Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Set fifty years in the future, an optimistic young man brings his A.I. fiancée home to meet his technophobic family.
About: This script finished in second place in the March Logline Showdown, behind the awesome Blood Moon Trail, which I reviewed on Friday. Integrating Anna received 19 votes, which was 22% of the total number of votes. It comes from long-time commenter WyldeWrite.
Writer: Jeff Wild
Details: 111 pages
I mean is there any doubt who should play Anna?
So far, we’re hitting on 50% of our Logline Showdown scripts (of 3 first place scripts and 1 second place script, 2 of them were great).
Will Integrating Anna raise that percentage even higher?
In many ways, it’s the perfect logline. It’s current. AI is all the rage now. It’s got an ironic premise. It’s got the “give us something familiar but different” requirement locked down.
I do have one worry here and that’s WHEN the story takes place. I have strong feelings about when stories like this should take place. So we’ll see if that becomes a problem or if my worries are unfounded.
By the way, THE NEXT LOGLINE SHOWDOWN IS FRIDAY, APRIL 21.
You can send in your submissions now.
What: Title, Genre Logline
Rules: Your script must be written
When: Send submissions by April 20th, Thursday, by 10PM pacific time
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
I can’t wait to see what you have in store for me this month!
Okay, onto the review…
The year is 2067. 30 year-old William Topper is engaged to 25 year-old doctor, Anna. Anna is what’s called a “nubeing,” which means she’s an artificially intelligent human-looking robot. In 2067, the United States has become the United Countries. And William is going home to the Southern country, where his parents live.
His parents, Wes and Olive, both in their 60s, do not like this idea of William dating a robot. In fact, Wes still calls robots by their AI slur, “Tinbacks.” Which is exactly why William is dreading them meeting Anna. He tells her not to divulge that they’re engaged yet.
Once home, the dad chirps in immediately that he isn’t a fan of Anna. Anna takes it in stride. She’s “grown up” (she’s actually only six years old) being discriminated against her whole life. Plus, since she doesn’t technically have feelings, she can brush off almost anything you throw at her.
Once they settle in, it’s time for their first big dinner together. That’s where we meet Brother Todd, his wife Candy, and his adopted son Toshi. They’re also going to be there for the weekend. Later that night, Anna does a few hundred thousand simulations and determines that if William’s parents don’t come away from this weekend accepting Anna, somewhere down the line she and William will break up.
So the next day they go drone-bungee jumping which basically is like reverse bungee-jumping where you shoot up high into the atmosphere. It’s here where Anna starts to make her first inroads into Wes accepting her. He seems to be opening up to the idea of his son marrying Anna, if only a bit at a time.
Things start to get complicated, however, when William runs into his old girlfriend, Sara. Sara is about as anti-technology as they get. She and her new boyfriend, Isaac, explain to William that Anna is part of a wider conspiracy for AI to take over the world. Part one is integrating with humans. Get us to trust them. It will all seem fine for a while. But then, the AI will eradicate them. Does William trust her? Or does he go with his gut, that his ex is crazy, and continue on his journey to marry his girlfriend?
Man, screenwriting is hard!
It’s hard because readers form opinions fast. I’m talking within the first few pages they have intense opinions about the first scene, the writing, the writer, and whether they think the script is going to work.
Once the reader has formulated that opinion, it’s hard to convince them of anything else.
As I suspected, the 2067 future setting didn’t sit well with me.
Stories like this work best when they’re set as close to present day as you can realistically get away with.
Because you want the story to feel current. You want the people reading it to think this situation – humans marrying AI robots – is right around the corner. That’s what makes it feel relevant – that it’s so close. If it’s 50 years away, it’s like, “Who cares?” That’s forever away to the average human.
I tried to keep an open mind about it but every subsequent detail drove it further away from, what I thought, was the more interesting story.
The United States is now the United Countries. There’s robotic trash cans. There’s drone cliff-diving and cars with full-on personalities.
I would argue that none of this stuff is relevant for this kind of story. If you’re writing about what a murder investigation looks like in 2065 New York – something like Minority Report? – then, yeah, go crazy and have fun with the technology.
But this is an intimate story. Or at least that’s what the logline promised. This was just about bringing an AI girlfriend home to meet techno-phobic parents. Why couldn’t you do that in 2033? Why can’t the parents just live in the poor South in the same America we live in now and they’ve lost their blue collar jobs (maybe the dad was a trucker) due to the increase of AI in the workforce?
The one creative choice I was kind of into was, at the midpoint, the script changes gears and becomes a thriller. Sara and Isaac inject this conspiracy theory into the mix, which forces William to doubt Anna’s intentions, which could potentially be dangerous. Once we stop trusting Anna, she becomes an infinitely more interesting character.
Because that was one of my main issues with Anna. She was boring. She never got too upset. She never got too happy. She was always right down the middle, which meant that every line she uttered was bland. But if we start to doubt her, now there’s subtext to everything she says, even if that subtext is only in our minds.
The problem with the thriller genre emergence is it all felt a bit wonky. The first half of the movie is this very standard “Meet the Parents” type situation where the on-the-nose dad hates Anna. Where William and Anna have to win the family over. The dinners and the outings all felt standard.
Which is probably why I welcomed the thriller storyline. Because it jolted me out of my malaise. It got me back into the script. But it’s not a fleshed out thriller by any means. Its late arrival doesn’t give it enough time to form an identity. By the time we got to the end, I wasn’t even sure what we were ultimately trying to establish here. Are we trying to establish that Anna is bad? That Sara and Isaac are crazy? It definitely didn’t come together in an organic satisfying manner.
Which leaves me to wonder how to fix this. Part of me wants to get to the thriller stuff sooner because that was the more exciting story. But another part of me thinks that makes this a completely different, more standard, movie. Which makes me GO BACK and want to ditch the thriller stuff altogether and focus more on what the original premise promised. But that story was too on-the-nose and reserved in its current incarnation. So, yeah, we could figure out the changes required to make that slow-burning story more compelling. But the changes would be so numerous that we’d, essentially, be doing a page 1 rewrite.
It’s a tale of two cities here and both cities are under construction. One thing I know for sure is this needs to be set no later than 2033. I PROMISE YOU this becomes an infinitely better movie with that one change. Cause we don’t need all the futuristic bells and whistles. Not only does it take us away from the core of your premise but it makes your movie needlessly more expensive. Without question the first thing any producer who developed this would do is cut all those future scenes out.
I don’t have the ultimate answer to this. I do think the script has some strong individual moments, especially in its second half. But it needs a lot of work to find its footing. What did you guys think?
Script Link: Integrating Anna
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: An early screenwriting lesson I learned was that when you’re dealing with low-budget sci-fi concepts, keep them in the near future – a future that’s almost indistinguishable from today. It makes them feel more relevant. The only time you want to set your movie far off in the future (40+ years) is if your story absolutely needs it. Avatar, for example.
