Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: When a violent, North Pacific storm traps two turbine techs on an offshore windmill, they must weather the storm overnight in order to survive.
Why You Should Read: Disaster films are tried-and-true blockbusters which always allure an international crowd. Now, let’s contain the threats of that disaster around a monstrous, yet claustrophobic structure that’s never been featured in a studio film. This location is susceptible to fires, explosions, destruction, and other electrifying outbursts that will make any action director salivate at the opportunity to get behind the camera. With a main cast of two, trapped in a battle between human nature versus mother nature, including hints of acrophobia, the most common fear, this movie will have any audience on the edge of their seats. GALE is an action-packed screenplay pitched as “Gravity on an offshore windmill”.
Writer: Taylor Hamilton
Details: 94 pages
If I’m being completely transparent, I knew this script would win the second I saw the logline. It was the only high concept idea where it felt like the writer truly understood what he was writing and how to convey it in logline form.
As much as writers hate them, I do think there’s value in learning how to write a logline. I’m not even talking about coming up with a concept. I’m talking about the physical construction of a logline, which boils down to introducing an interesting character, a special attractor, telling us what the big goal is, and what’s in the way of that goal.
Cause, to be clear, a movie idea and the construction of the logline are two different things. A movie idea is, “A dinosaur theme park.” A logline is, “A group of scientists get stuck inside a dinosaur theme park during a heavy storm and must escape before they’re mauled to death by the park’s relentless inhabitants.”
A logline helps you distill your idea down to its essence so you can tell if it’s a good idea or not. Typically, if there’s a hiccup in the logline, there’s a problem with the script itself. For example, if you have a cool main character, a cool strange attractor, a strong goal, but there doesn’t seem to be any conflict in your logline? Well, that probably means your script is going to be devoid of conflict.
If you’re someone who struggles with loglines, take half an hour a week and write up loglines for five movies you’re familiar with. Just to keep that muscle growing. It took me a good 300 reviews on this site before I became truly comfortable with writing loglines. It’s definitely something you have to practice. You can’t just wait until you write a script every year and that’s the only time you practice writing a logline. You’re going to be way out of your depth.
Anyway, I was right about Gale winning. But now the real work begins. Is the script itself good? Let’s find out!
25 year old Kamryn is a tomboy wind tech. She’s going to be the first female high ranking wind tech in all of America if she can pass the standard turbine climb test. 48 year old grizzled vet, Blake, is conducting the test, and even though Kamryn finishes on time, Blake doesn’t like the manner in which she did it and therefore fails her.
But that’s okay because back at headquarters in Portland, Oregon, the company CEO awards her the position anyway. Excited, Kamryn has a quick lunch with her fiancé to tell him the news. They both celebrate and discuss their upcoming wedding, which is happening in 48 hours!
Except that Kamryn is quickly shuttled back to headquarters where she’s told that her and Blake need to go out to an ocean turbine that’s locked up and fix it before a big storm arrives. The Department of Energy chair is visiting the site tomorrow and if he likes what he sees, he’s going to give the company a ton of funding.
Kamryn grumbles the whole way there. She just wants to get married. And it gets worse when they’re actually in the turbine and learn that a major part in the turbine’s construction is the wrong size. Which means this thing is a ticking time bomb. Oh, and it’s not helping that the huge storm outside is getting worse by the second.
So the two start the process of fixing the turbine only to realize that the storm is a lot heavier than they were told. Fixing soon transitions into surviving. And that’s looking less and less likely by the hour. Will they make it through the night? Or will the gale storm send them to a violent death in the sea?
The best thing about Gale is the specificity. The writer did a ton of research on this world and it feels highly authentic. Here’s a small clip from the script.
As I’ve already established, I like the concept a lot. It’s got movie poster written all over it and that gets me hotter than a fresh In and Out double-double.
Ironically, this becomes the script’s main problem. The description of the inside of the turbine is so technical and the conversations themselves are so technical, that we are often struggling to keep up with what’s going on.
I’ve found that, in these situations, you gotta use two tools. One is analogies. And two is clarity. Analogies help in situations that require difficult to visualize locations. I don’t know what a Nacelle is. So you gotta give me an analogy that clears it up for me.
On top of that, don’t be afraid to be straight up CLEAR AS F—K. Don’t be afraid to be overly on the nose. Don’t be afraid to write asides to the writer. “We’re in section 3 of the turbine. It looks like [this] and [that].” Go overboard with your clarity. Because let’s say that, best case scenario, someone is clear about what’s going in this story 75% of the time. That’s still a quarter of your movie they don’t understand.
