well ahead of it thanks to their foresight and ability to successfully predict what unsettling may this way come – which accounts for the preponderance and many times great success of film (Interstellar, Planet of the Apes), TV shows (The Walking Dead) and books (Hunger Games, Divergent) that hang their hat on the ‘”We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,”Before the year is out.” (from a poem by Aussie poet John O’Brien) rack.
Soon to join the list of glass-half-empty movies is The Last Scout, a movie which dares to imagine what would happen if humanity didn’t have the luxury of planning their exit from planet Earth but instead had to leave in a hurry with dinner still on the table and the swings eerily going back and forth in the yard (one of the visual staples of the apocalypse if ever there was one).
The results, as you might expect, aren’t exactly pretty, a chaotic pell-mell dash to find a new planet to call home with the fractious divisions that placed humanity in this invidious position in the first place still playing themselves out even as the human race races to avert extinction.
It look like bleak, engrossing drama that will likely find an audience when it premieres sometime in 2015.