Yesterday things got ugly. But you know what the great thing about this industry is? When you pay for a movie and it sucks, you’ve earned the right to complain about it. But today, we’re going to journey to the happier side of Hollywoodland as we celebrate the films that achieved the rare feat of doing more right than wrong. And since these lists are always asterisk-ridden, I should preface this with mine. I haven’t seen The Hateful Eight (going to see it in 70mm when I get a shot). I haven’t seen Spotlight (bored to tears by the script). And I haven’t yet seen Sicario or Joy (both of which I’m dying to see). There’s a chance one or two of these would’ve made the list had I seen them. With that in mind, let’s begin!
10) The Revenant – I will never see this movie again. Actually, I don’t even know if I can call this a movie. Over time, audiences have become hip to the plot beats that dictate a story. When the score dips and the close-up comes, and the plot machinations start getting spouted – we’re very hip to how all that works. And in a way, it’s comforting, that we’re being led along so politely. But there is no moment like that in The Revenant. Every remnant of plot is stripped away to give us the impression that we’re really out here in the middle of nowhere with these men. Conversations are left dangling, characters break into random thoughts, a fucking bear could attack you at any moment. This movie is anti-structure, and it works because Innaritu is such an amazing visionary. My only complaint is that it’s too brutal, too real at times. And after awhile you start to wonder if the experience is worth it. But there’s no doubt that you’ll never forget this film as long as you live. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime movie.
9) Beasts of No Nation – “Beasts” gets my vote for “biggest surprise” of the year. I expected to be bored out of my mind with this one. It looked way more like a history lesson than a piece of entertainment. For those of you who’ve assumed the same, I challenge you to watch the first ten minutes of the film. It’s a wholly original and beautiful little sequence where a group of poor kids use a stripped-down television to put on made-up shows in an attempt to “fool” the local militia into buying the TV. I’ve never fallen in love with characters faster. Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, said of “Beasts,” “This wasn’t a film that was audience tested.” And you can feel that. This is a movie where they trusted the writer and director. It gives you hope that outlets like Netflix will change the way movies are made, maybe ushering in a new killer director class who rebel against Hollywood oversight.
8) Inside Out – Pixar continues to achieve this amazing feat. They manage to build their story around heart, yet never devolve into the cheesy over-the-top after school special version of heart that is so commonly seen from everyone else. And the way they do this is by balancing the heart with darkness. You see it in Toy Story 3 (the toys are being left behind forever). You see it in Up (the first ten minutes sets up a man losing the love of his life) and you see it here in Inside Out… pretty much everywhere. Having to say goodbye to your childhood, to your imaginary friend forever? A young girl battling a mix of anger and depression. Tally that on to the most original Pixar premise to date, and there’s no question why this has become one of the best movies of the year.
7) It Follows – It Follows was this year’s number one victim of post-celebratory internet backlash. I do think It Follows starts to fall apart a bit once you begin dissecting its screenplay. Regardless of that, this is a “Best Movies of the Year” list. Not a “Best Screenplays of the Year” list. And there’s no question that director David Robert Mitchell is a true auteur. His haunting 360 degree snail’s pace pans were the perfect call for a film where anybody could’ve been the next follower. Not to mention, Mitchell could introduce a character using only music and imagery and have you feel like you’d known them your whole life. I read scripts every week that can’t establish a clear character after giving them a six page monologue. This guy is doing it with a girl wearing a cast in a backyard swimming pool. It Follows is a messy film, but it’s messy in all the right ways. A lot like The Revenant, there are no overt plot beats being dictated to the audience. Everything’s seamless and natural. And that’s what makes this film feel unlike anything else you’ve seen in 2015.
6) Steve Jobs – Boy do I get some extreme reactions on this one. One person will tell me they absolutely loved Steve Jobs. The next is threatening to find every print of the movie and dump them in the nearest volcano. Here’s the reality of the situation. Steve Jobs is a very screenwriterly-like script. It’s overtly structured. It’s dialogue heavy. The visuals of this world are non-existent so that all the focus can be on the characters. And that artificiality turned a lot of people off. But to me, I thought Michael Fassbender’s performance was amazing. He really brought Jobs to life. And I love how Sorkin found a way to infuse a personal slant to it all, with Steve’s imperfect relationship with his daughter. I thought that was genius and the key to the movie working. But this will always be one of those movies that Hollywood people go see and the average Joe is confounded by. Which I totally understand. But since I’m in the former category, I loved it.
5) The Martian – Ridley Scott, you’re my hero. This movie was both a cinematic and screenwriting feat. There were so many interesting challenges with the script (how do you keep things urgent with a 4 year timeline?) and Drew Goddard conquered them all. I also loved the rags-to-riches story of the writer, Andy Weir, who wrote the original novel and released it for free! Only to have it gain recognition on quality alone before becoming a national bestseller. How could you not root for this film to do well? The only issue I have with The Martian is one that’s come with time. Matt Damon’s performance wasn’t that memorable. I mean when you compare him to Tom Hanks in Cast Away, it’s like a minnow swimming in the shadow of a shark. And that minnow just got speared by a bearded bad-ass Tom Hanks. But he does a good enough job to sell what needs to be sold, and other than a certain awakening that involves a certain force, this is the must-see “event” movie of the year.
