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.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Halfway through its 120-year journey to save mankind, the hypersleeping passengers of the spaceship A.R.K. begin to fall victim to a serial killer.
About: This script finished in third place in the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest!
Writer: Mikael Grahn
Details: 112 pages

I was thinking about how Scriptshadow is a script review site and that I spend a lot of those reviews on scripts from the Black List – which I’m okay with. But it’s not as exciting as it used to be when the Black List script quality was better.

So, in the lead-up to reviewing the winner of Mega-Showdown, I thought to myself, “Why only review the winner? Why not review the top three scripts? If we’re going to review scripts on the site, we should be celebrating homegrown scripts over others, right?”

So that’s what we’re doing this week. I’ll review 3rd place Noah’s Choice today. 2nd Place Outpace the Dawn tomorrow. 1st place Bedford on Wednesday. On Thursday, I want to talk more about feedback. And then Friday, to add one last flavor to this contest, I’m going to tell you which of the final three scripts I liked the most.

That all begins today. So, let’s review… Noah’s Choice.

Noah’s Choice follows a deep-space ship with the final 100+ humans in all of the universe onboard. They’re headed on a one-hundred-and-twenty-year journey to a new planet where they will reboot the human species. The ship itself was hastily constructed because the earth was dying quickly so they had to make some technological sacrifices.

The mission commander, Trevor Norman, 35 years old, is awakened from his cryo-sleep halfway through the trip by the onboard AI, Keeper. Keeper informs Trevor that 20 of the females in hypersleep have been murdered, possibly sexually assaulted, and even eaten. Trevor is quickly on the case and starts looking into it.

Keeper starts waking up other relevant parties as well, like mission agriculturalist, Ahsan, mission astronomer, Kahaan, and physician (as well as Trevor Nemesis), Flavia. After the three make initial assessments, Trevor orders Keeper to wake up the rest of the men (there are only 10 of them) so they can do DNA cross-checks on some of these cryo-crime scenes.

Soon, all sorts of people are awake and everyone’s giving their opinions on who they think the killer is. The prime target seems to be a South Korean man named Moon who, it’s discovered, upon some extra research, was a sexual offender back on earth. The other primary suspect is a Chinese man named Yichen who didn’t have to qualify to get on the ship as his rich father was the one who built it.

The group doesn’t have a lot of time to figure things out because they’re limited on oxygen. They actually have to use these little oxygen candles to generate an hour of oxygen at a time. All in all, they only have hours to solve the murders. Or else they’ll have to go back into their cryo bays and pray that the murderer doesn’t take them out next.

The central conflict is between Trevor and Flavia as Flavia is convinced that Trevor is the killer since he was so cold in the lead-up to the launch, cheating on his own wife with one of the mission members. But as time ticks down, Flavia begins seeing holes in her theory and must reevaluate who, indeed, the killer is…

Whenever I read a script with a good concept, I’m desperately hoping the writer meets the promise of their premise. That doesn’t mean I have a pre-formulated idea of what the narrative should be. It’s more of a feel thing. I want the feeling of the script to match up with what I felt when I read the concept.

When I saw this concept, I imagined a slow burn – something akin to the beginning of Alien with shades of David Fincher’s “Seven.” Something has happened and the crew members are trying to figure out what it is. As the story continues, as more clues are discovered, the pace steadily increases, until a suspect is identified and now they have to eliminate them.

That’s not what we get. Noah’s Choice hits the ground running the second people come out of hypersleep. A ton of characters are thrown at us all at once and we spend a lot of those early pages trying to figure out who’s who. I thought Mikael did a solid job differentiating all of the characters, something that’s hard to do in these scripts.

But by unleashing a ton of characters, we never get that slow build-up. Everyone is launching theories at us at once and, at times, it felt like a bunch of drunk college kids being dropped into an Escape Room. Everyone’s clumsily yelling at each other, spouting out theories, throwing out blame, and running from area to area as soon as a new clue is found. There was no grace to the proceedings. The plot was being knocked forward with a blunt object, giving the investigation a lack of sophistication.

