Celebrating it’s World Premiere at the London Film Festival 2018, THE PLAN (THAT CAME FROM THE BOTTOM UP) is an epic documentary acknowledging and appreciating the efforts of a core group of individuals who were, during a significant time of upheaval and uncertainty in the UK business and political infrastructure, concocting a contingency plan that would at least try to be beneficial to them and their fellow man.
Directed by Steve Sprung, who helmed THE YEAR OF THE BEAVER), the film focuses on some Lucas Aerospace UK employees who back in 1977 – 78 were threatened with redundancy. Their desire was to use and utilise their natural engineering abilities to pioneer new manufacturing techniques that would enable the very products that were used for military development to be used in alternative ways for preservation of the environment as, they themselves would describe, as “socially useful” and “environmentally sustainable alternatives”.
Inevitably, given the effect of political and upper-level management influence on the workforce of the UK business infrastructure, not the mention the desire to gain power through profit, particularly during those crucial election months, the plan these people put together was ignored at a time when it could have been regarded as a ground-breaking and revolutionary way of creating jobs and ideas, as well as noticing the talents of people who would probably have been found on the scrapheap for the sake of downsizing and greater work efficiency with those who remain on the payroll.
This is an epic (215 minute over two parts) tale and a movie that analyses not just the practicalities of what these people were trying to achieve in both a personal and professional context, but also how the militancy and trade union movements of the period were also threatening to scupper much of the development of business and enterprise that the late Margaret Thatcher began to concur with when she went into power back in 1979.
It’s an impressive film, albeit a little overlong (some passages could probably have been edited down to a more reasonable length) and it does give the feel of a TV three-parter on BBC2 or Channel 4, but it does shine a light on many of the things we take for granted, like how profits in business tend to be more focused towards solving international conflicts in war-torn areas.
Films like Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH certainly looked at the global picture of the effects of climate change, but THE PLAN actually focuses on a microcosm of the world thanks to the attempted efforts of a group of people who merely wanted to find a way of surviving and preserving their own family and work legacy.
It’s a colossal landscape and many interesting ideas are to be found at the heart of its’ beliefs and this certainly will provide food for thought for anybody wanting to explore the world of multi-nationals and corporate business, as well as trace back history in these Brexit-enlightened times.