4) The Force Awakens – What??? Carson, you’re not making The Force Awakens number 1? I thought you looooovvvved it. Calm down, calm down. I still love this movie. But I’m not saying it doesn’t have flaws. It’s clear to anyone who watches the movie that the screenplay was written too fast, and we see the results of that. Han Solo’s been looking for his ship for 12 years and just happens to bump into it the second our characters fly it off their planet? And since when does Han Freaking Solo lose the Millennium Falcon?? But even with its flaws, The Force Awakens is, without question, the most enjoyable movie of the year. It’s just so darn fun! Let me give you an idea of how big of an impact this film has had on people. I’m a closet sports geek and I spend a little too much time listening to sports talk radio podcasts. In every one of these podcasts I’ve listened to, these big macho sports dudes have dedicated segments to reviewing Star Wars. Which have nothing to do with sports at all! And they all loved it! In a world with hundreds of channels and thousands of TV shows and billions of websites, there’s no such thing anymore as a movie that captures the entire nation’s attention. And yet The Force Awakens did it. Praise J.J.
3) Fury Road – If Force Awkaens was non-stop joy, Fury Road was non-stop awe. Who even attempts to make a film with a 100 minute car chase that contains 100 cars? George Miller, have you gone insane? Have you been around too many pigs and penguins? To me, Fury Road is the best action movie ever. Usually you can point to one cool original action sequence in a movie. Here, there are a dozen. The amount of creativity and imagination and originality and pushing the limit that went into this film is just staggering. My only issue with it is the lack of chemistry between Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. There was something missing between those two that stripped the movie of that “personal” connection that a film like Steve Jobs was able to find. That kept this from being the number 1 film of the year.
2) Wild Tales – This was the most delightful surprise of the year. It’s so rare for me to go into a movie not knowing anything, even what language it’s in, and that movie turn out to be great. What’s so surprising about this film, which is actually a series of short films, is that each story is so good. Usually with these things, someone has a good idea for a short, and then they try to come up with several other ideas to stretch the thing out to feature-length. I dare you to watch this film and not fall in love with every single short. The first one, which occurs on an airplane where something very strange starts happening to all the passengers, is so weird and so wild, you immediately know you’re about to experience something different. And then you get the road rage short, and the poison short. It’s so good, guys. I’m wanting to talk about this but not spoil it in the process so I’ll just say, go rent this movie. It’s not just a great film, but a great study in how to use suspense and mystery in your screenplays.
1) Room – There was no question after I came out of Room that it would be my favorite film of the year. I have not seen better acting… maybe ever. There is something so real, so honest about this movie, that it isn’t a movie. It’s reality. It’s us in this room with this mother and child. The clincher for me (spoilers) was the moment the child who has never been to the outside world, must escape into the outside world and get help to save himself and his mom. Everything about it, from the decision the mom makes to potentially sacrifice her son – the only thing in this world she loves – to have a chance at escaping. To trying to explain to a 6 year old child who’s never been outdoors before what he will need to do once he’s outdoors in order to save them. To the child only knowing this little room and therefore not even wanting to escape. To the clumsy nerve-wracking edge-of-your-seat escape itself. I mean that escape is better than any action scene I saw in Mission Impossible, Furious 7, James Bond, or Star Wars. It was so raw and so infused with love and depth and complexity, it was everything that movies are supposed to make you feel. If Brie Larson doesn’t win the Oscar for her performance her, fuck movies. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the kid is in the running for an Oscar as well.
Either Tomorrow or Thursday – My Favorite Amateur Scripts of the Year!
I don’t like trashing movies. I really don’t. By and large, Hollywood is a place where people love movies and are doing their best to make good ones. “Nobody sets out to make a piece of shit,” some producer once said. And so you don’t want to trash someone who tried like hell and just couldn’t get it poppin. However, there are instances where people who don’t value the opportunity they’ve been given get to make films, or times where ego dictates a film getting made, or where the almighty dollar becomes more important to the studio than making a good movie. And in those cases, I think it’s okay to call the movie out. Almost every movie on my Worst Of List falls into one of these three categories. So yeah, I’m going to vent a little bit here. But in order to give the post some value, I’ll throw in a few screenwriting lessons along the way. Let’s get started, shall we?
10) Jupiter Ascending – Calling the Wachowskis misguided at this point doesn’t do their status justice. Sure, the two are the original imagine dragons and they possess spoon-bending directing skills. But they’re stuck in “M. Night Shalaman Land,” unable to realize how badly their writing is screwing up their movies. Jupiter Ascending is a classic case of writers trying to cram way too much story into their script. George Lucas had to come to terms with this with the original Star Wars, which was supposed to have most of the stuff that ended up in Empire and Jedi. He finally relented, realizing it was too much story to tell, and focused on a more contained version of the story (by the way, there isn’t a sci-fi adventure script I’ve read that didn’t have too much story in its first few drafts). What that script gained in the process was urgency – becoming one of the greatest chase films of all time. Jupiter Ascending, with its bulky and bloated plotting, was the antithesis of this, a lumbering leviathan, and a lesson to all aspiring screenwriters to KEEP YOUR STORIES LEAN!
