Dan Soule

This was definitely written with the idea in mind of it being picked up by a film company. But what kind of movie exactly?
   Well, first there’s the opening. Jim Castle is a traffic cop—recently divorced, drinking too much, lurching into middle-age—parked up in a lay-by in rural Nottinghamshire on a morning much like any other: watching for speeding motorists while nursing a hangover. All three radios he has with him are behaving oddly though: there’s the ordinary radio he’s grumpily fiddling with, trying to find something worth listening to; there’s a CB radio his son built and gave to him; and there’s his police radio. But all he’s getting are snatches of conversation or music, and static as the reception fades in and out. Then a car shoots past, but as Castle blue-lights and gives chase he notices its occupants looking, not back at him, but up at the sky: something is streaking earthwards, followed by a sonic boom and shockwave strong enough to throw both cars clean off the road.
   In other words, very much the sort of opening some LibraryThing Members will remember writing themselves when they were teenagers—and the reason I know this is because it’s uncannily similar to something I started, but never finished of course, myself at that age (and with the same Box-Office-Smash idea in mind). Thereafter too (as with my own effort) what follows is all predictable enough: the invading aliens aren’t particularly interesting or horrifying; there’s a cast of clichéd human characters; and there’s military stuff which, as it can sometimes do, quickly gets very tiresome: raw recruits, sergeant-major-style repartee, etc., etc.
   So, yes, transferred to Hollywood, scripted—and set, inevitably, in New York—this probably could be turned into just the kind of movie (undemanding, with lots of special effects and big explosions, Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise) that bore the pants off me.… (mehr)