Sorry to say but there will not be a Scriptshadow post today (Tuesday). However, there is a big fat 6000 word newsletter in your inbox. You know how shocked everyone is that Squid Game was rejected for 10 years? Well in this newsletter, I discuss a project that took 30 YEARS to get made. I also talk about the season premiere of the amazingly written Succession. I give you a Kinetic update. I discuss the latest scripts to hit the market in October. I give you a sneaky good show no one knows about on Apple TV. I analyze all the latest trailers. And, finally, I review a really heartfelt feel-good holiday script.
If you want to read my newsletter, you have to sign up. So if you’re not on the mailing list, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line, “NEWSLETTER!” and I’ll send it to you.
p.s. For those of you who keep signing up but don’t receive the newsletter, try sending me another e-mail address. E-mailing programs are notoriously quirky and there may be several reasons why your e-mail address/server is rejecting the newsletter. One of which is your server is bad and needs to be spanked.
Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama
Premise: A family is entrusted with a planet that produces the most valuable energy source in the galaxy – spice.
About: Dune’s long perilous journey to the big screen is finally over. The film was released in theaters this weekend, as well as simulcast on HBO Max. It pulled in 40 million dollars, the largest post-pandemic haul yet for an HBO Max simul-release. The movie comes from visionary sci-fi director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049). Everyone’s asking the question, “Is a 40 million dollar opening enough to greenlight a sequel?” Well, I hope so considering the first movie didn’t have an ending. Dune is doing pretty well with critics (82%), and a little better with moviegoers (91% on RT and 8.3 on IMDB).
Writers: Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth and Denis Villeneuve (based on the novel by Frank Herbert)
Details: 2 hours 35 minutes
I should’ve been worried when I read this headline over the weekend: “Denis Villeneuve claims Tenet is a masterpiece.” But, if I’m being truthful, I was worried about this film all the way back when I saw the original trailer. My initial thoughts were, “This looks like it has the potential to be REALLY boring.” And, unfortunately, that’s Dune’s biggest battle. Fighting off its fits of boringness.
The problem here is Denis Villeneuve. Denis is a very talented filmmaker. But he wasn’t built to direct big-budget movies. He was built to create smaller artsier fare. There are large swaths of this movie that feel like a Terrance Malick film. And while that works with limited audiences made up primarily of cinephiles. It might as well be nuclear waste when selling it to mainstream audiences.
In Denis’s defense, there are so many things working against Dune as a feature film that one finds it hard to believe it would work in any capacity. The worst part of it is the story itself, which seems designed to be boring. The Atreides family is handed the planet Dune, which produces the main energy source of the galaxy, ‘spice.’ The plot that occurs for the next 60 minutes is anyone’s guess. But it can basically be boiled down to “people in rooms talking,” a screenwriting death sentence for a feature film.
After what seems like forever, the film finally comes alive when the Emperor orders the other clans to attack and destroy the Atreides family. But Denis finds a way to make even that boring, as we’re soon watching Timothee Chalamet and his mom spend ten entire minutes inside an underground tent having the most boring conversations known to man. It is one poor story choice after another here.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the movie ends out of nowhere, as if everyone on the production team realized, all at once, “Um, this story goes nowhere so why continue telling it?” In cutting the movie off so abruptly, they seem to have erased an entire character, the blue-eyed girl played by Zendaya, who was so heavily involved in the marketing that you might have expected her to have upwards of 2 hours of screen time. Try 5 minutes. All of which is in Timothee Chalamet’s dreams.
There are some lessons to learn from this screenwriting disaster. So let’s get into those.
There are way too many “two people in a room talking” scenes. A lot of you gave me crap for bemoaning 2PIART scenes but this movie shows you exactly how dangerous they can be to a story’s momentum. This is a giant production. So why do you have so many 5-6 minute scenes of two people talking in a room?? It’s egregious.
Even worse, nobody shows any emotion in this movie. Every character is muted. Everyone speaks monotone. Everyone looks serious. This is a classic beginner screenwriting mistake. You believe that if you muzzle emotion, your movie will come off as more “serious” and “thoughtful.” But all it does is make every single scene that has characters in it boring.
You can get away with one character being like this. You can’t get away with a dozen characters being like this. At a certain point, people need to show emotion. That’s what audiences connect with because we’re all emotional creatures. When something bad happens, we want the character to be mad. Or sad. When something good happens, we want to share in their happiness. There is no emotion in this movie at all. And when you combine that with the stark lifeless backdrops, it feels like we’re in the world’s biggest indie flick.
Another screenwriting 101 mistake – when you have a major team-up in your screenplay – characters who are going to have a lot of screen time together – you want those two characters to have the most interesting conflict-filled relationship possible. Why? Because they’re going to make up 50-60-70% of the movie we watch. So if there’s no interesting conflict between them, you could have up to 70% of your movie with two characters who have zero interesting moments together. Dune makes the inexplicable decision to team Timothee Chalamet up with his mother. The two have absolutely nothing interesting going on between them. They just mumble back and forth to each other for 150 minutes.