9) Knock Knock – Maybe it’s serendipitous that our number nine slot involves the actor who helped bring the Wachowskis into the public spotlight. This one really hurts though. For like two seconds, Keanu Reeves was cool again. John Wick brought the “Whoa” back. Which meant we could look forward to a Keanu who would receive better scripts, get better offers, and reclaim his spot on the A-list. Except Knock Knock. Who’s there? Eli Roth. If there is a working director with a bigger name who is less talented than Eli Roth, I’d like to know who he is. Knock Knock takes a somewhat interesting premise – a married man who lets two stranded trouble-making teens into his home while his family is out of town – then writes half a screenplay out of it. That’s right. Knock Knock runs out of story 60 minutes through. The whole idea with a premise like this is you make it a one-night ordeal – a series of escalating problems that climax before daylight. Yet Roth and his writing crew inexplicably send the girls home the next morning, only to have them show up a day later to, I guess, inflict more pain on Keanu. Except by that point, ALL THE TENSION IS GONE, leaving us confused as to what the point of the story was anymore. The screenwriting tip on this one is pretty obvious. Once all the air is let out of the balloon, you can’t blow it back up again.
8) Man From U.N.C.L.E. – This was the most bizarre movie experience I had all year. I have never seen a movie with more beautiful cinematography and more talented directing come across so dead on the screen. It didn’t help that everybody in the film looked like they’d just smoked a pound of herb! Oh, and that Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer have the collective personality quotient of a monk at a hospice center. Luckily, not many people had to suffer from these performances since THIS MOVIE HAD THE WORST TITLE OF THE DECADE and therefore NO ONE SHOWED UP!!!! Okay, just work with me for a second on this. You’re John Smith living in Minnesota and you want to see a movie this weekend. I tell you the movie, “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is playing. What do you think the chances are of him having any idea what the movie is about from that title? I’ll give you a hint. NEGATIVE 9 BILLION PERCENT! But for shits and giggles, let’s let him watch the trailer. That should make things clearer right? Um… sorta? It seems to be a buddy cop movie set in the 1960s? And one of the guys is Russian (when has a movie that featured a Russian accent in one of the main roles EVER done well in America????)? And they’re trying to stop something? And what do you tell your friend John when he asks why “uncle” has a bunch of periods inserted into it? I have no idea why anybody thought this movie had a Jawa’s chance in the Sarlac Pitt of doing well. Screenwriting lesson: Make sure your title helps sell your movie!
7) Entourage – This one seems like easy pickens. But it’s on the list because it’s bad in a way that none of the other movies are bad. It’s bad because it’s empty. More than all of the other entries, Entourage has the least story to tell. Indeed, when the end credits roll, it seems like we’ve been watching for 30 minutes. Vince (the lead character) directing a movie is supposed to be the “big hook” that makes this Entourage story worthy of feature-status. But Entourage the Movie is an example of why some stories are best kept on the small screen. Entourage has always been about the dialogue and the interaction between its lively group of characters. What it never purported to have was STAKES. You never felt like if the characters failed that anything bad would happen to them. And since movies are one event (as opposed to 100), the stakes need to be giant in them. Since Entourage had never operated in that arena before, it didn’t know what to do when given that mandate. And, oh yeah, since we were talking about Mary Sues the other day, isn’t Vince the biggest Mary Sue in the history of television? No movie felt like it had robbed me of my money more than this one.
6) Mississippi Grind – No film implored me to want to scrape my eyeballs out with rusty sporks in 2015 more than Mississippi Freaking Grind. I consider the hack that got Mississippi Grind made one of the industries biggest issues, and a loophole that bad writer/directors will continue to exploit if financiers don’t stop funding these. Basically, what you do is you write a non-story that centers around two miserable characters. Actors love playing miserable characters! So even though the story sucks balls, they sign on. And once you have known actors, you can get funding. And hence Mississippi Grind gets made. But the ridiculousness doesn’t stop there. Critics typically give these movies high marks because they’re different from Hollywood flicks and there’s at least one good performance. These factors help mask the fact that movies like Mississippi Grind are absolutely awful. Nothing happens in this fucking movie!!!! Two people gamble and talk and wallow in misery. FOR FUCKING TWO HOURS!!!!! There is never a point to any of it. These self-indulgent pretentious exercises in filmmaker masturbation do nothing other than convince a few poor souls to mistakenly lay down $5.99 for an Itunes rental. A mistake, I’m ashamed to admit, I made. I should’ve known better.
