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Genre: Action-Thriller
Premise (from writer): When every major city across the United States is attacked by an overwhelming paramilitary force, a Special Ops team has less than 24 hours to breach the war zone of New York City in a last chance attempt to retrieve a device that could turn the tide of war, before the US government takes drastic action and initiates the ‘Endwar’ protocol.
Why You Should Read (from writer): Hey everyone! I was recently inspired by a similar type of script that was recently featured on Amateur Friday with it’s use of artwork, so I’ve decided to do a similar thing myself, featuring the images on standalone pages, rather than behind/beside the text (so don’t freak out at the page count, it’s not as long as it might look). I have long had a fascination with war stories, but where this is different is that it takes place on American soil (something only very few films have explored in the past). The script was kind of an experiment in going big, unlike my previous scripts which were much smaller in scope. I want to take this script to the next level, with your notes Carson, and with the notes of the SS community. Thank you to everyone who can help.
Writer: Mark Ducass
Details: 147 pages (although artwork-heavy – so not a true 147)
It’s a good time to be writing a straight action spec. The studios haven’t bought one in awhile, and while a lot of people might think that’s a reason NOT to write action, I see it differently. If they haven’t bought an action script in awhile, it means they’re going to buy one soon. It’s not like action is going out of style.
But action is a funny beast. The writers who are good at it tend not to be as good at the other stuff. The characters, the emotional beats. Even the plotting suffers at the opportunity to inject another gun fight, another explosion, another car chase.
Finding that rare writer who can write both action AND emotion? You locate that guy and you’ve got yourself a professional screenwriter. Does Mark Ducass fit the profile? Jump in my jet, hop over my explosion, engage me in a brutal fist fight, and let’s find out!
Endwar starts out strong. The opening scene shows Air Force One being attacked from both the inside (one of the president’s security agents opens fire) and the outside (one of the accompanying jets lays down fire on the enormous plane). We’ve seen this kind of scene before, but there’s a clean and exciting visual style to Ducass’s writing that elevates this scene above the competition.
Meanwhile, Manhattan is falling apart. Someone’s hacked into the stoplight grid and made all the lights green. As a result, everyone’s crashing into each other.
From there we jump to an aircraft carrier stationed off the Atlantic coast. It’s here where we meet our Delta team. The “haunted” Commander Eisner. Newbie Edward Calvin. Party boy Phillip Vance. Hot as hell Kira Simmons. And immovable object “Bear” Walters. The group has just gotten back from a mission when a nearby ship – an American ship – starts attacking them.
The team realizes that something is very wrong here, and after dealing with the ship, they’re sent into Manhattan to see what’s going on. Unfortunately, things there have gotten worse. Random people are just picking up guns and shooting everyone they see. Like Chicago now but not as bad. Apparently, some sort of sound pattern is being broadcast over the airwaves and turning everyone into deluded soldiers.
Once in New York, Eisner and crew meet up with CIA operative Brandon Weaver and his nerdy tech assistant, Tim Emerson. After the obligatory comparing dick sizes scene (although I have to give Ducass credit for not having one of the female characters utter the line: “You guys done comparing dick sizes yet!?”) Weaver leads the group to a building where this signal appears to be coming from.
They eventually find that the bad guys are a part of the “New World Order,” a group of people who have secretly been in power for centuries but who have finally decided that they don’t like the “secret” part of their ruling approach. So they’re taking shit over public style.
Weaver and the Delts (hey, that sounds like a band name!) eventually discover some giant power sphere in the city that is the key to the NWO taking over the world. They realize if they can destroy that thing, they might have a shot at stopping the takeover. Of course, not everyone wants to help when they learn that the U.S. government has enacted the “Endwar” protocol and plans to blow the island up in three hours. Time, as they say in the military business, IS TICKIN’!
Let me start off by saying the action writing here is kick-ass. But I think it could be better. The best action scene in the movie is the opening. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good cause it pulls us in right away. It’s bad because no other action scene lives up to it, leaving us disappointed when we read everything else.
Why aren’t the other action scenes as good? BECAUSE THE ACTION SITUATIONS AREN’T AS GOOD. What’s great about that opening scene is that the objective – or what’s going on – is interesting. They’re trying to take out the president both inside AND outside the plane. There were a couple of dimensions going on there. And the stakes were sky high (how do stakes get higher than protecting the president? In the sky!?).
As far as the rest of the action scenes (with a few exceptions) they were quite basic. Someone comes to fight them. They fight back. They didn’t have the same depth or variety as that opening scene. And as a result, they felt kind of generic. And generic action is death in an action film.
I mean, this is the highlight of your script, right? Action is what you’re showing off. So if you’re not consistently giving us something different in that arena, what’s the point of even writing an action movie?
Moving on – just because this is an action movie doesn’t mean you can’t have slow intense moments between your characters every once in awhile. Die Hard is considered one of the greatest action films of all time. Yet it has that intense scene between John McClane and his wife early on where they fight about the state of their marriage. It has a scene where the cop who helps John confides in him that he killed a kid while on duty once.
If you don’t give us those emotional moments that connect your characters, we’re not going to see your characters as real people. We’re going to see them as cardboard cut-outs. I know it’s scary to slow an action movie down. But you need to do it sometimes.
Moving on to the plot, I’ll just say this. It’s too generic. This reminded me of the kind of plot I’d see in a video game. Like a bad cut-scene type video game from the early 2000s. And the thing is, I liked how it started. I liked the signal. I liked innocent people attacking our Delta team. But the plot fell apart the moment “NEW WORLD ORDER” was uttered.
The New World Order is such a generic been-there-done-that early 2000s solution to this problem that after it was announced, I couldn’t take anything seriously anymore. If I were you, I’d drop that nonsense and come up with your own mythology for this takeover.
Also, introduce more plot into the story. It seemed like we went WAY TOO LONG between major plot points. It wasn’t until page 72 when we learned who the bad guys were. I just felt like there weren’t enough interesting things happening frequently enough. I’m not saying you should do this but maybe one of their team is secretly a bad guy? Or maybe the signal starts creeping into their ranks. So these guys start turning on each other. Anything to add more VARIETY to the plot. Because that’s Endwar’s biggest problem. It’s too generic. You need to mix it up.
And you can do it. You’re a good writer, Mark. This script may not have been for me, but if a producer asked me what the last thing I read was, I’d say, “You know, the script was a little generic. But the writer had a lot of talent. Especially for writing action.” So go in there, improve on the stuff OTHER than the action, and you’re going to see your scripts get a lot better.
Script link: Endwar
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me (but the writer is definitely someone to watch out for)
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Beware SKIM-DESIRE. Skim-desire is the desire for the reader to start skimming. And it occurs when a script is boring, repetitive, or not making sense. In the case of Endwar, there was too much repetition in the action. Scene after scene was straight action with no variation in pacing or plot development. If you do too much of this, the script takes on a repetitive nature, and the desire to skim is strong. Which is what happened to me. I got hit with action scene number 7 in a row and I just thought, “There isn’t a whole lot happening here other than action, so I’m probably not going to miss much if I start skimming.” To prevent this from happening in your next draft, vary the plotting and tempo of your story.
