Genre: War-Action
Premise: Shot down by the Red Baron, a Nurse with a photographic memory must navigate the perils of no-man’s land to transport critical intelligence to the Allies that will save countless lives and shorten the Great War.
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 read finalist, The First Horseman, here. Each review contains a script link so you can download and read the scripts yourself. I’d call Smokescreen the biggest underdog of the four finalists. It has the most non-Hollywood subject matter and yet, still, it beat out a ton of other screenplays to finish in the top 3. Excited to find out what the hype is about!
Writer: Nick Philippa
Details: 110 pages
I know World War 1 doesn’t have the same technology as World War 2. It can feel a little dated in that sense. And I know that it doesn’t have the biggest bad guy of all time in it, in Hitler. But I think too many history/war screenwriters automatically default to World War 2, when World War 1 has so many more stories that have never been told. So I always perk up when World War 1 enters a logline. And this one sounded interesting.
It’s 1914 and 30-something James Warn is a fighter pilot. He’s currently at an Allied base that’s in the thick of it with the Germans. There’s a giant swath of no man’s land between the two sides and, like a lot of fronts, nobody’s making any progress.
One day, James is sent out to do some reconnaissance with his plane’s camera. He has to go take some pictures of the enemy base so they’re updated on what they’re up against. It’s never an easy mission to take pictures because the Germans use smokescreens to hide their ground formation and, oh yeah, the greatest fighter pilot ever, in the Red Barron, happens to be flying for the bad guys.
Despite that, James discovers the Germans are bringing in a giant gun like no other. One that may be able to cover the distance between the two bases. Currently, though, it’s stuck in a giant mud bank and they’re having a hard time getting it out.
When he brings this intel back to his captain, the captain is all gung-ho on learning more. The only problem is, their plane camera was destroyed by the Baron. And the next camera can’t get shipped out here for another two weeks. But they don’t have two weeks!
When James notices that a local nurse, Edna (nickname: Eddie), has a talent for drawing, he comes up with a crazy idea. He’ll replace his gunner with Eddie, they’ll go fly over the German base, and she’ll draw out a map of the land, including exactly where that gun is so that the Allies can destroy it before it’s put in use.
Eddie hates this idea, as does the Captain, but what choice do they have!? So the two go on several missions, each of which is complicated by that stupid Red Baron flying around. On the final mission, the Red Baron hits pay dirt, shooting them down. They crash right there in the middle of no man’s land, a completely inhospitable area of land, and must find their way back to their side without getting massacred.
Smokescreen is a tale of two scripts.
There’s the first half of this script, which is a completely different movie than the second half. And let me put it this way. If I weren’t reading this script for a review, I never would’ve made it to the much cooler second half.
So, what’s wrong with the first half?
A lot.
It has this weird pattern where the story keeps starting and stopping. Let’s go on a plane run. Come back. Talk about it. Let’s go on another plane run, this time with a nurse. Come back. Talk about it. Let’s get grounded because of a pissy captain. Then let’s go on another plane run. Come back. Talk about it.
It felt like a car that could never start. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for some big plot beat to arrive and it never did.
Until the second half. That’s when James and Eddie go down in No Man’s Land. And this is where the story picks up. I mean, it gets so much better.
When you’re writing a story like this, you want four things going for you.
One is obvious. Make sure we like your characters as much as possible. Because, regardless of what predicament you put your heroes in, we have to like them to want them to come out of that predicament. And the more we like them, the more invested we’ll be in them doing that.
Two is to make the mission feel impossible. Most writers create a main obstacle that is 50-60% as hard as it should be. You want something to seem 100% impossible. And that’s because the more impossible it feels, the more doubt there is in the story that your heroes will succeed. This is what makes for compelling reading because the reader will think the heroes can’t possibly win, and will turn the pages like crack to see how they do it.
Three is to give us something unique. You can do one and two really well but if you place your characters inside a situation that we’ve seen a million times before, or a situation that doesn’t have a lot of inherent drama to it, then it doesn’t matter that you got one and two right.
Finally, you need the stakes to be really high in a movie like this. You’re asking us to care so much about your heroes surviving. But what is it that they’re surviving for? If their only purpose is just to keep breathing, sure there’s going to be interest in seeing that happen. But it won’t be nearly as much interest as if there’s something bigger at play that needs to be satisfied.
Let’s look at how the script ranked in these four categories.
1 – Make sure we like the characters
Rating: 6 out of 10
Analysis: There is nothing special about James or Eddie. They were the most generic versions of these characters possible. There was nothing unique about either of them. Nothing memorable about either of them. They didn’t have any flaws that I related to. If anything, Eddie’s flaw of not killing, only saving, was too forced. And their personalities were as vanilla as my protein powder.
2 – Make the mission impossible
Rating: 8 out of 10
Analysis: If we had crashed into no man’s land at the end of the first act, this rating would’ve been a 10 out of 10. This mission truly felt impossible. The writing regarding how awful no man’s land is was excellent. I truly felt like there was no way out of this. Unfortunately, the first half of the script was a vacation. I’ve never felt more safe in my life than when I was at that Allied camp. I felt like they should’ve been serving Mai-Tais between missions. This was the weakest part of the script. I understand it’s required to set things up but it needs to be massively shortened.
3 – Give us something we haven’t seen before
Rating: 9 out of 10
Analysis: I’ve read over 10k scripts. I’ve never read anything like no man’s land was described here. With the craters filled with water and the impossible terrain and barbed wire everywhere and crazed dogs. I’ve never been in that environment before when reading something like this. But the plane stuff? I’m sorry but it was boring. I don’t know, I just felt like I’d seen that so many times and every time we were up in the air it felt like generic flying time. Uh oh, here come the bullets! Oh, there they go, through the plane wing. You could predict every moment. But in no man’s land? I couldn’t predict what would happen in the next second.
4 – Stakes
Rating: 6 out of 10
Analysis: The stakes were confusing pretty much throughout the script. I understood that there was some big bad gun. That they needed to know where that gun was, which is why they needed to bring in Eddie the artist. But it wasn’t clear what power she possessed that others didn’t. Sure, Rootin-Tootin Gunner Ronnie may not be the artist that Eddie is, but could he draw you a rough estimate of where the gun was in relation to other things in the area? Probably! It wouldn’t have been as pretty but so what? As long as it gets the job done, right? And then, when they’re shot down and trying to get back, she wasn’t carrying any critical information that would help the Allies win the battle. So then what are the stakes to her making it back besides being alive? (Spoiler) We do get her drawing something at the last second but I didn’t know that she was carrying any important knowledge up until that point. So, the stakes were low throughout that whole section.
As you can imagine, I’m very torn about this script.
There’s some good stuff in here. But it’s a structural miscalculation that severely hampers the finished product. Not to mention, these characters need to graduate from 1 scoop of vanilla to AT LEAST two scoops of salted caramel. Because it doesn’t just hurt the characters as individuals. It hurts the love story. If we’re not that into them, (suggested spoiler) we don’t care if they end up together, or even die. Which was the case for me. I didn’t care.
Fix the structural problem. Fix the characters. And this is a ‘worth the read.’ Maybe more. But in this state, it’s still a ‘wasn’t for me.’
Screenplay link: Smokescreen
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I feel like war movies need to physically move. Saving Private Ryan. 1917. Fury. We’re always moving towards something in those movies. The more you stay in one place, the lower the story engine revs. Until you risk it stopping altogether. The exception would be if you’re in one place and in constant danger, trying to survive. But when we were at the Allied base, even when the Germans showed up tunneling, I always felt safe. Which was a big reason why I couldn’t ever fully get into this story.