5) Fantastic Four – I know. Another gimme. We all heard about what happened. The director stayed in his trailer half the shoot, preferring to snort lines instead of help his actors read them. He’d get kicked off directing duties for a future Star Wars movie as a result (thank God!). They needed to bring in other directors to try and save the film. It was a mess. But movies have been saved from doom before. Maybe Fantastic Four could do the same? I’m afraid not, my friends. My best guess, from watching the film, is that the only stuff director Josh Trank shot before he went crazy was the first act. Because that’s all this movie is! One giant first act. I can’t tell you how many scenes there were of people in labs or on computers “researching things.” In a typical Hollywood blockbuster, those shots would’ve been relegated to a 60 second montage. Here they’re the main souce of plot for an entire hour! At a certain point it became a game of “How many computer generated DNA strands can characters look at in a single film?” Then, when we FINALLY get to the point where they go to the “other dimension” that they’ve spent 90 minutes researching, it’s a terribly composited incredibly ugly half-CGI empty moon-like surface. THIS IS WHAT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS WHOLE TIME???? TO COME HERE??? This movie probably would’ve finished higher on this list if I didn’t feel so bad for all the people who had to work on it.
4) Terminator: Genisys – Here’s some advice for Hollywood studios. Do not, under any circumstances, deliberately spell a word wrong in your sci-fi title. It is a guarantee that your movie will suck. I’m serious. Star Wars was not spelled, “Star Warz.” Or “Starr Worrz.” Is there any person on this planet who didn’t know this movie was going to be terrible as soon as they saw this misspelled title? And yet still, after lowering the bar that much, Terminator: Genisys still somehow managed to disappoint us. As I’ve always said on this site, if you’re going to do time travel, KEEP IT SIMPLE. Time travel is inherently confusing. Trying to mash multiple time-jumping storylines together is a recipe for movie suckage. To me though, it comes down to this director. Here’s a guy who took one of the most iconic scenes in science-fiction history, the naked Terminator walking up to a gang of punks and demanding their clothes, and changed the haircuts of the punks (from blue spiked hair to black normal hair and from a short cut to a green mohawk) because he “felt like it.” Any director who doesn’t understand why you don’t change the hair of the characters in that scene SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO FUCKING DIRECT THE MOVIE. What’s interesting about this film is that it was casting at the exact same time as The Force Awakens, and each production was fighting over the same actors. I can only imagine if JJ Abrams would’ve brought Emilia Clarke into the Star Wars universe. His pitch would’ve been so simple: “Come with me if you want your career to live.”
3) American Ultra – American Ultra puts every rant Max Landis has made on Youtube and Twitter into question. If he thinks this movie is good writing? I don’t think you can trust anything the guy says, whether it be about Mary Sues or lookie loos or piles of doo-doos. I can’t remember the last time a movie has made me hate its main characters so quickly. Our “hero” is a loser who smokes pot all day (why do I get the feeling this “trait” was based off of someone the writer knew?), refuses to do anything, doesn’t try to make his life better, whines all the time, and is generally a miserable worthless human being who has no interest in bettering his life. His girlfriend isn’t much better. She ALSO smokes pot all day, stays in like her boyfriend, gets pissed when her boyfriend doesn’t want to do anything, and is generally a humorless annoying excuse for a human being. THESE ARE OUR HEROES!!!!! What Max Landis doesn’t realize is that nothing he writes after he’s introduced us to these two people matters. It doesn’t matter if our protagonist all of a sudden gains Jason Bourne like powers. BECAUSE WE HATE HIM! A script can recover from a morally questionable character introduction. But it CANNOT RECOVER from a character the audience detests to the very core. But even if Landis managed to get that right, this is still a confused premise that’s only celebrated at 3 in the morning after everyone’s too trashed and too high to know a good idea from a bad one. “Like, he’s a stoner, who’s also, like, Jason Bourne. Wouldn’t that be awesome?” “Yeah dude. Max, you should totally write that.” “I can probably belt out a first draft by breakfast.” “Can I play the dealer?”
2) Aloha – This is the most significant of the movies I’ve put on this list because when I first reviewed this script, which was beyond awful, I got a call from one of the producers of the film chastising me for reviewing an early draft of the script (strangely enough, I kid you not, the final draft of the script added a major villain character named, “Carson”). Yet I knew, just knew, that there was no way this could ever become a good script. And it wasn’t because of the writer. This is Cameron fucking Crowe we’re talking about here, writer of Jerry Maguire and Say Anything! But the premise was so confused, so unsure of itself, that rewriting it was be akin to reorganizing the sheet music on a Nickleback song. Let this be a warning to all of you that if your concept is flawed from the beginning, there’s no way to save it. You can’t rewrite something that never had legs to stand on in the first place. And I know you’re all wondering, “How do you know if your concept is flawed?” There’s no universal answer to that other than GET FEEDBACK. If people look confused when you pitch them your idea? Or if you get a lot of polite observations that the concept is kind of hard to wrap their head around? That’s usually an indicator that your concept doesn’t work. In this case, it was that the concept was unfocused. There was no clear unifying idea, like in, say, Jerry Maguire: “A top sports agent must start back at the bottom after being excised from the biggest sports agency in the world.” What’s the unifying concept in Aloha? “A pilot comes to Hawaii to make sure a satellite launch goes well to stave off a rival Chinese company while rekindling two separate love interests and keeping the local Hawaiian government at bay?” I think some writers assume they can write their way out of a sloppy concept. It never happens.
