This is the craziest (but coolest) thing I’ve read all week.
Have you ever read someone’s musings or writings online and think it’s better than a lot of the published or produced work you’ve seen in the realm of film or book markets? Reddit- known to be a relatively clever site with an oft peeked-in-upon user base- has probably been exposed to its fair share of good ideas. And one was so good it might very well end up as a full-length feature film.
About a month ago, Reddit user The_Quiet_Earth posed the question “ Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU? ” in r/AskReddit- a subreddit devoted to culling answers from the Reddit community. The Redditor described the question in the excerpt at the bottom of this post to other Reddit users.
As the thread wore on, people off the site took note. One of those people was an exec at Warner Bros., who’ve snapped up the rights to James Erwin’s idea. Erwin- who has won at Jeopardy twice- had this to say about the serendipitous turn of events:
“Here’s the thing. I was very, very lucky to post what I did at the moment I did. It wasn’t just the idea of coming up with just the right answer – if I’d posted the same text an hour later, everyone would already be bored with the question. They wouldn’t have seen it and it wouldn’t have blown up. So that was definitely a lightning-in-a-bottle situation.”
Below, a snippet of the description for Rome Sweet Rome . Would you go see it on the big screen?
We’d be up against nearly 330,000 men since each legion was comprised of 11,000 men. These men are typically equipped with limb and torso armor made of metal, and for weaponry they carry swords, spears, bows and other stabbing implements. We’d also encounter siege weapons like catapults and crude incendiary weapons.
We’d be made up of about 2000 members, of which about half would be participating in ground attack operations. We can use our four Abrams M1A1 tanks, our artillery and mechanized vehicles (60 Humvees, 16 armored vehicles, etc), but we cannot use our attack air support, only our transport aircraft.
We also have medics with us, modern medical equipment and drugs, and engineers, but we no longer have a magical time-traveling supply line (we did have but the timelords frowned upon it, sadly!) that provides us with all the ammunition, equipment and sustenance we need to survive. We’ll have to succeed with the stuff we brought with us.
So, will we be victorious?
