Episode 12 / Reading 8 - The Temple

[old book]

My thoughts exactly, Genus. It would make an awesome film.

[Eric Lofgren]

Even if the inconsistencies were amended, this would still be a good movie. I think the key to it is to insure you have someone who can portray the captain as he is described in the story. Nationalistic zeal and iron will, while everyone else dissolves into manic superstitious phrenzy about you

[Genus Unknown]

Hell, if all else fails, they could just make it an "experimental" U-boat. A top-secret prototype with special pressure-proof portholes for underwater recon or something. Plans for more are scrapped when the U-29 fails to return, with everyone back in Berlin assuming that its loss was due to a problem with the portholes or airlock.

Or the story could be amended to use a more accurate U-boat. Maybe the visions of dead bodies swimming by could be dream-visions. The school of dolphins (and the city itself) could be revealed by sonar (who's to say whether those green blips following the boat are dolphins, or something else?), with Karl only getting a look at it after he leaves the vessel via whatever halfway realistic means the screenwriter could devise.

There are all kinds of ways around a little historical inaccuracy, including just plain ignoring it.

[old book]

I think it would be important to pay tribute to those U-boot films of yore in some noir way. Also, this thing they've been trumpeting in the Gulf of Bothnia/Baltic Sea: Is it convex or concave, but appearing to be convex???

[Jape]

I imagined keeping the airlock and tossing the portholes would be fine for a movie adaption (really portholes would hardly ruin the film). As Genus said, you could use dreams, sonar and sounds emanating from outside the Boat to create the atmosphere. Also without actual visual confirmation it adds an element of realism to the problems. Maybe it really is just a jittery crew going nuts because of the very terrestrial doom the sinking Boat offers? Though Hollywood isn't exactly a big fan of implicit peril.

[old book]

Again, I find the Baltic USO hype very instructional on how this could be done. The sonar images of R'lyeh could be as blurry as the thing in the Baltic, giving rise to all sorts of fanciful speculations, which is what the thing in the Baltic is doing. Experimental imperfect German military sonar, of course.

[Eric Lofgren]

Again, I find the Baltic USO hype very instructional on how this could be done. The sonar images of R'lyeh could be as blurry as the thing in the Baltic, giving rise to all sorts of fanciful speculations, which is what the thing in the Baltic is doing. Experimental imperfect German military sonar, of course.

Have you been following this old book? Any new info on it yet?

[old book]

Yeah, the Swedish captain of the salvage ship Peter Lindberg gave an interview to Portland KXL radio's Ground Zero. It sounds like it's a mineral thing with burnt out fissures that don't make a lot of sense on top of a pillar of a different mineral. The reported failure of electronics sounds like SNAFU for the salvage crew, but there was a temp of -1 C at the site, which might be a failing thermometer, but isn't usual in the waters of the Baltic which are almost fresh with very low salinity. Not a UFO, but something weird possibly.

http://www.groundzeromedia.org/gzpod/download.php?filename=2012-07-02_gzlive_062912.mp3

[old book]

I was just reading sections of Thomas Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa dealing with South Africa and Rhodesia, and stumbled onto the chapter about German Southwest Africa, now known as Namibia. The German colony in the South Atlantic would have to feature in the film somehow, as a destination or escape destination or something, because the timing is so right. I think the experimental deep-sea U-boot should have portholes or viewing windows made of neoprene or some experimental new hardened plastic material, and the twilight world below 1,000 feet should be lit up by external incandescent flood-lights from the submarine ship, so that the dancing patterns of the sea-life and luminosities can remind the captain of a winter scene in his native Prussia or wherever, and later he can become increasinly unsure, along with the rest of the crew, whether he isn't seeing human forms cavorting out there amid the luminous bits.

( Incidentally, while the initial Baltic UFO was hyped as being shaped like the Millennium Falcon, it actually has a definite U shape in the sonarogram. It could be the mother of all U-boots )