So, originally, today, I was going to talk about Noah’s Choice and those pesky video cameras but, after reading Bedford, I’d rather use today’s post on helping Joseph make his script as good as it can possibly be.

When I do these script reviews, half of the review is dedicated to explaining what the script is about so I rarely get the time to suggest actual fixes. That’s what today’s post will cover. And if you like some of the notes I give here, hire me! I can practically guarantee your script will get better and, if you mention “Bedford,” I’ll give you 100 bucks off.

Now that I’ve had a day to think about the script, one of the things I’m worried about is that it does feel THIN. Scott put together a technical analysis of the screenplay and learned that it contained 16,000 words, which is low. You want to be closer to the 20,000 word mark. The low word count made sense to me based on how the script felt. The plot zips along like lightning but, in doing so, there aren’t many moments where you get to slow down and smell the flowers.

This is one of those universal challenges you face when you write a screenplay. You know you have to move things along to keep the reader engaged but you also have to make them feel something in order to stay engaged. And if all you’re doing is moving the plot forward, the experience feels empty.

This leads us to Bedford’s first issue, which is its stilted emotional subplot. Emily has a daughter. The daughter wants to spend more time with her father. Emily is not on good terms with the father. So she’s not supportive of this reunion. The irony, of course, is that the father ends up being on the plane that’s gone missing. Which ties our emotional plotline together.

But is that the best version of an emotional plotline we can get out of this story? I’m not convinced it is.

Let’s look at the father storyline. Emily doesn’t like the father. The father is on the plane. Well, is there much drama in that? If the worst-case scenario happens and the military gets rid of this plane, Emily’s in a pretty good position! Now she doesn’t have to worry about this a-hole father screwing up her daughter’s life anymore.

I know that Joseph would say the reason it works is because, even though it’s no sweat off Emily’s back if the dad disappears, Emily knows that it would destroy her daughter. So, in Joseph’s argument, it’s a more nuanced decision that Emily has to make. Does she save the man she despises in order to make her daughter happy? Theoretically, I understand this argument. But I didn’t feel any emotional way from that choice.

For starters, I winced when I learned the dad was on the plane. It felt too cute. Too “wrapped up in a bow.” You’re already asking for a huge buy-in with everything that’s going on. Throwing “dad on the plane” in there is the equivalent of, after asking a friend for a 500 dollar loan, you then, an hour later, ask them for another 100 bucks.

Here’s how I was thinking we could fix this. Move the father out of the story. The daughter, who’s at college, is flying in tomorrow. We would set this up through a conversation between Emily and Crane. He notes how happy he is that she’s finally taking her vacation days off. She points out that, yeah, her daughter is flying in for the week and she wants to spend as much time with her as possible.

If you really wanted the dad in here, We could reverse the Emily-Husband dynamic. In this version, the daughter goes to school next to her father and therefore spends most of the time with her father. She rarely comes home anymore. So Emily is making the most of her daughter’s visit. After we establish that backstory via a conversation between Emily and Crane, we would not hear anything else about that storyline for 25-30 pages.

Then, in the midst of the plane mystery deepening, either through the dad texting Emily or the daughter’s friend texting Emily, she learns, shockingly, that her daughter came in tonight on an earlier flight. She’s ON THE ATLAS FLIGHT.

To be clear, I’m still not sold on any family members being on the plane. It’s too much of a coincidence to me. But the reason I like this new version better is because the setup of Emily not coming until tomorrow makes the surprise that she’s on this Atlas flight TRICK the audience into focusing on the surprise rather than the coincidence.

Another reason I like it is because, in these contained movies, you need as many shocking moments as you can get away with. The repetition of the environment necessitates that we find exciting story beats anywhere we can. This would be a good one.

Okay, let’s move on to Mike and his lack of fuel. This is one of those story choices that feels right from a screenwriting perspective. You’re giving this important character a ticking time bomb (he’s running out of fuel and needs to land) which adds an additional layer of suspense and tension to the story.

But not every story component that TECHNICALLY works ORGANICALLY works. Sometimes the coolest screenwriting tricks in the world don’t work within the larger context of the story. That’s how I’d label this choice. We’re so baffled by how dismissive Emily is towards Mike and his SOS situation that we get annoyed by it. The guy’s got less than a gallon of fuel and you’re asking him to fly around and tell you what he sees?? That’s not realistic. For either Emily or Mike (if I were Mike I’d tell her to F off).

This is an easy fix, though. Mike is already in a really crazy situation. He was in the UK five minutes ago. Now he’s in the U.S. What we should do here is establish that Emily isn’t allowed to land a plane that isn’t cleared in the US. But she can try and get a special landing clearance for him, which will take a few phone calls. That allows us to keep Mike up in the air while Emily attempts to solve his problem. And, as long as he’s up there, he might as well help her out.

