Sunday Story Break — Space train

JULY 10TH, 2016 — POST 188

This is the nineteenth in a weekly series where I try to find a movie idea from a piece of news, pop culture, or trope. You can read last week’s, about “wrong convicted” killers on podcasts, here.

Wired this week published a solution to a problem most people wouldn’t think about. Mainly because it’s not yet really a problem. The problem relates to space travel. Specifically, the largest amounts of energy required being at the start and end of a journey: when the craft’s velocity is required to change dramatically. But once you’re going in space, you tend to just keep on going. Like satellites in our own orbit, there are plenty of free forces to exploit in space to travel incredible distances.

Called “The Solar Express”, Wired published a concept designed by Charles Bombardier for an interplanetary “train”. Where the tracks of a train on Earth are constructed from wood and iron, the tracks of The Solar Express are the orbits of planets in our solar system. Designed to transport people, supplies, and minerals around, The Solar Express, Bombardier describes, is similar to a ski-lift, always moving and something that can be “hitched” onto. Smaller module crafts would be launched up to meet it, as it lazily floats past.

The history of the train in cinema is as long as cinema itself. Considered to be the first film ever, L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) by the Lumière Brothers was first exhibited in 1896 and depicted nothing more than what you would have expected from the title. A steam engine pulls up to the station, people get aboard. Fin. But more than that, the train as a technology has been inextricable from cinema ever since.

Buster Keaton’s The General, in which Keaton must secure a train known as The General for the Civil War, notably features the train as the story’s animating principle, in much the same way as the train literally was the animating principle of an industrialised, modernised world. Recent movies like Snowpiercer are built formally around the implicit linearity of the train: the characters can only go either forward or back. There is an implicit simpatico between the train and cinema with many metaphors able to be drawn. Generally, both the train and cinema are mechanically based modes by which the world was changed.

So if anything is naturally cinematic, it’s a space train. Even if the name, “The Solar Express”, might need a bit of workshopping, the space train concept has tonnes of potential. Perhaps even a little too much. Once we get past the spectacle and the richness of a world in which a space train is used, we’re not left with much else. There’s no story here necessarily. However, where the ground train was renowned for its capacity to have people from all classes and creeds share the same space momentarily, the space train would have this on a grander scale — not only are the people perhaps interplanetary, but they’ll also have to stay with each other for a lot longer than something like the Trans-Siberian. The space train then becomes a cultural melting pot riding the orbits of our solar system.

Once the space train is conceived of as this kind of nowhere space where everyone has to be, a lot of possibilities open up. The tropic “train murder mystery” is a very promising candidate given the sheer size of this thing. One could also go down the road of a permanent staff member, like a waiter or entertainer, who stays when everyone else is just passing through. There’s a built-in ticking clock in this sort of story — the permanent member only has so long to achieve their goal with the traveller. The insularity and security of the structure could also be mined for its horrific potential, say in the setting loose of a rogue agent a la Alien.

There’s a lot here to work through, and nothing all too concrete yet.

But, hey, it’s an idea.