Ridley Scott Adapting THE DAY BRITAIN STOPPED
Director Ridley Scott is teaming up with screenwriter Steve Zaillian (Schindler's List) to adapt the 2003 BBC TV movie drama The Day Britain Stopped into a feature film. The project is set up at 20th Century Fox and they will be using the original story on which the series is based, so technically it won't be a remake.
The story follows a fictional disaster, in which a train strike is the first in a chain of events that leads to a meltdown of the country’s transport system.
Scott and Zaillian are a couple of very talented individuals, and I'm sure they'll end up delivering a fantastic film based on this story. I look forward to anything Scott does; he's just one of the most talented filmmakers working today. He's got a few other films on his plate, like The Counselor and a Blade Runner sequel.
Read through BBC description of the story, and let us know you think it will end up being a good movie!
In the film, Britain is facing a national crisis by the end of 2003; the country's transport infrastructure is unable to cope with the traffic volumes it faced on a daily basis.
Our roads are the most congested in Europe, our skies the busiest in the world and the rail network is lurching from disaster to disaster.
Total collapse of all these systems was just around the corner - the warning signs were there, but they were all ignored.
19 December, 2003 is the last Friday before Christmas; one of the busiest days for the UK's roads.
In the drama, the day starts with the first of a series of 24-hour national rail strikes, following on from a fatal rail disaster at Waverley, Edinburgh. The strike pushed even more traffic on the roads.
By early afternoon the M25 is at a standstill following two accidents, and across the country minor incidents cause pockets of ever-growing gridlock from Scotland to the West Country.
By evening, hundreds of thousands of motorists are stranded in sub-zero temperatures and the police are forced to implement Operation Gridlock; a contingency plan intended solely for use in a humanitarian crisis.
The gridlock means passengers are unable to make their flights and hundreds of essential workers, including doctors, nurses, pilots and air traffic controllers, are unable to reach their place of work.
Understaffed and overloaded one air traffic controller makes a tiny mistake with devastating consequences.
At 22:28 the disaster many had predicted finally struck when a passenger jet collided with a Czech freight plane over Hounslow, killing all passengers and crew.