Every once in a while an idea wanders into my head that refuses to leave.
This one arrived at three o’clock in the morning.
It was so simple I almost laughed.
What if someone invented a remote control that could make machines run backward?
Not backward like rewinding a movie.
Backward as in… they undo whatever they just did.
A factory robot quietly disassembles a brand-new sports car.
An ATM politely sucks every dollar back inside.
A 3D printer inhales a coffee mug until nothing remains but a spool of plastic filament.
Funny.
Until someone points it at a hospital.
Imagine a surgeon finishing a six-hour heart transplant.
The exhausted team smiles.
The family cries with relief.
Then, somewhere in the hallway, a man presses one innocent-looking button.
The surgical robot begins moving in reverse.
Every stitch disappears.
The donor heart slides quietly back into its cooler.
The patient suddenly owns the heart he had six hours earlier.
Now imagine that happening across an entire city.
The traffic lights become confused.
Elevators return to floors they left minutes before.
Factories unbuild products.
Power stations reverse their startup procedures.
Computers begin forgetting instead of remembering.
The world doesn’t explode.
It simply starts… coming apart.
The fellow holding the remote is named Regan Pennyweather.
He’s one of those brilliant reverse engineers hired by billion-dollar corporations to discover how their competitors’ newest inventions work.
He’s so good that eventually he begins thinking backward himself.
Every solution becomes a problem.
Every beginning feels like an ending.
Then his employer decides he’d make the perfect scapegoat for a corporate theft worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Within twenty-four hours, Regan becomes the most wanted engineer in America.
Unfortunately for everyone chasing him…
He still has the remote.
And he has decided to fight back.
Not with bullets.
Not with bombs.
With rewinds.
Each time his enemies use technology against him, he quietly asks the technology to take back the last thing it accomplished.
The more powerful the machine…
The more horrifying the result.
Somewhere around the middle of the movie the audience begins looking around the theater.
Pacemakers.
Artificial knees.
Driverless cars.
Hospital robots.
Airliners.
Satellites.
Power grids.
We’re surrounded by machines.
Every one of them remembers what it just did.
What if one man discovered how to make them remember… backward?
I think I’d call the movie REBOOT.
Tagline?
“The future doesn’t explode.
It comes apart.”
If Hollywood doesn’t make it, perhaps they should at least promise not to invent the remote.
