An action thriller by Jock Miller


Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.


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The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.

As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.

The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.

The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.

The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.

Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.

Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.

Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?

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Cannes 2011: With documentary on BP oil spill, a festival tries to dig in



http://latimesblogs.latimes.com

24 Frames

Movies: Past, present and future


Fix

The Cannes Film Festival isn't known for its documentaries. But once in a while, a filmmaker takes on a current event in a way that gets the crowd buzzing. That happened in 2004 when Michael Moore came in with "Fahrenheit 9/11" and walked out with a Palme d'Or. And it happened last year when Charles Ferguson premiered his "Inside Job" to festival-goers on the Croisette; amid the glitz and opulence, everyone was talking about the perils of greed.

On Tuesday night, the festival tried the trick again by showing Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell's documentary about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. There would seem to be a promising cinematic story in the tale of a big corporation acting in dubious moral and legal ways, possibly with the help of the U.S. government, leading to a catastrophe.

The backstory on the spill was a good primer for those who have forgotten the cataclysmic events of that spring. And it was noteworthy to see Peter Fonda pop up; the actor-activist executive produced the film and made a small appearance. But any Fergusonian ambitions were soon extinguished. The crowd squirmed restlessly as the film moved from facts about the spill to topics as tenuously connected as the recent revolution in Egypt and the Japanese nuclear disaster, all while asserting some vague conspiracy between government and corporate activities. The filmmakers are activists in the realm of alternative energy (Tickell previously helmed the doc "Fuel"), and they go from showing the working-man victims in the gulf to talking-head voices of outrage who say things like, "The power system won't save us from corporate forces that kill us."

The you-can-make-a-difference activism is present in Moore's films too, of course, but usually after he has entertainingly worked the crowd into a lather, something that, judging by the audience's reaction here, the filmmakers don't do.

There may yet, however, be a filmic story to tell about the spill -- "Twilight" studio Summit is currently developing one, based on a dramatizing of the hours leading up to the spill.


-- Steven Zeitchik

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