More Movies to Base Oneshots On

I did a similar list a few years back, so here’s some more.

Lebanon

Lebanon tells the story of an Israeli tank and some paratoopers on a mission to clear out a Lebanese village. However, the tank loses its ability to move and the crew inside are quite inexperienced, so the situation turns into a nightmare.

The cramped quarters aren’t really inducive of the dynamic style of play most groups employ, but this could be a good alternative to that. When you can’t go anywhere, you just have to rely on those around you and you have to come to terms with whatevers fears you have in the situation. It would be hard to set the pace in the beginning, but if you can get there, it could be quite a unique roleplaying experience.

16 Blocks

A police officer is tasked with moving a witness 16 blocks from the police station to the courthouse. The problem is, the case is about police corruption, so our hero needs to find his way through a bunch of his colleagues.

Not a particularly good movie, but the premise is something we can probably make work. Of course, most groups would have more than one escort and assuming someone is playing the witness, maybe at least three officers. The reason for this is that you could than have one of them be feeding information to the other side, or at least be a part of the guilty faction within the police, and let them handle it themselves.

At least this should be bringing up a lot of roleplaying opportunities. Is it right to shoot at your fellow officers? Action movie logic would dictate ‘yes’, but if you set up the situation differently, its not that obvious. Or at least shouldn’t be.

Sound of Noise

Kind of a small Swedish movie. I was looking for this for years before I found a French release. Gladly I know some Swedish and a tiny bit of French, so I made through it okay. Which is nice, because its an excellent movie (although I tend to like the movies I see in languages I don’t fully understand, so either I really, really want to see them, or I manage to fill the parts I don’t understand with something good in my mind).

There’s a group of six anarchist musicians (drummers, to be more precise), who come together to perform a piece of music they call “Music for One City and Six Drummers” (a continuation of “Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers”, a short movie this is based on). They aren’t really very interested in an audience, since the first part is played in a hospital operating room with an audience of one unconscious man. They use quite random objects to make their music, but there’s a certain degree of radicalism, especially when they use a shredder and money to make music.

This would be a quite different kind of oneshot, because this would be more about planning the performances than anything else. Could be a fun, different take from the usual action-based scenarios, although you could get some action here as well. Maybe not gunplay, but chases, infiltration and so forth are nice options.

Arrival

A pretty new movie. Actually released late last year, so you might still be able to catch this in a theater.

A bunch of strange constructs are hovering just above the earth in a number of different locations around the world. Armies in different countries have different approaches to the situation, but we get to see the US Army, who have brought in a linguist to figure out how to communicate with the aliens. She establishes a good rapport with them and eventually figures out their language completely. The ending isn’t quite on par with the story, but that’s the way it often is.

So, there’s two distinct problems here. First one is of course the aliens. The second one is dealing with the people in the other countries working on the same problem, but with different approaches. Well, maybe dealing with the military is in fact a third problem.

This might require quite a bit more preparation than I usually like to have, but you could also just go with the ideas the players have. You know, “yes, but” or “yes, and”.

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