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fridgepunk
So there's these three old japanese professors, from this japanese institution that never gets named which is all about vague sciencey stuff. The important take home however is that the institution is set up so that its main buildings also function as multigenerational fallout shelters, which is important because this is a movie from the 80s.
How 80s is it? One of the Professors' students is Kurt Russel. The rest of the students are also all quite muscley 80s action movie stars but I only recognised Kurt Russel.
So these professors and their muscular students go on a holiday to a shinto shrine which is being run by a new head priest (who throughout this dream will be referred to as a "duke" [?!]) who's a bumbling comic relief character and his very young and new trainee priest, and the two of them spend the entire dream involved in this weird not-at-all-funny sub-plot about how the trainee sleep walks and eats the "Duke"'s food from their special fridge and then the duke wakes up and finds the trainee's bed covered in wrappers and half eaten turkey legs and stuff* and then he gets mad and makes the trainee do tiresome chores.
I can't remember how the main plot built up, but the finale involved this lanterny-thingie that is made by aliens and landed on earth, and the professors and their students have been trying to open it or turn it on... and they finally do. This causes the lanterny-thing to pin all the students and professors to the walls of the room the lantern got turned on in with forecfields and in the center of the room it created a person who knew one of the characters. The thing is that the character this new person said he knew couldn't remember him at all – and the lead professor explains that what the lantern has done is bring into being a person who might have lived, but who for whatever reason never did, was never born. But the person that was created had all the memories that he would have had had he been born and in his memories one of the students was his best friend.
There was then an arguement over whether or not to basically have the new person destroyed or to let him live, knowing that everyone he thinks he knows won't know him, but eventually the professors agree with kurt russel's pleas to let the new person live and so the lanterny stops doing stuff and goes dormant again.
During the denouement the professors discuss what the lantern-thingy is, and they decide that whatever it is the only people who should possess it are people who already understand how it works, and so they shouldn't study it "for who knows, maybe it will be a million years, but I'm sure one day we'll be ready." – and so they leave the lantern hanging from the verandah of the shinto temple as they head off back to the institution and we see the goddamn comedic subplot with the "duke" and his student END, as the duke puts down some flour around the doorway to the kitchen in the shrine, and then both fo them go to sleep. The next morning they wake up to find footprints in the flour, and so the duke berates the student for eating in his sleep and gets him to agree to do all the shrine's chores to atone for his crimes. When the berating is done the duke very carefully flips the cover of his bed over a little bit to hide the stray bone of the food he took during the night OH HO HO THE END I HOPE I NEVER DREAM OF YOU IDIOTS EVER AGAIN SO LONG AS I LIVE.
We then get the main plot ENDING some more as the professors and the students all exit their camper van in the masive grey parking lot that fronts the institute, and as the students all rush inside the institute ahead of the professors, the professors dawdle and discuss how maybe it was wrong to take it on themselves to create life, and that it would be poetic is they were suddenly struck down to restore the balance in the universe, at which they all laugh nervously and continue strolling towards the institute building. Suddenly one of the professors clutches at his chest and falls over and the other two look at him in fright, at which point the second professor starts gasping and falls over too. This so frightens the lead professor that he starts to run through the car park but bumps into a car and falls over, laying still on the tarmac of the car park. All of this uses a long single panning shot by the camera viewpoint.
Then the lead professors starts to laugh, which causes the other two professors to laugh as well and they all get themselves up and dust each other off while laughing and walking towards the institute again.
As they reach the steps leading into the institute the three of them, all of them still laughing, are suddenly illuminated by a blinding flash on their backs and they turn in horror at what's happened, at which point we see the place where the prominent and distant mountain in the distance opposite the institution has been replaced with a very badly done blue screen effect so that where the mountain was in the scene, grainy footage of a nuclear bomb's mushroom cloud slowly rising upwards is there instead.
There's a closeup shot then, all three professors look at each other in horror before rushing up the final steps into the instution and one of the professors hitting something on a nearby wall that causes massive steel blastdoors to slam down over the front of the institution's entrance just as a gust of dust and dirst blows against it.
And that's basically THE END for the main plot, but wait! For all intents and purposes another movies starts off from this point, as we see swooping shots of the institution from the air, purple flashing lightning lighting up the dusty gloom that enshrouds the site and we get a time lapse of the carpark slowly filling with dust that begins to cover the cars until they're completely covered, and then grave markers start to pop up out of the ground like mushrooms all over where the carpark used to be.
We then swoop down towards the institution building and see inside the dark and dank corridors of the institution's fallout spaces and see a person being dragged through the corridors by people in the robes of medieval monks, the only lighting is some recessed candles they drag this figure, who we see is an old man begging that they believe him.
Eventually they meet a large steel door with guards in the same medieval robes and they spin the spinny thing that opens the door and they pass through.
Now here I was absolutely sure that during the slow pan around the door, as we see the sign reading "command room and main reactor" above the door, that what was going to happen was that the camera was going to pan around and we'd see a large hallway of medieval scribes writing things out and doing the maths neccesary to run the fallout shelter.
