The Age of Adeline…and more

We recently watched the 2015 movie, The Age of Adaline, that Trish and I had somehow missed and, strangely enough, it evoked a couple of synchronicities for me.

In the movie, Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) at age 29 has an accident that results in the miraculously condition in which she no longer ages. Over the decades, she never lets anyone get too close to her because of her condition and moves frequently to keep her secret and avoid becoming a human guinea pig.

However, a chance encounter with a charismatic philanthropist named Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman) reawakens Adaline’s long-suppressed passion for life and romance. But it turns out that Adaline also had a serious affair 40 years earlier with Ellis’s father (Harrison Ford). A big coincidence that movie viewers have to swallow, but at that point, well over half of the movie, we were hooked and happy to go along for the ride.

Two particular scenes in the movie caught my attention. Both take place in San Francisco where most of the movie is set. In one, Ellis takes Adaline (who now goes by Jenny) to the San Francisco underground where about 40 ships are buried underneath the Embarcadero and Financial Districts, which used to be the city’s original shoreline. Most of the vessels are remnants of the Gold Rush, left behind by men who arrived in the San Francisco Bay, many from China, and abandoned their ships. The city was built on top of them.

In the other scene, Adaline takes Ellis to an old abandoned warehouse in the city that in the 1930s was a huge movie theater. The owner created an accurate night sky using bioluminescence which becomes visible when all the house lights are out. Now decades later, Adaline, who remembers the theater well, shows Ellis the night sky which is still visible on the domed ceiling.

Both those scenes – the San Francisco underground ships and an indoor planetarium – are also featured in Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, the last novel I wrote for LucasFilm. The novel, which was never published for stupid publishing house reasons, was based on the storyline for the sixth version of the Indiana Jones computer game. I didn’t create either of the scenes, just enhanced them, and they were written about five years before the Adaline movie came out.

So, of course, the last piece of the synchronicity is that Harrison Ford plays a role in the movie. So, for me, seeing those remindful scenes was kind of stunning. Meanwhile, as I’m writing this, the final episode of the audio version of Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings will be coming out in a few days.

One other ships under San Francisco…