Genre: Thriller
Logline: At the height of World War 2, a young Japanese-American investigator must race to prevent a terrifying Japanese plot to unleash a devastating plague on the United States. Inspired by true events.
About: This is one of the four Mega-Showdown finalists. It finished with 16 votes, tying it for second place. You can read the winning script review, Hard Labor, here. You can also download the script for yourself, as there’s a link in the review. This script first broke onto the Scriptshadow scene when it won the First Page Showdown. It used that status to become one of the early favorites in the Mega Showdown Screenwriting Contest. And it rode that wave all the way to the finals.
Writer: Finn Morgan
Details: 85 pages
I’ve been intrigued by this one ever since I read the first page.
Let’s see what happens afterwards!
It’s 1944. We’re in an internment camp in Northern California, where Japanese Americans are being kept imprisoned. One of these is 22 year old Laird Tanaka. And one night, Laird sees something in the windows of one of the workshops on-site and goes to check it out.
What he finds, impossibly, is a Japanese submariner, who’s been ravaged by hundreds of fleas. Before he knows it, the submariner is attacking him and he shoots him dead. This gets him in a lot of trouble with the soldiers running the camp, who don’t seem nearly as concerned about why a Japanese soldier would be holed up in one of their buildings as Laird does.
Laird is thrown into the camp jail, where Sheriff Bill Jefferson is intrigued by the story and wants to look into it. He deputizes Laird so he can bring him with, despite the fact that Laird wants nothing to do with this. They follow the clues to the nearby ocean shore that night, where they find a giant Japanese submarine washed up.
Jefferson forces Laird to follow him inside the sub and that’s when they find more dead submarine people with fleas all over them. Out of nowhere, a still fully alive soldier decapitates Jefferson with a sword and Laird jets the hell out of there. He runs into the forest, where he finds evidence of more Japanese heading towards town.
He eventually figures out that these fleas are carrying a plague that the Japanese are trying to unleash on America. But a storm crashed their sub before they could get to San Francisco. So now they want to get on a train and get to their original destination, on New Year’s Eve of all times, when people are everywhere, ready to spread some plague!
Laird will have to battle American racists and Japanese allies to get to the plaguers and stop them himself!
What I liked best about The First Horseman was how relentless it was. Finn calls this a thriller and it sure is plotted like one. It is impossible to go into a scene where something big doesn’t happen.
That’s actually one of my… what’s the opposite of pet peeves? Pet pariahs? It’s one of my pet pariahs. I like when period pieces move fast. Cause, traditionally, the further back you go in history, the slower a movie moves. So I loved that this had such a relentless pace.
And I loved that it was never boring. I suspect that that was one of Finn’s driving directives and why the script is only 86 pages. I sense that any scene, no matter how short, that could be considered unnecessary, was cut without a second thought. Leaving us with a lean and mean screenplay.
Despite that, I still struggled to get through The First Horseman at times. I would often be reading a scene and knowing that it was a technically sound scene for a thriller. Our hero needed something. There was always something interesting trying to prevent him from getting it. But I noticed my brain drifting during some of these scenes and I didn’t know why.
Things started off strong. I loved the stuff with the washed-up submarine. Just lying there on the shore. That was badass. I loved walking through that thing. Talk about freaky. That scene could’ve gone toe-to-toe with any scene that’ll come out of Blood and Ink Showdown.
And I loved how relentlessly cruel Finn was to his characters. He wasn’t afraid to kill them off, no matter how big of a character they were. We get one of those scenes in the submarine and it was just like, “Wow.”
But then later in the script, there’d be a scene in a house and I’d find that I just wasn’t that invested. Which perplexed me because not only did we have a plague on the loose. But it was an original ‘end-of-the-world’ threat. These de facto kamikaze sub pilots had come here to kill themselves in order to spread this unique ‘flea plague’ to take down America.
Maybe that would be my first question for Finn. These fleas are carrying the plague. The Japanese are trying to bring them to San Francisco to let the fleas loose. Except there are already fleas that have gotten loose everywhere. They climb all over Laird numerous times throughout the movie. How is he not infected?
And how bout the tens of thousands of fleas that have been transferred wherever else these fleas were found? You’re saying that you can just side-step these things and you’re okay? Or that if they get on you, you could potentially still be fine? If so, that’s not a very threatening plague, is it? It should’ve been that if one of those things even grazed you, you were fucked. That’s what the opening scene indicated, right? Which is why the worker in contact with the virus was immediately shot.
Another thing about this script that I couldn’t figure out was that, for a fast story, it sure read slow. I was constantly checking what page I was on and would be shocked that I wasn’t nearly as far into the script as I thought I was.
This phenomenon can be hard to measure because whenever you have problems with a script, it will read slow. So maybe that’s what I was experiencing. But I still think there was something else going on. Reading the text, even though it was kept sparse, didn’t keep my eyes moving quickly enough. It could be something in the writing style. It’s hard to tell.
I’m not sure where I stand on this script, to be honest.
The setting is cool. The set-pieces, like the sub and the train, were cool. I liked some of the recklessness of the creative choices, like killing off characters you didn’t expect to be killed. But I can’t deny that, towards the end, I wasn’t as invested as I should’ve been.
Maybe it’s Laird. Maybe he needs to be more likable or interesting or deep or have more personality. Because, in the end, for any movie to work, we have to be behind the main character and want him to succeed. I don’t know if I was ever a Laird fan. Starting with the stuff at the internment camp. Maybe that was the problem – that Finn thought that just being an internment camp prisoner would be enough for us to want to root for this guy.
It really isn’t a bad script. It just didn’t pull me in enough. I know some of you have already read the script so I’m curious to hear what you thought. What you liked and disliked as well. And if anything I said here resonated.
Good entry overall for Finn. Just needed something extra!
Script link: The First Horseman
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of my biggest pet peeves is when the hero asks for help from a cop and the cop says he doesn’t believe him. Why? Because it’s a lie. A cop’s job is to believe people. Not only that. But if America is so afraid of Japanese people that they’ve put them in internment camps, then how does it make sense that someone calling 911 saying there’s a Japanese invasion that’s happening, that that cop blanketly dismisses it. Worst of all, writers do this so they don’t have to deal with the logical consequences of the police getting involved. They want only their hero involved. So it’s a cheat. Please don’t use movie logic like this in your scripts. It’s lazy.