And I would put my understanding closer to about 50. I understood what I was looking at 50 percent of the time. I didn’t understand what I was looking at the other 50.
There were numerous reasons for this, one of which was the use of mini-slugs. Mini-slugs are miniature slug lines that look like this: “LADDER – MOMENTS LATER.” Notice that they don’t have EXT or INT next to them. And, sometimes, scenes would last 10 pages long in this script. I would be so unclear about where we were that I wasn’t even sure if we were inside or outside. And because it had been so long since the last regular slug line, it wasn’t easy to find out without totally disrupting my read and going on a duck hunt for it.
I honestly don’t feel like I can accurately judge this script because unless it was ultra clear what was going on, I was struggling with all my might to picture what I was looking at. I loved the moments like the turbines detaching and falling into the ocean. Cause I could envision that. But when we’re in a nacelle near a holding room situated on a blast platform, I didn’t know what the heck I was looking at.
Which is unfortunate because the scenes had a lot of energy to them and I could tell, if I were watching this movie on the big screen, I would probably love it.
But this is one of the skills required for writing these types of movies. You have to be able to write visually and clearly. Even if you do that for 80% of the script, it’s still a failure. Cause you can’t have the reader not understand what’s going on 20% of the time. And I would put this script’s visual clarity at way lower than 80%.
Also, this doesn’t feel to me like a script where you do a traditional cold open (an action scene) then go back home and carefully set up your characters, plot, stakes, and life situations, before going to the main movie location (the turbine) and starting the movie we came for.
This feels more like a “Gravity” movie to me. Where we start at the location where we’re going to spend the entire movie. So I think they should already be on the turbine. They came here to fix something. They realize they don’t have the necessary tools to fix it. They recommend to base that they bring in the “A-Team,” the guys who fix the truly big problems.
But then something happens with the pick-up crew, who get stuck on shore, and then, when the storm rolls in, Blake and Kamryn are told they can’t be picked up tonight and they’ll have to stay there through the storm. Blake and Kamryn then realize the problem is worse than they thought. And if they don’t fix it, the whole turbine is going to fall apart in the storm (it might be fun to create a bigger storyline where this “wrong part” was installed in all the company’s offshore turbines in order to cut corners and meet budgets. So they’re all going go down). Something to that effect. We start in the heat of it and we never stop.
I didn’t think the relationship between Kamryn and Blake was very good. It’s appropriate that one of the main characters is named Blake because their relationship feels like it came out of a Blake Snyder AI generated beat sheet. These two only seem to dislike each other because they’re supposed to. They don’t feel like real people. And they don’t feel like they have a real problem with one another.
With Gravity the main issue was internal and it felt genuine. Sandra Bullock’s character has given up on life since her daughter died. So the movie is about will she find the strength to keep fighting to survive despite the fact that, before today, she wanted to give up on life? We keep watching to see her strength in those moments where she has a choice to either keep fighting or give up.
Meanwhile Blake and Kamryn yell at each other because that’s what Blake Snyder learned way back when he watched Lethal Weapon. I will say that I liked the choice (spoiler) to kill off Blake. But probably for the wrong reasons. I liked that it spiced up the story and made it less predictable. But when a character dies, the reader should feel emotion. And I didn’t feel any. So that’s obviously a problem.
Something I’ve learned recently is that readers can feel your intention. They know when you’re making choices for something other than organic story reasons. In other words, if you create a strained relationship between Blake and Kamryn because screenwriting books tell you to instead of these really being two people who would have this conflict with one another, readers suss that out. Readers are way more intuitive than you think they are.
It’s with a heavy heart that I can’t endorse this script because, as a movie, I can see a director creating some great set pieces regardless of the script. So I still feel like this would work as a movie. But the script is just not there. It needs better characters. And it needs to be way easier to visualize. I hope Taylor takes that feedback to heart. What’d you guys think?
Screenplay Link: Gale
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It is very hard for readers to visualize something that they have no reference point for. A wind turbine is not a basketball court. Pretty much every single thing inside of it is going to be something we’ve never seen before. Therefore, when you’re a writer on one of these scripts, you have to be Mr. Clarity. You have to hold our hand so hard that you’re practically breaking it. We need you to help us visualize this world because it is beyond foreign to us. And, by the way, you’re talking to someone who once wrote about a turbine wind farm. So I even have some basic knowledge of this world and I was still struggling to visualize where we were most of the time in this script.
