Are you confused? Would you like to be? You are not prepared… for Paralleled!
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Genre: Sci-fi/Thriller
Premise: (from writer) An emotionally unstable neurosurgeon undergoes an experiment with parallel realities and fights different versions of himself to find a dimension where the wife he put in a coma is still healthy.
About: This script won the Amateur Offerings Weekend a couple of weeks ago. Submit your script (details up top) to get on the list. Best of the 5 picked that week will get a review. So make sure to submit a snazzy well-crafted logline and a great query letter!
Writer: Denis Nielsen
Details: 103 pages
Downey Jr. for Angus??
I’m going to give Denis this. He put a LOT of effort into this. This wasn’t something he scraped together over the weekend. This is a mind-bending plot-twisting psychological thriller if there ever was one. But after finishing Paralleled, I think Denis might be his own worst enemy (that’s an inside joke between me and whoever read this script). There are so many moving parts to this plot, it’s impossible to grab onto them all, leaving us scrambling just to keep up. Then again, I would’ve said the same thing about Donnie Darko. So I’m still not sure if I’d call this a big mess or pure genius. And I have a feeling Denis prefers it that way.
(I’d like to ask the writer, Denis, to please excuse any mistakes in the plot summary. It was hard keeping up!)
Dr. Angus Williams, 48 years young, is working on a very special scientific project. In it, he’s attempting to bring doppelgangers from parallel universes over to our current universe. It’s kind of like cloning, except your clone isn’t created on the spot. He’s been living this entire life, just like you, in another reality, but making different choices from you, and therefore is a different person.
So one day he puts his wife and co-worker, Madeleine, into the machine, only to have her emerge in full freak-out mode. Her body starts breaking down and the lab team has to put her in a medically induced coma. Once this happens, Angus starts constructing a plan to find ANOTHER Madeleine in one of these other alternate realities so he can be with her (why he’s leaving this poor Current Reality Madeleine to lie in a coma, I’m not sure).
So he starts ushering in versions of himself, hoping that they’ll have a Madeleine in their lives he can go and be with. (This confused me as well. What was his plan if they did have a Madeleine? Was he just going to ask them politely if he could steal their wife?) Eventually he finds one in Number 4 (Angus Number 4), who says Madeleine 4 is doing well and fine in his reality.
So Angus jumps to that reality, only to find out that he (or Number 4) is being kept in a nearby barn by his wife. For some reason Number 4 has jumped with him (it’s not clear to me why Angus couldn’t simply jump himself) and because he wants this Madeleine for himself, he kills Number 4 and buries him. When Madeleine comes along to retrieve him from the barn, he learns that he’s on an extended time-out from the family because his Number 4 version nearly beat their boss to death.
Why would he do such a thing? Because he found out that Madeleine had slept with him. But this turns out to be the least of his worries. It turns out Number 2 (back in the Angus’ original world) is conspiring to do something terrible to him. What would that be? To be honest, that’s where I lost track of the story. It just became too complicated, which is where our analysis begins.
You know, I admire Denis’s ambition. He clearly wasn’t interested in writing some run-of-the-mill spec. He set out to challenge the audience. The problem is, it just got too complicated. And I tried. I mean I was re-reading scenes constantly (which I never do) to make sure I kept up. But at a certain point, I couldn’t do it anymore. We have four versions of our main character, we have two versions of our boss character, we have two versions of the wife character, and we have two versions of our assistant character (who I didn’t mention in the synopsis). We have separate mysteries in two timelines, some that intersect, some that don’t. And we have multiple double-crosses in the final act.
Now Denis was challenging us from the very first page (he had voice overs, off-screen talking from characters we didn’t know yet, AND overlaps – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that happen all on the same page before) but I survived that. However, I can tell you exactly where I gave up on trying to figure out what was going on. It was at this line, around page 70-something.
“This is another REPLAY of Madeleine’s trauma surgery, administered by Number 2 – But we don’t know that yet, because at this point he looks exactly like our main Angus.”
Now Denis might be arguing that that’s exactly what he set out to do. He’s trying to twist your mind. And maybe he’s right. But I think he went one Angus too many, one mystery too many, one double-cross too many. Just because you’re trying to bend people’s minds doesn’t mean you can throw the kitchen sink at them. Part of making an audience think is knowing when to show restraint. And I never saw that here. Problems were solved with exorbitant twists rather than clever writing. It’s not that all of these twists and turns couldn’t have worked. But the more false realities you place in your script, the more skill it requires to inject those in a way the audience can follow them. And even though Denis was up to the task of trying (I could FEEL the effort on the page), I just think he wrote himself into a place he couldn’t write himself out of.
The thing you gotta remember is that if the audience can’t follow your plot, it doesn’t matter what you write. They’ve already mentally checked out. And what you ALSO have to remember is that the more confusing your plot is, the more mental focus the reader has to give to straightening all that out. Because we’re focusing on all the confusing stuff, we miss the other more obvious plot points. I’ve had this happen every once in awhile, where I’ll miss a plot point and the writer will be like, “What are you talking about! It was right there on page 64!” And I’ll try to explain to them, “Well yeah, but at that time I was trying to figure out why the 7th doppelganger of the Grandfather’s ghost’s son had his daughter travel to Klongor to find the Mogshire Suit.” So there’s this compound effect. It’s not just the complex plot the reader isn’t getting, it becomes the simple stuff too.
Take Madeleine going into a coma, for instance. Why did she go into a coma? I’m still confused about that. And why is our main character searching other realities for a new Madeleine when he has another one? Sure, she’s in a coma. But you’re a doctor. It seems like it’d be easier to try to get her out of a coma than go kill someone in another reality that’s completely foreign to you and take their place. It also makes your hero look bad. He’s ditching Vegetable Wife to go find a hotter more mobile version. These questions may be answered in the script somewhere, but there was so much going on, they apparently flew right past me.
Really intricate mind-fuck scripts require a lot of practice to write. It’s not just about logistically mapping everything out. It’s about writing a lot of scripts and learning when readers understand the stuff you want them to understand and when they miss it. It takes a writer a couple of tries, for example, to learn that when a main character SAYS he has a phobia of spiders, that a reader doesn’t always remember that. It’s only when the writer SHOWS the main character being attacked by spiders and freaking out, that we understand he doesn’t like spiders. There are a lot of little things like that that you only learn through trial, error, and feedback.
In Denis’s defense, movies like this have been made before. Primer. Donnie Darko. The Jacket. There is an audience out there for them. And an actor would LOVE to play the part of Angus, obviously (actors love to play multiple characters to display their range). But I just think there’s too much going on here. I’d recommend to Denis that he seriously dial the script back. Simplify this plot. You already have so much going on with the multiple Angus’s. The rest of the plot shouldn’t be so complicated. Good luck!
Script link: Paralleled
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Too-far-in-your-own-head” script. Sometimes we writers get a little too far into our own heads when we write. We write multiple plotlines, multiple twists, multiple mysteries, and we just keep piling it on because, why not, we’re in our own little world. But when the reader gets the script, he hasn’t been through the 15 drafts you wrote. He wasn’t there when you created the first clone of your character, the second, the third. He just doesn’t have all that information in his mind that you do, so he loses track quickly. As a writer, it’s your job to step out of your writer’s hat occasionally and into the reader’s. You have to ask, “Does this make sense to someone who’s reading this for the first time?” If you don’t do that, you’ll be stuck too far in your own head, and your script will remain a mystery to the world forever.
