Cris Silvent and I worked on this movie idea.

An  interpretation of the Old Earth Creationists, slapped with the standard, “what if?”

God is displeased with the Earth and the humans. He’s pleased with us over all, and has destroyed the Earth completely before, and afterwards humans went right back to being the same bickering bunch as before.

He doesn’t want to destroy everything. But He thinks something is amiss. Somewhere in His creation, there is some detail that if only He could change, it would ripple through all of Creation and people would live, if not in peace and harmony, more peace and harmony than He sees now.

So. God destroys the world, changes some small thing, like the current most popular brand of running shoe. The highest mountain peak. Makes all snow flakes identical. Fish tastes like beef. Water becomes purple.

One change each time. And then He recreates the world.

Instantly.

From humanity’s perspective, nothing has happened. The change, whatever it has been, has always been, and so goes unnoticed.

God watches the world run for a while, then changes it again.

One person, for the sake of this post, a man, for whatever reason remembers all of the Earths. All of the changes. After a change, for a short time, his body, his clothes, the things in his pockets, these things stay as they were in the last Earth. He never knows what a food will taste like. He walks down the street, his hair and clothes the latest style, turns a corner, and he discovers that purple and yellow no longer are the height of fashion, while his long scraggly goatee, well, is a long scraggly goatee.

A possible opening sequence:

A woman sits on a bench in Washington D.C.

Cherry blossoms bloom and fall, swirling about her.

The wind lifts her hair off her face. She has brought a book to read.

“Do you like this sour smell?” a man says.

She’s been lost in her book.

“Yes,” she says, “I love it.”

He smiles at her and his teeth are very white.

But otherwise her glance keeps slipping off of him. Back to the park, the trees, the blooms.

“Smell this,” he’s holding out a small brown journal with a single cherry blossom pressed between its pages.

She hesitates and he closes the book.

“Please,” he says, and smiles.

She nods and he says, “Close your eyes.”

She does.

Her own books lies folded in her lap, her index finger marking her place.

She hears the leaves and blossoms move in the trees, and across the park a dog barks and somebody laughs.

The sounds filter through the wind.

And then the slight rustle of paper and a very sweet smell. It’s so sweet to be almost cloying.

She opens her eyes, and there is the faded cherry blossom from his journal, up against her nose.

He closes the book, and then wraps a plastic bag around it.

“So you could smell it?” He says.

Then she can see his eyes. His plain eyes in his plain face. At that moment, the blue of the sky and the blue of his eyes match.

He appears to have two spots on his head that go straight through.

“What kind of cherry is that?” She says.

“That was yesterday’s bloom.”