It's 40 years in the future, and rising waters have left more than 70 percent of the world's landmass under the ocean. Landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty and even Rio's Sugar Loaf Mountain barely break the surface. Enter a group of salvagers who embark on a quest to find the ancient scepter that just might be the key to saving mankind's future.
Such is the plot of Lost City Raiders.
Lost City Raiders stars James Brolin and Ian Somerhalder as leaders of the salvagers, as well as Ben Cross as the villain who seeks to acquire the scepter for his own less-than-noble purposes. SCI FI Wire was on the line recently when Brolin and Somerhalder spoke to journalists during a half-hour conference call. Following are excerpts from that conversation.
The opening sequence of this movie, with much of the world swallowed by oceans, is pretty scary. What are your thoughts about the climate crisis, global warming? And how big a factor was that in your wanting to do this movie?
Brolin: Well, as far as I'm concerned, I believe the clock is ticking, and there are two questions. One is whether a man and his burning of any kind of fuel is causing it? As far as water and gravity, anything above water level, of course that melts, is going to come down and raise the water level. All of this stuff is very, very possible, as opposed to, you know, let's say a Jules Verne story or any of the old sci-fi stories that just come from the depths of somebody's mind and become art. This is something that we're really faced with, and I believe in everything that Al Gore had predicted and everything that we're actually seeing. Everybody now is looking at the Kyoto agreement, and we're off in panic sort of in the right direction. In 1910, most of the cars in America--I'm talking about 55 percent of the cars in America--were electric. And I would assume had we continued on that path we would probably be in pretty good shape. ...
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Jamie Thomas King (from left) is Thomas Kubiak, and Ian Somerhalder is Jack Kubiak, in Lost City Raiders.
Somerhalder: I agree with you.
Brolin: ... Something happened to deter that, and something is still trying to happen. And I think if we can nose off the stampede and get it going in another direction here quickly, we can curtail things. But, in many ways, we're going to have to accept the results of what we've done so far.
Somerhalder: I couldn't agree more with Jim at every syllable if I tried. So ...
It's entertainment with a message.
Somerhalder: A cautionary tale.
Brolin: Yeah, a cautionary [tale]--politics or weather--but to me we have to start with entertainment. When I read the first page of this and turned it, here they were, diving on Hollywood Boulevard 300 feet below, looking at Grauman's Chinese. I thought, "Wow, this is going to be a lot of fun." And, of course, it was a lot of fun to do. ... I haven't seen the picture [yet], but I'd assume that it's a thrill ride as much as the reading of it was and the doing of it was.
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James Brolin is John "Pa" Kubiak.
Somerhalder: The first page you see, you have this imagery in your mind of what it would look like. And as a cautionary tale, I indeed believe it could be. I mean, when you're reading about a place a number of miles from your house 300 feet below the ocean, it gives you a sense of severity that you haven't really thought about. Also, I'm from New Orleans. I grew up on the Gulf of Mexico. And with climate change in the next 50 to 75 years, 75 to definitely 150 years, the United States of America alone is capable of losing up to 22,500 miles of coastland. Now that is a scary concept. Look at the Maldives. What happens to the Maldives? They're going to be under water. So as a cautionary tale, yeah, I think it could actually lend itself to be something that takes people's imagination to a place where reality seems it is feasible.
-Ian Spelling