Getting back to the emotional side of the story, there’s a version of the Mike storyline that’s A LOT DEEPER that allows for a bigger, more impactful, climax. It would go something like this. Similar to Wade Wilson in Deadpool and Wolverine, Mike is not in a great place in life. His life didn’t go the way he imagined it would. And he regrets the fact that he didn’t do something bigger with his life.

In this version of the story, Emily and Mike’s talks would be a little deeper. They’d get into some of that stuff.

This way, when the climax comes around, you could set it up so that the military is about to take down the aliens and the plane. It’s a foregone conclusion. UNLESS Mike sacrifices himself. If Mike could somehow disrupt the shot by crashing into the missile launcher, he could give them just enough time to get away. Essentially, Mike finally does something that matters in his life.

Obviously, that’s a darker ending. I suppose there’s a version of that ending where Mike could still survive the crash. Because I do like the idea someone had of Emily and Mike finally seeing each other in the end (similar to John McClane meeting the cop at the end of Die Hard). You could even hint that there’s some romantic potential there. All of these different choices will alter the tone so you have to figure out which concoction best suits the movie you’re imagining.

As for our ending where Emily and Crane leave the tower and drive out, I’m on the fence about this. On the one hand, it makes the ending different from the first two acts. I like that. All the movement does make things more exciting as well. So I like that.

But it’s also kind of messy, which I don’t like. And Crane is such a weak character that he almost single-handedly destroys this scene. Crane might as well be an AI powered human body, he has so little depth to him. And what’s frustrating about that is that it’s an easy fix.

Let’s establish who Crane is in that first act! I imagine him similar to the sheriff character Jeff Bridges played in Hell or High Water. He’s almost retired. All he cares about is his pension. The guy’s mantra is: Don’t rock the boat. When all this shit starts going down, Crane keeps saying to Emily, “Let it go. It’s above our pay grade.”

That way, when Crane is driving the car at the end, it actually means something. Because he’s transformed as a character. But even without that, note how much better you know my version of Crane than the version in the story. Just by that one paragraph I wrote. That’s how easy it is to give a character depth. So, even if it’s not my version of the character that you go with, come up with your own version. As long as Crane isn’t some faceless wordless shadow in the back of the room.

Finally, I want to talk about where this movie ends. I feel like it should end in the tower and I have two examples I want to share for why. The first is Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is a terrible movie. But there’s one thing I remember from that movie. Ben Affleck plays a pilot who’s the greatest pilot in the entire Navy. When the Japanese start attacking and there’s pure chaos on the ground, all Ben Affleck is trying to do is get up in a plane. Because that’s where he belongs. That’s where he’s the best. He can’t do anything for anyone down here. He’s useless.

I like characters like that. They’re so great at what they do that that’s where they need to be to shine the brightest. Assuming Emily is great at her job, she should know that her best chance at saving the plane is up in that tower. Cause that’s where she shines the brightest.

The second example is Wedding Crashers. In that movie, the writers, Steve Fabor and Bob Fisher, couldn’t figure out their ending for draft after draft after draft. Then one day one of them said, in the most obvious of statements, “Our movie is called Wedding Crashers. It needs to end at a wedding.” And that’s how they came up with their ending.

This script is similar in that, it’s about an air traffic controller. It needs to end in an air traffic tower.

Yes, I understand that that makes the ending LESS cinematic. But if the FBI is guarding that tower and Emily has to sneak back in, there are elements there that can be cinematic (not to mention, it would be cheaper to shoot).

Those are my thoughts on how to improve Bedford. If any of these ideas have inspired you guys to come up with even better ideas, please share them. The more feedback Joseph has going into this next draft, the better. :)

I would even ask Jospeph to come up with a 2-3 page document detailing what he’s going to do for the next draft and I would post it here. That way, we can spot any potential problems ahead of time and adjust the outline accordingly.

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Premise: 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.
About: Today’s script is the culmination of our 7th month journey toward the Mega-Showdown. Congratulations to Joseph Fattal for claiming the top prize!!!
Writer: Joseph Fattal
Details: 98 pages

Major spoilers throughout this review.  I recommend you read the script yourself first.

Coming up with a great concept is hard. Most people WHO WORK IN THIS BUSINESS don’t even come up with a single great concept in their entire career. So when you run into someone who’s come up with two of them, as today’s writer, Joseph Fattal, has, you want to know what their secret is. If you don’t remember Joseph’s previous awesome concept, here it is: An Amazon truck driver is ambushed in Mexico by a group of mobsters who mistake him for a drug cartel deliveryman and must survive using only the packages inside his van.