What instead we see is a largely dark room seen from a quite high up walk way, and we and everyone else on the walk-way all face towards a massive NUCLEAR REACTOR with a giant "signal strength" style bar that's only showing a few small bars of remaining power, oh noes!
The prisoner and his guard all turn to face an important robed figure and the obviously evil vizier and his toady who proceed to have a conversation about how the prisoner was caught with illegal technology, like that which caused the world to end and cast them all into perdition and the evil vizier suggests the prisoner be immediately executed when the prisoners tries to get a word in edgeways to explain himself.
While the conversation is going on, the evil vizier's toady moves into a position that he can make a leap from the walkway above the reactor onto the reactor, which he then proceeds to climb up to the port at the top for fuel to go in and out of, and dives into the reactor, where he apparently acts like a neutron poison or something because the few remaining bars on the side of the reactor disappear and the vizier starts to laugh evilly as the prisoner ask why the toady did that given that it means everyone in the fallout shelter is going to suffocate and die now. The vizier stops laughing and explains that he's from a puritan sect that believes even the nuclear reactors that power the shelter are evil and will doom us all again if someone doesn't shut it down and entrust them all to God's judgement.
Which obviously bums the prisoner out a bit, who starts to weep and cry "it's all my fault! I should never have come back!"
Suddenly out of the darkness to the side of the reactor a large screen lights up and a computer voice starts explaining that reactors #1 and #2 are non-functional, switching to tertiary power" and a map on the screen shows a map of the area with the reactors and shelter marked out on it, showing that the tertiary reactor is a long way from the shelter and there's no chance of the final reactor being shutdown from the shelter.
At this the prisoner looks up and smiles going "ah! yes!" and the vizier looks evil and grumpy while the important guy and guards look confused by it all.
Suddenly some more guards come in dragging a vaguely human shaped robot between them who seems to recognise the first prisoner.
This for some reason baffles the vizier who asks what the robot is and what it all means, to which the first prisoner says:
"don't you get it yet? We're from your future, we're proof that there's hope and you can embrace technology without creating a second cataclysm, there's still hope!"
And there, patient and probably bored reader, is where I woke up and the movie definately ended.
* my subconcious knows absolutely shit about shintoism aren't they vegetarian? Not that this would have been funnier if they were.
Of course for the people who stuck through that (I basically wanted to get it down before I forgot it for good) or those who have better things to do with their time; here's a video of Karen Gillan (Amy Pond) in a bikini and shooting an american in the face to cheer up the americans who are suffering from the giving of thanks and everyone in southern england who's gotten wettened over the past few days.
How 80s is it? One of the Professors' students is Kurt Russel. The rest of the students are also all quite muscley 80s action movie stars but I only recognised Kurt Russel.
So these professors and their muscular students go on a holiday to a shinto shrine which is being run by a new head priest (who throughout this dream will be referred to as a "duke" [?!]) who's a bumbling comic relief character and his very young and new trainee priest, and the two of them spend the entire dream involved in this weird not-at-all-funny sub-plot about how the trainee sleep walks and eats the "Duke"'s food from their special fridge and then the duke wakes up and finds the trainee's bed covered in wrappers and half eaten turkey legs and stuff* and then he gets mad and makes the trainee do tiresome chores.
I can't remember how the main plot built up, but the finale involved this lanterny-thingie that is made by aliens and landed on earth, and the professors and their students have been trying to open it or turn it on... and they finally do. This causes the lanterny-thing to pin all the students and professors to the walls of the room the lantern got turned on in with forecfields and in the center of the room it created a person who knew one of the characters. The thing is that the character this new person said he knew couldn't remember him at all – and the lead professor explains that what the lantern has done is bring into being a person who might have lived, but who for whatever reason never did, was never born. But the person that was created had all the memories that he would have had had he been born and in his memories one of the students was his best friend.
There was then an arguement over whether or not to basically have the new person destroyed or to let him live, knowing that everyone he thinks he knows won't know him, but eventually the professors agree with kurt russel's pleas to let the new person live and so the lanterny stops doing stuff and goes dormant again.
During the denouement the professors discuss what the lantern-thingy is, and they decide that whatever it is the only people who should possess it are people who already understand how it works, and so they shouldn't study it "for who knows, maybe it will be a million years, but I'm sure one day we'll be ready." – and so they leave the lantern hanging from the verandah of the shinto temple as they head off back to the institution and we see the goddamn comedic subplot with the "duke" and his student END, as the duke puts down some flour around the doorway to the kitchen in the shrine, and then both fo them go to sleep. The next morning they wake up to find footprints in the flour, and so the duke berates the student for eating in his sleep and gets him to agree to do all the shrine's chores to atone for his crimes. When the berating is done the duke very carefully flips the cover of his bed over a little bit to hide the stray bone of the food he took during the night OH HO HO THE END I HOPE I NEVER DREAM OF YOU IDIOTS EVER AGAIN SO LONG AS I LIVE.