My guess as to why that happened is because Mikael was determined to use GSU, specifically the “U” part (“Urgency”). So he creates this rule with these limited supply oxygen candles whereby there isn’t a lot of time to figure things out. Theoretically, that’s a good idea. But when you use it to dictate the actions of 10 bickering people, it becomes a circus.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind here. One, if your central mystery is strong enough, the reader will give you ample runway to build your story up. You don’t need these intense ticking clocks nipping at your characters’ heels right from the start. Two, in serial killer movies, the Urgency is almost always measured by the next kill. There’s rarely some Police Captain saying, “You have 24 hours to find the killer or else!” It’s more that, if they don’t figure things out soon, the killer kills another victim. That allows for a slower, but still effective, type of urgency.

There’s this scene in Seven where Somerset and Mills just sit down in Mills’ place and share theories on what might be going on. It’s a deliberately slow scene that’s more about getting to know these characters and how they work together. We never get a scene like that in Noah’s Choice. It’s more like a Mr. Beast video where everyone’s just yelling at each other the whole time.

Now, when I peeked through the comments on Noah’s Choice’s day, I saw that Mikael was using Agatha Christie as a guide for this story. And, if that’s the type of movie he was trying to make, fair enough. The notes I just shared aren’t as applicable. But I would argue that a Seven-like tone is more conducive to a deep space murder mystery than Agatha Christie is. So I think that was the incorrect creative choice to make. I just didn’t like the bickering tone. I would rather we follow 2-3 people around who come across spookier and spookier clues. The mummy-kid was a great example of this. I wanted more stuff like that.

One of the biggest discussions all week has been the lack of cameras on the ship. Mikael had a spirited discussion with everyone who thought there should be cameras on the ship and I have to give him credit for being the only screenwriter I know who has been given the same note from 20 different readers and insisted he was still correct. But I don’t want that to be a big talking point today because I’m actually going to dedicate Thursday’s article to it. I want to talk more about feedback in a broader sense. So save your opinions about the cameras for Thursday!

Look, I’m aware that my expectations of what I hoped this script would be are coloring my analysis of it. However, even if I had wanted this to be “Agatha Christie in space,” I still think it needs work. Even the basics aren’t there yet. Like Trevor. I felt nothing for Trevor. I didn’t like him. I didn’t dislike him. I was 100% neutral. There was no effort made to make me feel anything about our protagonist. And no, a couple of family video messages isn’t enough. I need to like this character by seeing him take actions that make me like him.

If I don’t feel anything about your main character, nothing you write afterward will matter. But, let’s say I did like Trevor. The rest of this story is still messy. The way these characters interact is clunky and juvenile 70% of the time. There’s no elegance to how these character scenes are crafted. Everyone’s just thrown into a blender and a piece of food eventually spits out and Trevor goes to see what it is, which leads to another blender being turned on. That’s the basis for almost every interaction in this movie.

So even if you’re going for Agatha Christie, I think we need to go for a calmer space-version of Agatha Christie. Less characters. Conversations with a clearer purpose. Scenes with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. The plot to Noah’s Choice has structure. But the conversations within that plot have zero structure and that’s what frustrated me the most. I couldn’t make it through any scenes without getting agitated.

I still believe in this idea. But I would look at this draft more as an exploratory draft as opposed to a draft that we build future drafts on. Cause I think we need to rethink how this starts and how it evolves. Curious to hear if you guys agree or disagree.

Script link: Noah’s Choice (Contest Draft)

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: The goal with a murder mystery is not to line up the plot and character variables in a way that makes things the easiest on you, the writer (aka, eliminate cameras so you don’t have to come up with a reason why they can’t check camera footage). It’s to line things up to make them the hardest on you. In other words, if your story is about a man who needs to save a cat stuck in a tree, don’t make it a bansai tree. Make it a freaking redwood.

Vote now! Script with the most votes gets a review Monday.