So I went to the source and asked Mr. Fattal what his concept-generating secret was.

“I don’t have a magic bullet, but my best advice on this front is to just brainstorm a lot, hedge your bets, come up with a TON of story ideas and write them all down. I have folders with hundreds of concepts and I section them by genre. Then I do a lot of field testing, pitching the best concepts to anyone who’ll listen.

As for technique itself, I try not to get too attached to the initial logline when I start developing ideas. Like, I think of things very technically. I come up with a concept and then start attacking it from all angles of screenwriting techniques to make it better (lots of techniques that I learned from Scriptshadow). Does it have clear GSU? What market does this appeal to? Is there a good main character in this? Can I convince studios that this will make more money than it would cost to produce? And then I adjust it accordingly.”

So there ya go. I’m sure Joseph will be in the comments willing to answer more questions about this topic. In the meantime, let’s check out his contest-winning entry…

Emily is an ATC operator at a small airport on the east coast of the US called Bedford. When we meet her, she’s dealing with a passenger jet from Atlas Airlines that is frustrated with some bad fog that they’ve hit on their descent. The only problem is, Emily doesn’t see any fog on her radar.

Things get worse from there. Their call sign disappears from her radar and none of the other planes in the area seem to be able to find Atlas. Emily makes the other controller in the room, Crane, aware of the situation, but he doesn’t seem too bothered by it.

When Emily finally gets Atlas back on the line, the captain’s voice sounds clipped and awkward. He’s still looking for landing coordinates but Emily can’t even figure out where he is so she can’t help him.

Soon after that, she hears some angry military guy on her radio demanding help. He keeps talking about “Delta” formation and insists that Emily clear a landing strip for him. Emily has no idea who this guy is or where his airplane is. This is then followed by a lot of different languages over her radio, culminating in a guy named Mike in a Cessna who claims that he’s come from Cambridge… IN ENGLAND.

Now Emily is really freaking out. Mike says that he’s almost out of fuel and he needs to land but Emily refuses because they’re not allowed to just let any plane land if they don’t know who they are. So she, instead, keeps him up in the sky, and starts asking him to look around for her and see if he can spot Atlas.

To make matters worse, we learn that Emily’s ex-husband is on the Atlas flight. This husband is not a good guy and Emily has zero contact with him. But he’s coming here to spend time with their daughter. And her daughter is very excited about that, which Emily has mucho conflicted feelings about.

As Emily continues to try and figure out where Atlas is, the FBI invades her radio and tells her to stay the F away from Atlas. Atlas is their focus now. She’s been dismissed. But Emily is not giving up that easily. She’s determined to get Atlas down safe. But to do that, she’s going to have to get around not just the FBI, but the US freaking military!

Now that we’re at the end of the contest, I can confess, this is the script that I was hoping would win. It has a lot of the things I love in a spec script. Airplanes! Contained location. Condensed time frame. An angle into a subject matter we haven’t seen before. I always loved that scene in Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind where they’re in the control tower tracking a UFO that’s about to crash into a plane. To create a feature-length version of that? Sign me up!

Was the feature-length version of that a perfect landing? Or an epic Tenerife-like crash for the ages?

Good news.

Bedford is a lot closer to the former than the latter.

This script does a lot of things right but the biggest thing it got right was the mystery. I’ve read a lot of screenplays and seen a lot of movies so I know my way around a plot prediction.  But I was STRUGGLING to figure out what the heck was going on here all the way until the last twenty pages.

Usually, when that happens to me these days, it’s rarely because the script is written well. It’s more often because the script is such a mess that it’s impossible to decipher much of anything that’s going on.

But Fattal’s script is purposeful all the way through. He understands his mystery and he understands how to dole out clues, red herrings, side mysteries, and escalating plotlines in a way that makes you want to turn the pages. Which is all this game is really about – is your script good enough to get the reader to keep turning the pages? And this script is!

To give you a little more insight into HOW page-turnable-it is, there are three levels of page-turnability for Scriptshadow. One is that it’s not page-turnable at all. So I stop reading. Two is that it’s “script review page-turnable.” That’s when I’m interested enough to keep turning the pages but if I wasn’t reviewing it, I probably wouldn’t. Three is legit page-turnable. I would keep turning the pages even if I wasn’t reviewing the script. Bedford is the third one.

The thing that Fattal did that really got me was he created four mysteries that were all interesting in their own right but they were different enough that I was desperate to figure out how they connected. Why was Atlas frozen in place? Why was Atlas’s communication so weird? How did a Cessna from England get to Bedford? And who was this angry military type who kept yelling at Emily from the radio?

