Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: The crew of a ramshackle starship, stranded lightyears from the rest of humanity, stages a daring heist to infiltrate a rogue luxury transport, steal the spare warp drive it hoards, and escape the gaze of Eos — a volatile star tumbling toward supernova.
About: This script finished in second place in the Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Screenwriting Competition.
Writer: Luke Secaur
Details: 118 pages
We sci-fi lovers are starving for a good sci-fi film. And I’m not talking about one of those clever-premised tiny films like Ex Machina. Something with some scope! We haven’t had one of those in a lonnnnnng time. We got Rebel Moon on Netflix. But that movie sat on the screen like a dead elephant.
That’s why I picked this concept for the contest. It’s a cool idea! A heist film in space? Sign me up! To be honest, the logline implied that there was a little too much going on. Maybe that’s something to look at going forward for Luke. Should we streamline this into a more straightforward space heist film? Let’s find out.
The Eos sun is about to go supernova in 10 hours. The last people on a space station in the star system are fighting for the last few seats on the final evacuation ship. Through a miracle, our hero, Nathan, gets his wife and daughter onto the last two seats . He promises them that if he can see them again, he will. And off they go.
Cut to 7 years later and, what do you know, Eos is still burning, the stubborn old star that can’t quit us. Nathan is now the captain of a small ship and crew (pilot Lenora, guitar-playing Diego, droid H3-NRY, and freshman Opal) who dart around looking for leftover spaceships. They scavenge these things for fuel and food, all to live a little bit longer.
But what they’re really hoping to find is an Alcubierre drive. These drives allow ships to jump to light speed, which would allow Nathan to reunite with his wife and daughter. During their latest scavenge, they run into another crew and are able to kidnap one of them, the perpetually sick Mako.
Mako informs them that there’s a ship run by a cult that is set up for a front row seat to the supernova. It just so happens that they have a spare Alcubierre drive on their ship. Which means all they have to do is sneak on, steal the thing, and they’ll finally be able to escape this potentially-but-not-yet-but-will-probably-blow-up-soon-although-we’re-not-100%-sure star. Can they do it???
Outpace The Dawn is better than Rebel Moon. If Netflix made this movie, it would be more popular than that movie. There are some caveats to that – like several rewrites. But the idea is better than Rebel Moon for sure.
I thought the script was okay but something was bothering me as I wrote this review up. I wanted it to be better and I couldn’t figure out what it was missing. It was only once I finished the review that it came to me. Outpace the Dawn doesn’t understand its tone yet. I think the best version of this story is Guardians of the Galaxy meets Ocean’s 11.
It KIND OF gives you that. But it gives you a muted version of that. The characters aren’t as fun. The jokes aren’t as sharp. And I don’t know why that is. I’m wondering if Luke wants to make a more serious version of this story and, therefore, keep the characters grounded.
I say f*&% that. Let’s have fun here! This is a fun premise.
The problems start right there in the opening scene. We’re told that the sun is going to go supernova in 10 hours, which is why there’s a race to get on this final escape ship. But then as soon as the escape ship leaves, we cut to 7 years later and the sun is still there. No supernova.
Sure, this is explained by Luke. Supernovas are not an exact science. Nobody knows when they’re going to blow. But it did feel cheap that we frame the opening with this extreme urgency then, as soon as the scene is over, throw that urgency out like a used Coke can.
This is followed by a scene where our team of scavengers attempts to infiltrate an abandoned ship for spare parts. As they’re scavenging it, another group of scavengers appears and tries to do the same. We just got out of a very rare scenario (a star that’s going to go supernova) and now we’re in another one (what are the chances that right when you scavenge a ship in the middle of nowhere that someone else does so at the exact same time?). Are these ships getting scavenged every 10 minutes?
Those opening scenes, while by no means catastrophic, gave me pause. I would label both of them as sloppy. Or, at least, not as clean as they could be.
But that’s okay because the success of every script comes down to how you deliver on the aspects of the script that matter. For example, if you write a horror script, all that TRULY matters, is that it’s scary. If you write a comedy script, all that TRULY matters, is that we laugh. Every other aspect of the script can be mediocre, as long as we laugh.
When it comes to heist scripts, two things matter – You have to have a great heist and you have to have a fun group of characters. On both those fronts, Outpace The Dawn did okay.
Unfortunately, audiences don’t go to movies for okay. They go to be entertained. Nathan was fine. There’s a decent emotional component to his character whereby he’s trying to reunite with his family. Diego was kinda fun. Lenora and Opal were all right but, if I’m being honest, kinda forgettable. My favorite choice on the character front was Mako. I love the idea of putting a villain on the team, someone you can’t quite trust. So that was cool.
Then there was the heist. The heist had some problems, the biggest of which was that I couldn’t quite imagine the ship we were infiltrating and where we were all the time and what all the different parts of the ship looked like. This is one of the challenges of writing sci-fi and fantasy. There is no frame of reference for the reader visually. So it requires very clear descriptions, something that’s challenging to achieve within the abbreviated format of screenwriting.
But the bigger problem was, the people that we were trying to steal the warp drive from didn’t feel that scary. The thing you want to do with heists is you want to make the heist feel impossible. This was some hippy cult in a ship. Not exactly the most threatening of folks.
I liked that we didn’t have guns. That’s more in line with what you want to do – make the goal as hard as possible. But it starts with the difficulty of the heist itself. And this heist difficulty level reminded me of Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon Jinn going into the separatist ship and being attacked by a bunch of harmless droids.
That doesn’t even broach the fact that I wasn’t sure how many people were on the ship! If you told me it was 3, I would’ve believed you. If you told me it was 303, I’d believe you. Again, we have to know what we’re up against before we head into the ship.
Some of these details may be in the script and I just missed them. I’m sorry if that’s the case. But it’s hard to pay attention 100% of the time in a script where there’s no visual reference for anything. In other words, if I read a romantic comedy script set in New York, I never once have to use my brain to figure out where we are, what’s around us, and what everything looks like. I already have those references in my head.
But in this script, nearly every scene requires me to do some mental work to visualize what’s happening. And if the reader’s forced to do that all the time, I guarantee you even the most dialed-in reader is going to experience some mental drift. Readers don’t like working when they read. They like enjoying.
The last script I read that did a good job with all this stuff was Street Rat Allie. The writer created this entire world but did so in a clear and concise way so that we were always able to visualize what was going on.
So, in summary, I think more work needs to be put into the characters. I don’t want them to be kinda okay. I want to aim for “greatest characters ever.” You won’t get there, of course. Nobody does. But by aiming way higher than you’re aiming now, you’ll upgrade them for sure. We need things to be more fun, more wild. The final heist needs to be bigger and more impossible. And there needs to be an obsession with clarity in the description.
What did you guys think?
Script Link: Outpace the Dawn
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful about trying to have your cake and eat it too. Readers notice that. Is it fair to build your opening scene around a ticking time bomb only to learn, right afterward, that the ticking time bomb was a false alarm? Probably not.