We then get the main plot ENDING some more as the professors and the students all exit their camper van in the masive grey parking lot that fronts the institute, and as the students all rush inside the institute ahead of the professors, the professors dawdle and discuss how maybe it was wrong to take it on themselves to create life, and that it would be poetic is they were suddenly struck down to restore the balance in the universe, at which they all laugh nervously and continue strolling towards the institute building. Suddenly one of the professors clutches at his chest and falls over and the other two look at him in fright, at which point the second professor starts gasping and falls over too. This so frightens the lead professor that he starts to run through the car park but bumps into a car and falls over, laying still on the tarmac of the car park. All of this uses a long single panning shot by the camera viewpoint.
Then the lead professors starts to laugh, which causes the other two professors to laugh as well and they all get themselves up and dust each other off while laughing and walking towards the institute again.
As they reach the steps leading into the institute the three of them, all of them still laughing, are suddenly illuminated by a blinding flash on their backs and they turn in horror at what's happened, at which point we see the place where the prominent and distant mountain in the distance opposite the institution has been replaced with a very badly done blue screen effect so that where the mountain was in the scene, grainy footage of a nuclear bomb's mushroom cloud slowly rising upwards is there instead.
There's a closeup shot then, all three professors look at each other in horror before rushing up the final steps into the instution and one of the professors hitting something on a nearby wall that causes massive steel blastdoors to slam down over the front of the institution's entrance just as a gust of dust and dirst blows against it.
And that's basically THE END for the main plot, but wait! For all intents and purposes another movies starts off from this point, as we see swooping shots of the institution from the air, purple flashing lightning lighting up the dusty gloom that enshrouds the site and we get a time lapse of the carpark slowly filling with dust that begins to cover the cars until they're completely covered, and then grave markers start to pop up out of the ground like mushrooms all over where the carpark used to be.
We then swoop down towards the institution building and see inside the dark and dank corridors of the institution's fallout spaces and see a person being dragged through the corridors by people in the robes of medieval monks, the only lighting is some recessed candles they drag this figure, who we see is an old man begging that they believe him.
Eventually they meet a large steel door with guards in the same medieval robes and they spin the spinny thing that opens the door and they pass through.
Now here I was absolutely sure that during the slow pan around the door, as we see the sign reading "command room and main reactor" above the door, that what was going to happen was that the camera was going to pan around and we'd see a large hallway of medieval scribes writing things out and doing the maths neccesary to run the fallout shelter.
What instead we see is a largely dark room seen from a quite high up walk way, and we and everyone else on the walk-way all face towards a massive NUCLEAR REACTOR with a giant "signal strength" style bar that's only showing a few small bars of remaining power, oh noes!
The prisoner and his guard all turn to face an important robed figure and the obviously evil vizier and his toady who proceed to have a conversation about how the prisoner was caught with illegal technology, like that which caused the world to end and cast them all into perdition and the evil vizier suggests the prisoner be immediately executed when the prisoners tries to get a word in edgeways to explain himself.
While the conversation is going on, the evil vizier's toady moves into a position that he can make a leap from the walkway above the reactor onto the reactor, which he then proceeds to climb up to the port at the top for fuel to go in and out of, and dives into the reactor, where he apparently acts like a neutron poison or something because the few remaining bars on the side of the reactor disappear and the vizier starts to laugh evilly as the prisoner ask why the toady did that given that it means everyone in the fallout shelter is going to suffocate and die now. The vizier stops laughing and explains that he's from a puritan sect that believes even the nuclear reactors that power the shelter are evil and will doom us all again if someone doesn't shut it down and entrust them all to God's judgement.
Which obviously bums the prisoner out a bit, who starts to weep and cry "it's all my fault! I should never have come back!"
Suddenly out of the darkness to the side of the reactor a large screen lights up and a computer voice starts explaining that reactors #1 and #2 are non-functional, switching to tertiary power" and a map on the screen shows a map of the area with the reactors and shelter marked out on it, showing that the tertiary reactor is a long way from the shelter and there's no chance of the final reactor being shutdown from the shelter.
At this the prisoner looks up and smiles going "ah! yes!" and the vizier looks evil and grumpy while the important guy and guards look confused by it all.
Suddenly some more guards come in dragging a vaguely human shaped robot between them who seems to recognise the first prisoner.
This for some reason baffles the vizier who asks what the robot is and what it all means, to which the first prisoner says:
"don't you get it yet? We're from your future, we're proof that there's hope and you can embrace technology without creating a second cataclysm, there's still hope!"
And there, patient and probably bored reader, is where I woke up and the movie definately ended.
* my subconcious knows absolutely shit about shintoism aren't they vegetarian? Not that this would have been funnier if they were.
Of course for the people who stuck through that (I basically wanted to get it down before I forgot it for good) or those who have better things to do with their time; here's a video of Karen Gillan (Amy Pond) in a bikini and shooting an american in the face to cheer up the americans who are suffering from the giving of thanks and everyone in southern england who's gotten wettened over the past few days.