1) Big Game – We’ll finish this list on a lighter note. I did not hate this movie. But it is unquestionably the worst movie of the year. The plot plays out like a bad 1980s Sylvester Stallone movie. The dialogue is so on-the-nose, you leave each line with a fresh blackhead. The characters are so over-the-top, you wonder how they keep climbing back onto your side. Just the premise alone – a stumbling-over-his-lines Samuel Jackson as president gets teamed with an Inuit boy who uses his hunting skills to help the president evade a Middle Eastern terrorist who doesn’t just want to kill the president, but hunt him down like a wild animal – is so bizarrely conceived you’re wondering if this is one of those MTV Movie Award comedy promos where someone’s decided to use the leftover footage and try and turn it into a feature. I was so fascinated by this awful collection of ideas, I went looking for more info on the film, and only then did the picture become clearer. The director is a Finnish guy from Helsinki who had, up until this point, only directed short films. I began to imagine a backstory for this man, one similar to the family in The Wolfpack, where he’d been chained to his bed-post growing up solely on a diet of cheesy 1980s action movies. What I’m about to say next is going to sound preposterous. But I swear to you I believe it’s true. I think this script was originally written in Finnish and the director simply put it through Google translate to get the script we see now. Like that’s how wonky this movie is. I cannot believe that this movie exists. I just can’t!
Tuesday is Best Movies of 2015!
Wednesday is Best Amateur Scripts of 2015!
So yesterday, a Scriptshadow reader sent me this video of a roller coaster. Why he sent it to me, I’m still not sure. He’s kind of weird. But I’m glad he did. Because as I watched the video, I realized it contained the perfect screenplay lesson.
You see, there’s a reason that rollercoasters don’t start the ride at the top of the track. By making you start at the bottom and go up that hill, that endless clickity-clack-clack-clack hill, they are creating something called anticipation. With each inch closer you get to the top, the more terrified of what’s about to happen you become.
MAJOR FORCE AWAKENS SPOILERS BELOW
Anticipation is a powerful storytelling tool. And it basically works like this. Imply that something big and important is about to happen, then instead of throwing your character into it, make them go up that hill. A perfect example is the death of Han Solo in The Force Awakens. Han Solo doesn’t run into Kylo Ren willy-nilly and boom-bam kill-em dead. Abrams and Kasdan have Han walk across that endless bridge before getting to Kylo. And then they give us a long dialogue exchange before Kylo finally kills him. The scene is pure anticipation.
What you eventually learn after screenwriting for awhile is that it’s never the actual event that impacts you. It’s the anticipation of that event. And so I give this gift to you to play with. Find some time after opening presents to write ONE SCENE that’s centered around anticipation. Feel free to trade scenes with each other in the comments.
Have a wonderful holiday. And try not to get too drunk. Ya freakin alcoholics.
So the hot topic in screenwriting at the moment is that The Force Awakens sucks because its main character (Rey) is a “Mary Sue.” I don’t know if Max Landis is the one who started this argument or he’s just the most prominent person to weigh in on it, but his involvement has brought more attention to the “problem” either way.
Basically, a “Mary Sue” is a female character who is great at everything and experiences no resistance in her journey. Rey can easily use the force. Rey can easily fly a ship. Rey can easily fight a lightsaber battle. The big issue here is that nothing is “earned.”
The roots of this go back to fan fiction, where [mainly] female writers would write themselves into Harry Potter or Twilight storylines and, as a form of wish-fulfillment (along with being bad storytellers) made their characters amazing at everything. Cause, you know, it’s funner that way!
I will say that I never thought about this while watching The Force Awakens. Nor had I ever heard of this term before yesterday. So is this a legitimate concern? Or is it yet another thing the internet masses had to make up as a “legitimate” excuse to hate something?
It’s funny, I look back to one of my favorite scripts, The Equalizer, and you could argue that that protagonist was a “Gary Sue.” He was great at everything. He encountered no resistance. So apparently this isn’t something that bothers me that much.
What may have happened here is that JJ Abrams had such a mandate to write a kick-ass female character, that maybe he went overboard? He made her too kick-ass? Or is there nothing to see here? Internet trolls determined to take something down that’s universally beloved? What’s your take?
I loved The Force Awakens.
Review over.
Bye.
YODA SAYS: “SPOILERS THERE ARE, BELOW.”
No, I’m kidding. To be honest, I expected to be critical of this latest installment of wars that happen in stars. The Hollywood moviemaking system can easily be described as the Hollywood capture-lightning-in-a-bottle system, as that’s essentially what you’re trying to do. Make 300-400 variables all come together and work in your favor over a 1-2 year period. So when Star Wars was not only able to achieve this once, but TWICE (with Empire), it was pretty much guaranteed that the franchise would never accomplish that feat again.
And it didn’t. Jedi was good. But it wasn’t great. And the prequels. Oh… the prequels. You could say that those movies were the universe’s way of balancing shit back out. “You made the best movies in history? Well, we can’t keep allowing THAT to happen. We must restore balance.” And so we got the three worst films in history.
