A Vision of the Future (Movie idea)

Purpose of the movie

I want to make a movie that will make people as dissatisfied with the present as I am. I want them to see what the future holds the way I do. I want them to cry with dismay that they weren't born later. I think the #1 thing I want is for them to end the movie crying along with the protagonist after he's lost the chance to live in the future. I think I also want to try to use the movie to recruit people into new social settings in which they'll be focused on trying to bring about the future more quickly (using a tactic from LRH for a good end).

Plot Summary

The movie opens to an extreme close-up of the face a 16-year-old boy lying on the ground at night. This holds for a few seconds.
It then cuts to some scenes from a currently-existing social group that viewers would find incredibly
After a minute or two of this, the screen becomes slightly pixelated and pulls back, and it is revealed that this is a TV program that a typical-looking American family is watching. The camera pans across their faces as they all stare intently at the screen. The family is white. There's a mother, a father, a daughter and son who are both ~16(?).
Some interactions are shown that show typical problems of today that people take for granted.
Somehow the son and daughter end up in a field, away from everyone else, and there they encounter something like the flying vehicle out of Back to the Future Part 2. They meet a woman.
She takes them with her, and they end up in the "future", which turns out to be the same time as when the kid is living, but in a different part of the world. It becomes clear that the kid has been living in some kind of commune that has purposely kept itself separate from the rest of the world.
The kids get into some kind of plot that inevitably will have them running into all kinds of futuristic inventions.
Some kind of plot development leads to the kids being put back into their old community at the very end. We're shown the old way of life somehow (maybe the kids are dropped off near their house, and they see their family / parents step outside, so we see the parents again).
At the end of the movie, we're back with the crying kid lying on the ground, but this time we look up and see what he's looking at: the night sky is absolutely crawling with satellites and planes(? I'll need to see whether there are flights that would take people over that part of the world). The kid had never understood before what those were, but now he understands that they are the rest of the world doing their thing, and he's stuck with his family.

Slightly-more-in-depth plot description

The movie opens to an extreme close-up of the face a 16-year-old boy lying on the ground at night. He is crying and panting but at that point right before you totally lose control and start bawling uncontrollably, like those few moments right before you vomit; his eyes are open and red and full of years and he's looking past the camera, which is positioned just slightly below even with his eyes. After a few seconds of that, just as he's totally losing control (if he was sick, it would be the moment he starts to vomit), it cuts to black for a few seconds.
It then cuts to a daytime shot of the jungle, like at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. As the credits roll, gradually tribesmen are shown running through the Amazon until they get back to their village. The camera pans across a family from the village, showing their faces as they're intently watching something.
- (Alternatively, you could show Amish people; however, I don't think Amish are living as differently from modern society as the inhabitants of the Amazon.)
After a minute or two of this, the screen becomes slightly pixelated and pulls back, and it is revealed that this is a TV program that a typical-looking American family is watching. The camera pans across their faces as they all stare intently at the screen. The family is white. There's a mother, a father, a daughter and son who are both ~16(?).
Some interactions are shown that show typical problems of today that people take for granted.
- The family is overweight.
- The kids have acne.
- The parents have to discipline the kids for behavioral issues.
- The dog can't be let outside.
- (The family will have to be living somewhere remote and somewhat unpleasant, maybe Siberia, otherwise it wouldn't be clear why they'd still be in the dark-ages, since all the nice places to live are probably going to be taken by those with good technology.)
Somehow the son and daughter end up in a field, away from everyone else, and there they encounter something like the flying vehicle out of Back to the Future Part 2 (in this case it's the VTOL electric aircraft Elon Musk talks about). The craft lands and out comes an incredibly-striking figure, unlike any person the siblings (or the audience) has ever seen before:
- It's a woman, very dark-black, tall, incredibly beautiful.
- She's got very exotically-colored eyes, maybe changing color.
  - (Will she have a HUD on her iris? It may be more likely that people will just hook up their brain to a computer and have the computer interact with their neurons directly.)
- She's got very colorful / expensive-looking clothing / body paint.
- She's clearly in impeccable shape.
  - Hmm...if the family is in Siberia, and it's at night, it'll presumably be cold. So maybe she's wearing form-fitting clothing that keeps her warm, like superheroes with their jumpsuits.
- Hmm...getting out of the craft may not be designed to look sexy. So it may be better if the craft has already landed and she's shown already standing.
She takes them with her, and they end up in the "future", which turns out to be the same time as when the kid is living, but in a different part of the world. It becomes clear that the kid has been living in some kind of commune that has purposely kept itself separate from the rest of the world.
The kids get into some kind of plot that inevitably will have them running into all kinds of futuristic inventions.
Some kind of plot development leads to the kids being put back into their old community at the very end.
At the end of the movie, we're back with the crying kid lying on the ground, but this time we look up and see what he's looking at: the night sky is absolutely crawling with satellites and planes(? I'll need to see whether there are flights that would take people over that part of the world). The kid had never understood before what those were, but now he understands that they are the rest of the world doing their thing, and he's stuck with his family.