I needed to see how all those puzzle pieces fit together! That kept me racing through the script all the way til the end. I didn’t even check the internet! Which is RARE when I read a script these days.

I believe Bedford will be made into a movie.

But there are certain things it has to improve in order to get there. Some of them are easy. Some are quite difficult. But the good news is, there’s a path forward to production for this script. How often do we see that here even with professional scripts?!

Let’s start with Crane. Here Emily is going through the strangest craziest series of events that have ever happened to her and have probably ever happened to any ATC controller, yet here Crane is, over on the other side of the room just chilling out! Give this a guy a six-pack of Mountain Dew and a Nintendo Switch and he’s just fine hanging out in his own little world the rest of the night. We need to do something about Crane. His lack of action does not match up with the situation at all.

Next, we have the personal storyline – daughter and absent dad. I commend Joseph for trying to connect the personal story to the plane story. But it just doesn’t feel right. The dad being on the Atlas plane is way too coincidental. And the connection between the daughter and the dad is okay but not nearly as compelling as it could be. We have to rethink that part of the story. It’s too cute, like you can feel the writer wrapping everything up in a perfect bow, which is why it reads false.

Mike.

Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike.

I like the idea of Mike. But Mike has some issues. For one, I still have no idea how he got to the US. So there’s that. Two, Emily is WAY TOO FREAKING CASUAL about poor Mike who LITERALLY has 2 gallons of fuel left in his plane and he’s desperate to land. Yet she turns him into her own personal errand boy, having him fly all over the place looking for clues. It was like, “DUDE! EMILY! GET THIS MAN DOWN ON THE GROUND! HE’S ABOUT TO CRASH!” And why is Mike listening to her?!? He would be way more focused on living. Not every plot beat needs the ultimate ticking time bomb. Maybe Mike has plenty of fuel. He’s just confused as hell about how he ended up in the US.

I kind of like Emily and Mike (via his plane) coming together at the end. But something tells me there’s more we can get out of this moment. Maybe, for example, Mike has to fly into the triangular alien formation to save the plane or something. Having him just safely crash-land nearby was anticlimactic.

The real thing that scares me, though, is the ending. It’s kind of cool but I’m afraid it won’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s better than M. Night’s infamous ending to Signs, where aliens visiting a planet with 80% water realize that water kills them. But I’m not convinced that aliens would need humans to help them triangulate the path back to their planet. I’m not going to say to get rid of that as the ending. But I wasn’t totally buying it.

I’ll wrap this up by saying I like the concept of the “Contained Adjacent” genre. What that means is, you spend MOST OF THE TIME in the contained location. But then, in order to create some variety in the plot, you take them out of that contained location late in the script, like Joseph did here. With that said, I think there’s a version of this ending that needs to end in the control tower. That’s what our hero does best. So let’s put her back in there (think about how Tom Cruise must get in a plane at the end of Top Gun because that’s where he’s most effective).

I definitely dug this script and I’m curious what everybody here thinks as well. Some of you guys give really great notes. I think, together, we can help Joseph solve these problems and turn a “worth the read” into an “impressive.”

Great job, Joseph! Had a lot of fun with this one. It’s worthy of the Mega Showdown Title. :)

Script Link: Bedford

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

What I learned: This one comes from Joseph himself. Try not to get too attached to your concept because there could be a better concept inside of it. Here’s Joseph…

“Here’s a fun story about Wish List (my script about the Amazon driver). It was originally called Extermination and was about two government guys in a post-apocalyptic world that get sent to drive a truck containing an exterminating bomb into the heart of a zombie-infested city. I really wanted to write a contained thriller, and I chose a truck/van to be the contained setting. And it was around Covid, I wanted something to do with viruses, so I put in the whole zombie angle. 

But it didn’t feel right, it was too much “fantasy” because it was a post-apocalyptic world (and I’m not great with fantasy), and the story just felt very forced in a lot of ways. So I started rethinking it entirely one day, even though I had already spent so much time outlining it. How do I make it more marketable? Can it be a van in the modern world? How do I add more elements that drive the story forward (i.e. the Amazon packages)? 

Then I came up with the Amazon angle. And I loved it, and everybody I pitched it to loved it. Even then I had a hard time throwing away the original idea, because I had spent weeks on the treatment at that point, and I was emotionally attached to a lot of aspects of that story. But I’m glad I redid the whole thing. Because now I’m 4 years into Wish List and many drafts later, and still manage to get eyes on the script and showcase my writing because people love the idea.  So I try not to get too attached to the ideas, that way I can better determine what works and have the strength to throw out what doesn’t, even if I already worked super hard on it. This has been a very useful mindset for handling feedback, too.”

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.