This leads us to The Force Awakens. Am I saying JJ Abrams contacted the spirit of Ben Franklin and somehow managed to bottle lightning one more time? I’ve broken down so many movies and so many scripts at this point, I’m beyond the ability to judge a film purely on the kind of emotional impact required to answer that question. But you know what? The Force Awakens came squiddly-diddly close.
Before I get into the bantha meat of my review, let me reiterate that a screenplay is the sum of its parts. For those of you curmudgeons who will bring back a point I made in Scriptshadow Article #317.b about if there’s a thin character in your script, it means you need to fix it immediately, and that The Force Awakens’ Captain Phasma is a thin character and therefore I must denounce all that is Star Wars past, present, and future and count Force Awakens as one of the worst movies ever because “Youuuuu saaiiid Carson…” I’m not going to do that.
Screenplays are the sum of their parts. Therefore, if you like the majority of those parts, even if the rest of the parts are subpar, guess what? It’s okay to still like that movie. Cause the truth is, there is no perfect screenplay. You can take the original Star Wars to task if you want to. The hero is introduced too late! Oh no. I guess Star Wars sucks now.
Nope. Not how screenplays work.
I’ll tell you how they do work though, and a large majority of it comes back to your main character. If you can nail the main character, nearly every other mistake you make in your screenplay can be overlooked. Because if we love the main character, we’ll want to go anywhere with them. And I loved Rey. This is where JJ really brought the heavy metal. He knew that if he could give us the perfect hero, he could make other mistakes and we’d look past them. So how did he pull this love affair with Rey off? He went old school Scriptshadow, that’s how! Let’s take a look atneverything he did with Rey…
1) Underdog – Rey is an underdog character. She’s a nobody. She’s barely surviving. Everyone looks past her. Audiences FUCKING LOVE UNDERDOGS! When are you all going to learn??? It’s instant likability sauce drip drip dripping on your hero.
2) Deserted by parents – We will always sympathize with someone who’s been left by someone they loved. Rey was fucking ABANDONED BY HER OWN PARENTS. Jesus Christ do we want to see this girl find happiness now.
3) She pushes on despite her misfortunes – Ever meet someone where life has beat them down and they throw up their arms and say, “Well, fuck it. Might as well do drugs and play video games all day?” Not exactly the kind of person you want to root for, right? On the flipside, we LOVE characters who’ve been dealt a terrible hand and yet they KEEP. ON. FIGHTING. This is one of our favorite types of characters and the key to us loving Rey.
4) She’s active – We LOVE active characters. Characters who are out there doing things. Rey spends all day every day scrapping. How can you not admire this?
5) Puts others’ safety/happiness in front of her own. – A droid is about to get kidnapped for parts? Rey is right there to stop it! Girl is being selfless for the well-being of something that’s not even human!
6) Is taken advantage of – We LOVE characters who are taken advantage of because we don’t like it when people are unfairly wronged. We root for the person wronged to rise up and make it right. The scraps dealer Rey sells to every day JUST TO EAT is constantly giving her less and less money for the parts she spends all day scrapping. After every one of these scenes, we root for Rey even more.
Anybody who claims JJ Abrams is a bad screenwriter (and I’ve seen a few dare to do so) don’t realize that this is what he brings to the table. He makes sure his main character is great so that we will care what happens to them. And since in most cases, the main character IS the movie, he knows that if you like his main character you’ll like his movie. This guy doesn’t just depend on mystery boxes, as some internet trolls will have you believe. He’s a well-rounded screenwriter who’s been selling scripts since he was 23 years old. The boy has skills.
Once you have your hero, your ying, you have to create your villain, your yang. And holy shit did I love JJ’s yang. Err, I mean Kylo Ren. Was he as brilliantly conceived as Rey? No. But here’s what Kylo Ren was. HE WAS INTERSTING. As co-writer Lawrence Kasdan put it, there’s no other character like him in the Star Wars universe. And I agree. Villains are probably the hardest characters to write because if you go over the top, they come off as on-the-nose. But if you’re too subtle, they’re not scary enough. You have to strike that balance, and that’s never easy.
What I loved about Kylo most was how UNPREDICTABLE he was. This is an underrated trait of villains that screenwriters should take more advantage of. The guy could go ape-shit in a heartbeat, but he’s also involved in two of the quietest moments in the film. He practically whispers when he takes off his mask needing information from the captured Rey, and also when he’s out talking to Han on the bridge (which might be my favorite scene in the movie). To me, the scariest people are the people for whom you don’t know what’s coming next. Is it compassion, is it rage, is it introspection, anger, curiosity, fear. Kylo Ren displays all of these things, which is why I loved him so much. I mean compare that to say, Darth Maul, who conveyed what? Anger? I think that’s it, right? Actually, looking back on it, I don’t think he conveyed any emotion outside of snarling. Is snaring an emotion?
Next we have the plot itself. One of the complaints coming out of the reviews is that the story moved “too fast.” This actually made me laugh. A story that moves too fast? Oh no! How awful! Let’s see. How many times in history have you complained that a movie moved too fast? Once? Maybe twice? The notoriously common reaction to a movie is that it MOVES TOO SLOW. That’s because it’s really fucking hard to keep things moving in a movie. For Abrams to not have this problem? It’s kind of a miracle.
