Das Arche Noah Prinzip

Infobox Film
name = Das Arche Noah Prinzip


image_size =
caption =
director = Roland Emmerich
producer = Wolfgang Längsfeld
Hans Weth
Peter Zenk
Executive producer
Klaus Dittrich
Ulrich Limmer
Gabriele Walther
writer = Roland Emmerich
narrator =
starring = Richy Müller
Franz Buchrieser
music = Hubert Bartholomae
cinematography = Egon Werdin
editing = Tomy Wigand
distributor = Filmverlag der Autoren
released = February 22 1984
runtime = 100 min
country =
language = German
budget = DEM 1,200,000 (estimated)
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website =
amg_id =
imdb_id = 0086911

"Das Arche Noah Prinzip" (aka "The Noah's Ark Principle") is a 1984 German science fiction film written and directed by Roland Emmerich as his thesis at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (HFF).

While his fellow students typically raised and spent 20,000 Deutsche Mark for their final work, Emmerich managed to collect a budget of 1,200,000 DM (around 600.000 USD), and made the film look even more expensive.

This film, shot in color with mono sound, received a rating of 12 in West Germany, and was sold to 20 countries. It was submitted to the 1984 Berlin International Film Festival and received some acclaim for technical skill and special effects, but won no prizes.

Plot Summary

The year is 1997, and World Peace seems to have come, with most classic weapons of mass destruction having been abandoned. However, orbiting the Earth there is the European/American space station FLORIDA ARKLAB, capable of controlling the weather at any location on the planet underneath. A civil project by nature, it might be abused as an offensive weapon, since it could deliver devastation to any potential adversary simply by creating natural disasters such as storms and floods. No wonder the space station soon becomes the central point in rising political tensions between East and West, next stop World War 3 (as indicated by the tagline "The end of our future has already begun"). We follow the main protagonist Billy Hayes, an astronaut aboard the station, as he wades through a plot of secrecy and sabotage trying to tell friend from foe in the process.