A vision of the future

Year
- I need to decide what year I'm going to be showing.
- If it's going to be a trilogy, it might be cool to predict 100, then 200, then 300 years from now.
  - Or 30, 60, 90 years from now. Although things won't be nearly as different.
- A lot of the more-exciting differences that I'm showing seem like they may be more realistic in ~300 years.
People
- People won't know the details of how the technology they use works.
  - On the other hand, people will be more educated.
- People's mental abilities
  - I think people's brains do create a hard limit on how good they'll be able to get good at things. It seems like people like Tiger Woods / Mozart who spend all of their time working on something are probably close to the limit of what existing human brains can achieve. Future people who are taller and equally-talented could probably do better (eg a 7' Tiger Woods).
- Age
  - The traveler notices that everyone looks young, but there's some variation, from ages 13 to 30. He asks about it and the couple of people he's with explain that people can choose what physical age they'd like to stay at.
  - At some point the traveler asks the couple of people he's with how old they are, and one of them says, "I'm 32, I think he's 40, (etc.)" And they all look like they're 15-20 years younger than the age they say. And the traveler says something like, "Wow, you look great for your age! But if you're 32, how do you handle 20-year spaceflights?" And the person he's with looks at him funny like she can't understand what he's confused about, and then her eyelids open like she's figured it out and she laughs and explains they're really 32,000 or 40,000 years old, and they just leave off the thousand when referring to their age. So that'll be something that makes the audience pop their eyes out.
- Bodies
  - Faces
    - People will all have beautiful faces
      - Examples
        Just look at the teenagers in the richest counties in the world.
    - People will all have beautiful profiles
      - Examples
    - People will have perfect skin.
      - Examples
        She's obviously wearing make-up and it looks heavily photoshopped, but it gives an idea of what people might look like in the future without makeup (just using genetic engineering etc.)
- Fashion
  - There will be an incredible variety of appearance.
    - There will be inequality of appearance. Everyone will look better than people do today, but some people will look way better (nicer stuff).
  - People will have lots more jewelry:
    - Examples
      - Delakeyz - How You Love (Official Music Video)
        \
  - People will have cleaner / more-varied / more-colorful clothing.
    - Examples
      - The color of her beads are extremely rich and really "pop" (to use a term I got from a fashion-savvy guy) because the rest of her body is muted in color.
  - People will have bright, rich-colored clothing.
  - People will be painted a lot more often.
    - Examples
      - People won't look like her (her decorations are honestly unpleasant), but they'll have painted faces like she does.
        Paint will take the place of tattoos once it is cheap and fast to have it done with robots.
        The problem with tattoos is that they fade.
      - The colors are right, but I think the designs aren't as intricate as they will end up being in the future.
      - Sports Illustrated painted swimsuits
        I think the level of intricacy is right, but IMO they show a lack of imagination; they're too close to real bathing suits. There are a lot of interesting things that you can do once you shift to painted outfits.
      - Other outlandish painted bodies
        I think the vividness of the color in this one is right on point. I think paintings will have colors like this.
        Google 'Chadwick Spector' for some really imaginative body paintings. They're really doing some clever things with the medium.
        I think their idea of having the content of the painting interact with the part of the body it's near is clever.
        Example: Having a face painted on the guy's face, so that one of the guy's eyes is used for one of the face's eye.
        ...but the paint they're using isn't rich in color.
        ...and the 'visual jokes' they're using are fairly intellectual (eg putting a Pablo Picasso painting on a guy).
        Tribal body painting
  - There may be microorganisms / micromachines that can dynamically change a person's appearance.
    - Examples
      - Moving tattoos.
      - Clothing that changes shape.
Daily schedule
- The pace of life will be far beyond our current pace of life, continuing the trend seen by the people who lived in the woods in England for a year.
  - It'll be like the pace of events we see in movies nowadays.
  - There'll be a constant stream of new things to do, new people to meet,
Business
- When top businesspeople don't die, their firms are going to stay on top for much, much longer.
  - There may need to be something like a draft for new talent to keep things even between companies, in the way it's done in sports.
Population
- Earth has 100x the number of people it has now, but it's a tiny, tiny fraction of the human population. Most people are out in space, on Mars, or headed to other solar systems.
Music
- There will be crazy new instruments.
  - Instruments will explore the possible space of instruments.
    - Loudness
      - Maybe a huge cannon/bass the size/shape of a pyramid that makes explosively-loud sounds.
        It'd be analogous to those really loud fireworks that people love.
      - Fireworks music!
        The fireworks would be timed to the music.
        It'd be an awesome audio-visual experience.
    - Pitch
People
Social norms
- People will be more physically intimate / comfortable / affectionate with each other
  - Explanation
    - I suspect this is the natural way of things for humans.
    - I suspect that the standoffishness we see in modern western society is caused by:
      - Social norms getting passed down from generation to generation (like neck-ties).
      - Societies in which people move around a lot more, as opposed to villages you see in Africa / the Amazon.
  - Examples

Nuts-and-bolts of the movie

Rating
- Aim for it to be PG (like Back to the Future) or PG-13 (like Jurassic Park) so that people can bring their kids. It'll help with the virality.

Trailer for the movie

The trailer should lie to potential audiences about exactly what they're going to see. It should give people the flavor but not actually show anything that will be the fun surprises of the movie.
It might be OK to just use footage from the cutting-room floor.

Ending credits

The movie should roll the credits next to instructions for how to recommend the movie to others.
- Example:
  - "If you recommend this movie to others, please don't tell them what they are going to see. Just say something like, 'You have to see this movie.'"

A list of the things to show in the movie

Just think of all the problems in the world today and show what the world will look like when those problems are solved.
People may have forgotten about lots of things that happened to them more than 100 years ago. They'll need to keep a record of everything that's happened to refresh their memory. They may have a full video capture of every moment that they can search as they please.

Things to research

How to make people cry in movies. How to build the tension properly.
- Get a list of movies that are good at making people cry.

Similar movies

M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village"
Back to the Future
The Truman Show (having someone's reality separate from the rest of the world).
I should check out that movie where the guy falls in love with an AI.

Related pages

Predicting the Future