Delilah Paz: They call you a universal soldier, Snake. What does that even mean? A man built for every war?
Solid Snake: That’s the lie they sell. A universal soldier isn’t built for war—he’s built to end it.
Delilah: You carry a gun.
Solid Snake: I also carry bandages. And prayers. Depends on what the moment demands.
Delilah: So you’re a soldier… and a medic?
Solid Snake: A real one has to be. You can’t break the world all day and not know how to put a body back together at night. Sometimes the enemy is bleeding. Sometimes it’s your own soul.
Delilah: And the chaplain part?
Solid Snake: When people are dying, rank disappears. Flags disappear. All that’s left is fear—and the need for meaning. Someone has to stand there and say, You’re not alone. You’re seen. You’re forgiven.
Delilah: You talk like a man of God.
Solid Snake: I talk like a man who’s asked God too many questions in the dark. A universal soldier isn’t holy because he’s pure— he’s holy because he stays human when the world is trying to turn him into a machine.
Delilah: So what are you really fighting?
Solid Snake: The idea that a man is only what he’s ordered to be. I fight so that when the gun goes silent, someone is still alive to heal, to listen, to pray.
Delilah: You’re not what they think you are, Snake.
Solid Snake: That’s the point. If I were only a weapon, I’d already be obsolete.
Title: Romeo Dallaire’s Speech at the East Vancouver Legion – “Who Do We Save?”
Scene: The East Vancouver Legion is filled with aging veterans, students, activists, and a few reporters. General Romeo Dallaire steps up to the modest podium under the glow of dim fluorescent lights. There’s a solemn silence as he adjusts his glasses and unfolds a few crumpled pages from his jacket. The Canadian flag hangs behind him. A mural of fallen soldiers overlooks the gathering.
Romeo Dallaire:
“I want to thank the East Vancouver Legion for allowing me to speak today—not just as a general, or a senator, or a witness to history—but as a broken man who still carries the ghosts of ten thousand children in my head.”
He pauses, letting the silence settle.
“The essay I am about to read is titled: ‘Who Do We Save? A Reflection on the Colour of Peacekeeping.’ It is about Rwanda. It is about shame. And it is about the lie of ‘Never Again.’”
Essay Reading (by Romeo Dallaire):
“In 1994, I was the Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda—UNAMIR. I was sent to keep the peace. But there was no peace to keep. Only a tide of blood to stand against, and the cold machinery of bureaucracy grinding slow while a genocide consumed 800,000 souls.
Let me be clear: the failure in Rwanda was not just logistical. It was moral. I sent cables. I made calls. I begged. I offered warnings. And I was told to do nothing.
And why?
Because the children being slaughtered were not white.
Because the women being raped and mutilated were not European.
Because the machetes did not threaten a pipeline or an embassy or a shareholder’s investment.”
Dallaire’s voice catches. He steadies himself with a sip of water.
“I was ordered to stand down. I watched as my peacekeepers—mostly white soldiers from Western nations—were told by their governments that Rwanda was not worth the risk. That black lives in Central Africa were not worth Canadian or Belgian or French casualties.
Had those children been blonde-haired and blue-eyed, the cavalry would have come.
But instead, our rules of engagement said: observe, report, but do not intervene.
So we observed a genocide.
We watched babies thrown into latrines. We documented the systematic extermination of Tutsis in schools and churches.
And we did nothing—because doing something would have required us to admit that black African children matter as much as white European ones.
And the UN, at that time, could not do that.
That is the simple, racist truth at the heart of the Rwandan genocide.”
Dallaire sets the essay down and looks out over the crowd.
“We in Canada like to think of ourselves as peacekeepers. But peacekeeping is not a photo-op. It is not blue helmets posing with smiling orphans for CBC cameras.
Real peacekeeping means risk. It means sacrifice. And it means believing that all human life has equal value—not just when it’s convenient, not just when it’s close to home, but everywhere.
And until we have peacekeepers willing to die to save black children the same way we’d deploy battalions to save Europeans, we are not peacekeepers.
We are bystanders.
And history has enough of those already.”
The room is silent. A veteran in the back wipes his eyes. A young woman with an East Van punk jacket stands and starts clapping. Slowly, others join.
TITLE: “In Flanders Fields” A film by Terrence Malick or Angelina Jolie Written by JCJ
GENRE:
Historical Drama / War Poetry / Psychedelic Realism
LOGLINE:
In the blood-soaked trenches of World War I, Canadian doctor and poet John McCrae fights to save the lives of shattered soldiers. As the dead rise in memory and verse, and poppies bloom from cratered soil, McCrae is torn between medical duty, poetic prophecy, and the haunting truth that the very flower that honors the fallen is also turned into heroin — a drug that numbs pain but erases souls.
TREATMENT:
ACT I – THE PHYSICIAN-POET
1915, Ypres Salient, Belgium. Major John McCrae, a Canadian military doctor, sits in a dugout scribbling the first lines of his immortal poem. His hands are bloodied from surgery. He smokes in silence. Explosions echo in the distance.
The poppy fields shimmer under firelight — red, delicate, eternal. A wounded soldier stares at them through morphine-laced eyes and whispers, “So beautiful… even in hell.”
McCrae’s hospital tent becomes a revolving door of mutilation. As a man of science and spirit, he balances logic with grief. Each lost life becomes a ghost that whispers in his ear.
ACT II – THE FLOWER AND THE FLESH
Through a young orderly named Tommy, McCrae learns how the soldiers have begun to call morphine “poppy wine.” He watches as the wounded beg for more — not to die, but to float away.
Voiceover from McCrae’s journal:
“They say the poppy brings peace. But what peace is it that steals a man’s mind while leaving his body behind?”
A subplot follows a young French nurse, Marguerite, who introduces opium tea to the critically wounded, saving some from agony but sending others into spirals of hallucination. In one dreamlike sequence, a dying soldier walks through a field of poppies and meets the spirit of war — a figure made of smoke and brass, who offers him eternal sleep.
ACT III – FIELDS OF FORGETTING
McCrae writes “In Flanders Fields” after the death of his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer. He doesn’t mean it to be political. But the poem spreads like wildfire. Politicians use it to recruit new soldiers. The poppy becomes a symbol — of memory, of nationalism, of grief.
McCrae is conflicted. In his quiet moments, he studies the chemical transformation of the poppy — from flower, to latex, to morphine, to heroin. He whispers to Marguerite:
“We use it to soothe pain… but what if it becomes a way to forget the truth?”
In a haunting montage, addicts in future decades inject heroin. The flower that once honored the fallen now fuels forgotten wars — Vietnam, Afghanistan, the ghettos of America.
ACT IV – LEGACY
McCrae dies of pneumonia in 1918. But his words live on.
The final scene shows a young girl in modern-day Kabul, standing in a poppy field, reciting “In Flanders Fields.” The camera pulls back to reveal warplanes overhead.
A final voiceover:
“If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow…”