But it also goes back to the fact that this guy is a great screenwriter and a great storyteller. Keeping a plot moving, as you know from this site, is really hard. But you do it in a few ways. You make sure your lead characters always have goals. You make sure your SECONDARY CHARACTERS always have goals. So if your main characters hit a slower section, we’re still wondering, “Oh shit, well what is Han up to now? He still has to achieve [x]!” You make sure your VILLAIN is always driven by goals. This way, everybody we cut to HAS SOMETHING TO DO RIGHT NOW.
Bad screenwriters either don’t always include goals, or when their characters complete a goal, they don’t replace it with a new one. Certain goals don’t have high stakes, so we don’t care whether they’re completed or not. There may not be any urgency attached to the goal, so it’s not imperative that the goal get taken care of right away, which results in a slowing down of the plot. A good screenwriter is always checking in on all the characters at all times and making sure they have something to do. And that’s the reason this screenplay moves so fast, is because JJ and Kasdan made this a priority.
Would I have liked a little more time with Rey at the beginning? Of course. I think that would’ve made me like her even more (if that’s possible). You can even see in the trailers that a lot was cut from her planet. We get shots (her scrapping) and lines (“Who are you?” “I’m no one.”) that JJ decided to snip to keep the pace going. The thing is, this is every writer and director’s biggest fear – is their story moving too slow. So they’re always cutting, always only including what’s needed and nothing more. JJ might’ve been the first director in ten years who cut 10% more than he needed to. His movie was so good, it could’ve survived an added ten minutes.
Before my praise-lavishing comes to an end, I’m going to explain to you why JJ Abrams now understands Star Wars better than the man who created it. One of the only praises people had for The Phantom Menace was the lightsaber battles, particularly Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon vs. Darth Maul. But you know what those people were really saying? “This movie is so bad, that I need to hang my hat on something, anything, so that I can’t call this Star Wars movie a failure.” And boy were those lightsaber battles a doozy. Right? Right?
Indeed, they were fun to look at if you’re a fight choreography dork who melts at the mention of Iko Uwais and spends 364 days a year prepping for Choreo-Con. But if you were looking for emotion? For meaning in those fights? You found nothing. You found nothing because who the fuck was Darth Maul? As I pointed out above, he had no emotional component whatsoever. He was a snarl. And who was Qui-Gon? A nice Jedi? That’s the emotional complexity George Lucas had devolved to? Nice vs. Snarl? And don’t get me started on the borrible Obi-Wan. The point is that no matter how many flips they did or times they cut each other in half, it left us with no feeling whatsoever.
I’m going to say something pretty controversial here. The lightsaber battles in The Force Awakens… they kinda sucked. Kylo Ren just kept doing the same clumsy overhead strike again and again. Rey had some kinda cool moves. But overall, the lightsaber battles were weak. And you know what? It was still ONE FUCKING THOUSAND TIMES BETTER than that Qui-Gon Obi-Wan Darth Maul battle. Because Kylo was in one of his complex rages. And Rey was struggling with this newfound ability. But most importantly, I LIKED REY and I WAS FASCINATED BY KYLO. Each character was acdtually compelling. And interesting. And had something on the line other than hitting their marks. That meant I ACTUALLY CARED WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN THEM. They could’ve thumb-wrestled and I still would’ve been riveted. And if there’s a lesson to lesson here, it would be that. Focus on the people, not the fights. You do that and the fights will take care of themselves.
Okay, now that I’m finished regurgitating the awesomeness I gorged on, it’s time to point out some of the film’s faults, although I’ll contend these issues were at least partly due to big bad Disney. To come up with something truly original, you need time and LOTS OF DRAFTS. You need to write through the obvious to get to the unobvious. And Disney didn’t give JJ any time. So yeah, I’m still defending JJ.
The first gripe is that, yes, the plot feels similar to the original Star Wars. Lone person on desert planet, droids with important plans, giant battle stations. Here’s the thing though. It didn’t feel SO similar that it ruined my enjoyment of the film. The things that anchored the story (a female protag, a storm trooper gone rogue, a search for Skywalker) were different enough that while I felt the parallels to A New Hope, I never felt like it was a beat for beat copy.
But here’s where I did have a problem. The one thing Lucas brings to the table that JJ doesn’t is imagination. JJ basically used pieces that were already there. Lucas CREATED ALL THOSE PIECES. I read an interview with Lucas a long time ago and in it he was asked how he came up with Jabba the Hut or some other weird character. And he said, “Honestly, some of this stuff is just whimsy. I like the thought of it.”
And JJ’s not like that. He’s a storyteller and when you tell a lot of stories, it gets drilled into your head that everything needs to make sense. Everything needs to be logical. The reason Star Wars is what it is is because it isn’t always logical. It doesn’t make logical sense to have a giant slug who couldn’t escape a determined alien amputee be the most feared gangster in the galaxy.
