BILL KNOX – 55, a likable, successful American engineer working in Britain – wakes to the sound of police at his door. He gives them the slip and travels north across a half-flooded Britain towards Glasgow, from where he can catch a ship to Greenland. But Knox is in danger: the public lynch ‘fossils’ like him. He hitches a lift with a lorry driver, but the trucker calls the cops. Knox makes a narrow escape – he’ll have to stay off the roads. Stealing a boat, he decides to sail to Glasgow but a storm catches him. He washes up half-drowned on the shore of an island, where KEN, a moody teenager, manages to revive him. He and his widowed mother MHAIRI help him. Unable to get to Glasgow in time to catch his ship, Knox has to lie low and wait a month for the next boat.
The island has no internet, so Knox's face isn’t known there. The place is soon to be evacuated, given up to the rising sea, so Ken asks Knox to design a seawall to save the place. Initially reluctant—there's neither sufficient time nor money—Knox eventually agrees: after all, he owes the kid his life. The plan meets resistance from McCORQUODALE, the local councillor – a wall is too expensive and the islanders have all accepted that they’ll have to move. After some effort he persuades ALEXANDRA McDONNALL—aristocratic chieftain of the island—to get behind the scheme. Knox, Ken and McDonnell mobilise the kids and the project gets momentum.
Meanwhile, US government agents on the mainland work to track down Knox’s whereabouts. Mhairi discovers that Knox is on the run. He confesses to her that he was an engineer for an oil company, a ‘climate criminal’. But Mhairi is sympathetic – her husband had been a rigger and he was lynched for it. She agrees to help him get to Glasgow.
Knox, torn between escape and his growing fixation with his seawall, hesitates at the decisive moment and is caught by McCorquodale, who has worked out that he’s not who he claims to be. Knox admits his true identity – his crime far greater than the one he confessed to Mhairi.
Can he persuade the Islanders that saving their home is enough for them to forgive the unforgivable? Will the agents track him down before island justice is done?
Comments
Disaster movie scripts are…
Disaster movie scripts are not often very convincing but this definitely bucks the trend. I think it's the authentic set-up and a premise that's all too easy to imagine becoming a reality but most of all, it's the characters and the dialogue that do, and must, take centre stage. I would have liked the descriptive detail to be less frugal but that's just my personal preference.