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Genre: Contained Sci-fi Thriller
Premise: (from writers) When an elite team of Allied forces assault a top secret research facility, they become trapped underground with a sadistic Nazi Colonel and a mysterious Machine which allows him to switch bodies, turning the team against one another as they desperately try to survive.
Why you should read: (from writers) Echovault is a contained thriller with a strong hook, interesting characters ,and edge of your seat twists: the perfect low budget script to get two blokes from Australia noticed. We are a writing partnership from downunder and believe being featured on Scriptshadow would be great exposure, as well as a means to get extra notes from the Scriptshadow community. Please don’t hold back; we’ve been bred tough, boxing kangaroos and wrestling crocodiles, so go ahead and throw us to the Scriptshadow wolves.
Writers: Andrew Macdonald and Jacques Joubert
Details: 96 pages
Okay, enough about who made it in Hollywood and who didn’t make it in Hollywood and if you’ll make it and why we make it. What it comes down to is writing scripts. You gotta write something. So it’s time to review one of those somethings. Maybe today we’ll see someone make it. Which is a darn good reminder. People can still make it right here on Scriptshadow! If you write something awesome, it will be recognized and people will seek you out. But you gotta bring it. Let’s see if today’s writers did that.
Echovault is about a group of American soldiers in Germany during World War 2. They’ve been given the task to storm a secret vault in the dead of winter and secure some nasty German fellow named “Schneider.”
Our hero is 30 year old Corporol “Fish” Fisher. He’s a man’s man who just wants to follow orders and get the job done. He’s joined by a group of men that include Captain “Jonesy,” Lieutenant Colonel Somerset, Private Mahler, Corporol “Jackpot” Washington, Corporol Webster, and a few others.
So these guys storm this vault that juts deep into the ground, only to find out that their target, Schneider, is a scientist, and this is his testing lab. After a lot of confusion, Schneider (who was supposed to be taken alive) is shot and killed.
Or was he??
It turns out Schneider’s machine switches the consciousness of two human beings! And that Corporal Webster is now Schneider. Of course, nobody knows this yet. They’re still trying to figure out what the hell’s going on.
Schneider uses his cover to call in reinforcements, who are a few hours away. In the meantime, everyone’s trying to figure out how to get out of this vault, which has been mysteriously locked from the inside.
Eventually, everyone gets caught in the lab area again, the machine is turned on, and Schneider uses another jump to get into someone else’s body. By this time, everyone’s figured out what’s going on. The problem is, no one’s sure which body Schneider just jumped into. Which means any one of them could be the bad guy. Combine that with the fact that the calvary’s coming and they can’t get out of here, and we have ourselves a dandy of a situation.
There’s definitely something to Echovault. The last two days we’ve talked about the importance of writing marketable concepts, and we’ve got that here. We have a contained thriller set in World War 2 with Nazis and secret experiments involved. Those are a lot of marketable elements.
They’ve also added a clever mystery (who’s Schneider?), a ticking time bomb (the Nazis are coming), and some high stakes (obviously, there’s death at every corner. But also, if Schneider gets out of here with his experiment, he could do a lot of damage).
But MAN, there are so many little things that trip Echovault up. The good news is, this is an idea worth pursuing. The writers should definitely keep at it and try to make it work. Because my gut tells me there’s a movie here. But the writers need to pay a lot more attention to the details.
First off, I wasn’t thrilled by the idea that the Nazi scientist they’re trying to get just happens to be working on an experiment that would help him get out of this exact predicament. I found that to be a little convenient. I eventually forgot about it, but it was always in the back of my head. I don’t know if anybody else saw this as a problem. If so, they might want to fix it. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a way to do this.
Second, I think the story moves a little slow. I only became interested once we didn’t know which one of them was Schneider. That’s when the script really picked up. Whenever you write, you come up with a few good things in that first draft. Your job in the second draft, then, is to move all those good things up in the timeline and try to come up with MORE good things. The third draft, do the same. The fourth draft, the same. Until your script is packed with good things from beginning to end! That’s what we need here. We need to push up the moment where we’re not sure which one’s Schneider. Because before that, I was kinda bored.
The BIG fix that needs to be made, though, is the characters. They’re all the freaking same!!! In this kind of script (with lots of people to keep track of in a small space), you have to differentiate the characters somehow. All these guys pretty much acted and sounded and did the same things with only slight variations. The extent of differentiating them came in the description, when someone was labeled as “big” or “black.” You think that anorexic description is going to help us remember who’s who five pages from now? Twenty pages from now?
But even if you take out the “helping the reader” aspect, you just want your characters to feel different. Give a character a certain phrase he keeps using (“You got it champ”). Make one character faux tough, compensating for the fact that he’s scared as shit. Have an over-educated guy speak intelligently. Have one guy who never says more than a few words. And then use the character’s actions to further differentiate them from each other. Have one character be overly fearful. Have another be too brave. Because outside of Fish, I rarely knew who was who until the ¾ mark of the script.
Character differentiation is one of the easiest ways to spot the pros over the amateurs. So if you can master this, you’re in good shape. But it’s REALLY important in scripts like these, where you have a lot of characters thrown at the reader quickly. It’s so easy for the reader to forget who’s who. It’s your job to make sure that doesn’t happen.
As for the rest of the script, it was a mixed bag. It still feels rough to me. I think Anna is a throwaway character that you’re not committing to. You either have to commit to a character like that or not. You can’t straddle the line. And you’re clearly straddling the line. I think the soldiers would’ve figured out A LOT EARLIER that they could sit everyone down and play the memory game in order to sniff out Schneider. I was thinking that the whole time, so I didn’t believe it took them forever to figure it out as well. I didn’t know how Schneider all of a sudden became a perfect naturally speaking American once he was in someone else’s body. Did he just inherit the person’s speech patterns? I’m not sure that makes sense.
These are those annoying things we writers HATE trying to figure out but we HAVE to figure them out or else the screenplay feels lazy. And that’s where the script lies right now. So unfortunately, while I think there’s potential here, it isn’t at “worth the read” quality quite yet.
Script link: Echovault
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In order to help differentiate your characters, think (maybe even write down) about ALL your friends and the people you know. Write down what makes each of them sound different from one another. Some speak fast. Some slow. Some are more nurturing. Some are less caring. Some keep the topic of conversation on themselves. Some like to ask other people about themselves. Some say “um” a lot. Some are more eloquent. The list of variables is endless. Take what you learn there and apply it to your characters so they, too, sound like their own people.
