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Movie Idea: The Tunnel

Not from a dream, but me conjuring up something to dream about when I woke too early at 5am…

A tunnel has been discovered underneath the Sphinx in Egypt (this is real, BTW). So of course it gets a lot of publicity, and serious archaeologists spend years planning how to carefully investigate it. When they finally do, the send a robot down it, but after a few hundred meters it reaches a door that it cannot get past.

While it had long been rumoured that such a tunnel leads to the famed Hall of Records, footage of the tunnel walls that was not made public shows hieroglyphs that also mention treasure.

So then we have the heist crew:

  • A female real archaeologist who is under-appreciated
  • A psuedo-archaeologist / ancient alien theorist
  • And his bimbo girlfriend
  • An Egyptian professional tomb raider
  • A mercenary
  • A historian / fence
  • And a geek who claims to gave a map of the tunnel. He knows the plot so also kinda blackmails them to take him

Contriving how they all meet won’t be hard, they have very shared interests. The psuedo-guy is on a TV show and conducts guided tours for rich Americans. The historian sells the objects the tomb-raider steals.

They sneak in with weeks worth of supplies.

There are booby traps. And jump-scares (bats). Places that are impassable. Forks. There is double-crossing. There is something tracking them that someone thinks is a ghoul. Patchy reception for their tech.

Pivotal is that the tunnel is not deep, and someone’s basement actually connects to it. They encounter that someone and have to decide whether to kill him or kidnap him.

They discover the treasure just after learning that their interloping has been discovered, and the authorities are almost certainly going to catch them when they exit.

Some flee with treasure. Some continue on to the neighbouring Hall of Records. There are indications of aliens.

Well, it is a 6 episode TV series (10 with back-stories, 15 with stories happening on the outside), and ends with double cliff-hangers – do they escape with the treasure? do they find aliens? or secret knowledge?

Published in Writing