And the thing that made Lucas Lucas is that he didn’t care. He just liked the idea of a giant slug gangster. JJ doesn’t have that talent. He’s scared to go into the depths of his imagination and come up with something truly weird because those are the things that are the least easy to calculate. JJ knows that having someone take advantage of Rey early on will result in a calculable emotional reaction from the audience. But he doesn’t know what will happen if he makes Finn a no-headed Quaseldorf from the planet Yim-Yam. So he makes him a stormtrooper instead.
Speaking of Finn, he didn’t work AT ALL. And it didn’t help that John Boyega’s acting amounted to, “Holy shit, I’m in Star Wars! Holy shit, I’m in Star Wars!” But here’s why Finn doesn’t work. JJ and Kasdan had the right idea. You take a bad guy and you place him inside the gang of good guys. It’s good old fashioned dramatic irony. We know Finn is bad, but nobody else does. Oh no, what’s going to happen!?
Well what happens is that JJ and Kasdan never fully commit to the conceit. Yes, we have someone from the First Order inside the Resistance. BUT WHAT ARE THE STAKES???? If they find out Finn is a stormtrooper, what’s going to happen to him? I’ll tell you what. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Not only is Finn fully committed to the Resistance now and therefore not a threat, JJ has so little confidence in the storyline that he actually starts letting everybody know Finn’s secret! BB-8 knows. Han Solo knows (“Sooner or later, women find out the truth.”). If this secret matters at all, how come it’s freely shared and no one seems bothered by it?
I think what happened was that they realized at a certain point, “Uh, this isn’t working. There are no stakes if he’s figured out. What next?” And so they kind of transferred the stakes over to Rey. If Rey found out Finn was part of the First Order, she wouldn’t like him anymore. So ruining a potential romance is now the consequence of Finn’s big secret. Except JJ and Kasdan never make it clear if there is a romance, so again, the stakes aren’t very high.
Yesterday, I highlighted a movie to watch for this specific purpose. In it, Lawrence Fishburne plays a cop who must go undercover into a gang of drug dealers in order to take them down. THAT’S how you do Finn’s storyline right. We knew that if at ANY MINUTE, they figured out Fishburne was a cop, HE WAS DEAD. So there was tension in every moment and the writers could play with that. They could build scenes around the fact that Fishburne’s identity was in jeopardy (make him have to kill someone to prove his loyalty). We never sensed anything close to that with Finn.
It’s a little upsetting that this was the one big deviation in plot from Star Wars and JJ got it wrong. It shows that without that blueprint, he was flying blind. I have no doubt he would’ve figured it out with more drafts but they just didn’t give him the time. Moving forward, Finn is my one big worry for the franchise. He doesn’t seem to fit. He doesn’t seem to have an intriguing arc, unless he’s secretly a jedi, which wouldn’t make sense. This half-realized idea would’ve been best left at the alter, replaced with the incredibly charismatic and underused Poe Dameron. Who knows? Maybe Rian Johnson will figure something out with him.
NERDY DISCUSSION POINTS 3000!
It’s time to throw screenwriting theory out the window and go full nerd. When you go full nerd, you do not need facts. Just a strong opinion and a lot of pent-up self-hatred, and to that end, I will address some nerdy discussion points of Force Awakens.
How can Rey use the force if she’s never trained?
I think it goes back to what I said earlier. If you can make us believe in a character, you can make us believe in anything they do. I liked Rey so much I believed she had a strong sense of the force. But here’s where it gets interesting. A part of me thinks that Luke was channeling the force THROUGH REY. That’s why she seemed half-confused whenever she was using it. The big clue to this is when she’s in the chair and knows to tell the stormtrooper to let her go. That’s a specific callback to Luke watching Obi-Wan say the same thing in the original Star Wars. I think Luke has gotten so powerful – more powerful than any jedi in the history of the galaxy – that he’s learned how to speak and control people throughout the galaxy, specifically those who also have the force and who, in this case, might be his daughter.
Then there’s Snoke. Who is Snoke? Why is he 80 feet tall and has a weird crevice in his head? Snoke is derided in the reviews as one of the weaker additions to the franchise and I’d agree with that. FOR NOW. Because I think there’s more going on here. The shots of him in the cave with the projection seem to be a specific reference to The Wizard of Oz. This might be Snoke’s projection, but it very well might not be anything like who the real Snoke is. The real Snoke could look completely different. I’m guessing even a tiny creature, a callback to Yoda. Might we finally get the true GOOD phantom menace story we were all hoping for? Either way, there’s more to Snoke than meets the eye.
You know what? I realize that if left to my own devices, this review could go on for ages and you know what? I want to go see The Force Awakens again. So I’ll stop here. And just say, yeah, this movie was freaking awesome. Big props to JJ and Kasdan for doing an amazing job, especially in the amount of time they had!
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[xx] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You should be able to go to any point in your screenplay, look at your relevant characters in that moment, and see that they’re trying to achieve something (a goal) RIGHT NOW. If they’re not trying to achieve anything, rewrite it so they are. Because if too many of your characters are inactive at the same time, your script will drag. That’s when you’ll hear readers say things like, “Nothing seemed to be happening.” The Force Awakens is one of the best examples this decade of a movie where everyone in the story has something to do whenever we cut to them. It’s a great study companion to see how to keep a plot moving.