It’s here!

The final countdown to the winner of the Mega-Showdown.

Just to be clear, this is the final voting weekend. Whoever gets the most votes wins. I’ll review their script this Monday.

If you’re new to the site, we’ve been having a 10-day feature screenplay contest. These are the final four scripts in the competition. Your job, as a reader, is to vote for your favorite of the four in the comments. Just comment and say, “My vote is or [insert script title].” Feel free to add any reasons for your vote.

A couple of changes here.

There will be NO HALF-VOTES. Full votes only.

Also, normally, voting closes at 11:59pm Sunday Pacific Time. This weekend it’s going to close at 10pm Pacific Time. That’s because I have to read and review the script the next day. So don’t wait too long!

If you want to read pages for any of the scripts, simply click the script title link and it will take you to the first five pages of the script.

Good luck to the four contestants. I honestly have no idea who’s going to win. Each script has its backers.

So let’s find out!

Title: Bedford
Genre: Thriller / Sci-Fi
Logline: During a graveyard shift in a local air traffic control tower, a passenger flight goes missing, setting off a series of unexplained occurrences in the sky and leaving it up to a single determined tower operator to untangle the mystery.

Title: The Best and Brightest
Genre: Mystery
Logline: After the president of the United States is poisoned aboard Air Force One, a no-nonsense Secret Service agent reluctantly teams up with a hotshot White House staffer to investigate a flight of high-maintenance VIP suspects and solve the murder before the plane lands.

Title: Noah’s Choice
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: Halfway through its 120-year journey to save mankind, the hypersleeping passengers of the spaceship A.R.K. begin to fall victim to a serial killer.

Title: Outpace the Dawn
Genre: Science Fiction
Logline: 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.

This week, we are highlighting the top 4 vote-getters in the Mega-Showdown Screenwriting Contest. Monday through Thursday, I will post the first five pages of one of the finalists and all you have to do is read their pages. A good gauge of whether you like the pages or not is to ask yourself, “Would I keep reading?”

What we’re trying to do differently from past showdowns is to give every writer their own day so that people actually read their pages as opposed to just vote on a logline or the first page. We’re trying to find the best writing. The best storytelling.

Also, this is a great opportunity for all screenwriters to learn. A lot of screenwriters still don’t read scripts. It’s hard to know what to do when you don’t have anything to compare it to. This week, you’re going to read 20 pages. Take note of what you like, what you don’t like and try to figure out why. If you do that, I guarantee you you’ll learn something about your own writing.

Time to meet our final contestant of the week. And if you’re getting a case of deja vu, yes, this *is* a different script from yesterday. Time to welcome Luke Secaur to the feedback party!

Title: Outpace the Dawn
Genre: Science Fiction
Logline: 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.

This week, we are highlighting the top 4 vote-getters in the Mega-Showdown Screenwriting Contest. Monday through Thursday, I will post the first five pages of one of the finalists and all you have to do is read their pages. A good gauge of whether you like the pages or not is to ask yourself, “Would I keep reading?”

What we’re trying to do differently from past showdowns is to give every writer their own day so that people actually read their pages as opposed to just vote on a logline or the first page. We’re trying to find the best writing. The best storytelling.

Also, this is a great opportunity for all screenwriters to learn. A lot of screenwriters still don’t read scripts. It’s hard to know what to do when you don’t have anything to compare it to. This week, you’re going to read 20 pages. Take note of what you like, what you don’t like and try to figure out why. If you do that, I guarantee you you’ll learn something about your own writing.

Time to meet contestant number 3. I wasn’t sure how this one would do but I liked the concept of a serial killer preying on helpless hypersleepers. :) Time to welcome Mikael Grahn.

Title: Noah’s Choice
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: Halfway through its 120-year journey to save mankind, the hypersleeping passengers of the spaceship A.R.K. begin to fall victim to a serial killer.
Tagline: One killer – no mankind
Movie Crossover Pitch: Knives Out meets Passengers