And the thing is, they actually had the opportunity to create some conflict here. One of the first things Chalamet’s mom does is send him into a trial where, if he fails, he dies. Mom trying to kill you is a pretty good starting point for a conflict-heavy dynamic that’s going to need a lot of work to resolve. However, Chalamet holds no ill-will towards his mother after her attempted assassination of him. He shrugs it off and goes back to mumbling.
Another thing I tell writers is that when you’re writing sci-fi or fantasy, stick with two sides: the good guys and the bad guys. That way, we’ll never be confused. However, if you have three sides, or in Dune’s case, four sides, there’s going to be a good chance we’ll be confused by what’s going on. That’s exactly what happens here. The Emperor decides to take down House Atreides. Is the Emperor part of a House himself? No idea. Is he completely on his own? Maybe. When people did start to attack House Atreides, which House were they a part of? Information not available.
I’m not even sure what House Atreides’ job is. Are they only harvesting and distributing the spice? Or do they now own the planet and, therefore, own the spice itself? This matters because if they own the planet, it makes sense that others would want to go to war with them, so they could have the planet themselves. But if they’re just harvesting for the greater good of the galaxy, it makes less sense that anyone would want to attack them.
And this isn’t insignificant information here. This is at the heart of what the movie is about. If we don’t know what the rules are, how can we appreciate the nuances of any sort of attack on them? I know Dune is not trying to be Star Wars. But I understood what the central conflict of Star Wars was within ten minutes. It just seems like nobody sat down and said, “We have to figure out how to make this conflict understandable and accessible.”
Even stuff that should be easy to understand is confusing. Why is spice red but the people who live among it and are supposedly overcome by the toxicity of spice – their eyes are blue? That seems like a no-brainer to make those two things the same color.
It reinforces, to me, that Dune is not meant to be a feature film. I’m not sure it’s meant to be anything other than a novel. But, if it has any chance of being a media product, it definitely needs the length of a TV show to set all of this elaborate mythology up.
The directing in this movie isn’t that good either, to be honest. The movie looks pretty. But I’m not sure that’s the point of making Dune. One thing I noticed was how empty the movie felt. George Lucas was famous for his obsession with filling up the frame. He wanted his world to be so vibrant and exciting that it would seem like there were ten other movies going on in the background of the movie he was telling.
Denis is the opposite of that. He finds gigantic empty rooms and puts two characters in them and has them speak for 10 minutes. After doing this enough times, the world begins to feel so empty as to be insignificant. I mean is all this squabbling that’s going on for a few thousand people? Because that’s what constant empty frames makes it feel like.
Another Denis issue is that he doesn’t make a single exciting choice in the entire movie. I’m no defender of the original Dune. But Lynch makes a couple dozen exciting choices in that movie. Where is that here? For all the lauding of Villeneuve, his sci-fi imagery and his characters are standard. That’s the one area where you could’ve made your movie stand out. Instead you opted to create a boring political indie film with some pretty desktop wallpaper backdrops.
Did I like anything in the film? Yes. I liked the sand worm stuff. In particular that first scene where the sand worm is coming and the ship breaks down and they have to improvise. That was a cool scene. And then there are a couple of other sand worm scenes that rocked as well. Denis did a great job of creating that looming dread of one of those things coming your way.
Ironically, I think the sand worm scenes expose what’s wrong with Dune. Which is that, the scenes prove that they’re the only sequences you can actually do anything with in the feature format. Those attacks were built for the big screen. But nothing else was. It’s scene after scene after scene of two characters speaking in giant empty rooms. And it’s proved to me that Denis needs to be making smaller movies. This big stuff isn’t his forte.
Despite my desperation for a good sci-fi movie, I can’t recommend Dune. There’s way more bad here than good.
[ ] What the hell did I just stream?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Readers need to understand the central conflict of your movie. In Infinity War, it’s Thanos trying to snap half the population out of the universe. In Star Wars, it’s the Empire trying to permanently squash the rebellion. In Dune it’s…. What exactly? That’s right. There is no central conflict. Well, until the Emperor decides to take down House Atreides. But that doesn’t happen for 80 minutes. This is basic stuff. The fact that nobody on the Dune team understood it is somewhat baffling.
The voting begins NOW!
How excited am I for Halloween Horror Showdown? Let’s put it this way. My favorite candy in the universe is the Reese’s peanut butter cup. Halloween allows me to buy bags upon bags of Reese’s peanut butter cups from the supermarket and nobody questions me. “Of course these are for the trick-or-treaters. What? You think I would eat all of these by myself? Ha ha ha ha. What a silly idea. That’s way too much candy for one person.” But as only I, and Scriptshadow readers know, those Reese’s will never reach a child’s hands. Because they’re mine! All mine!!! Mwahahahahahahha!!!”
I got some KILLER entries this year. Horror is clearly the genre people on this site are the most passionate about. Most interesting logline that didn’t make it: “Seven influential philanthropists must fight for their lives after attending a charity event secretly hosted by a murderous cult of billionaires. Ready or Not meets Die Hard.” Favorite “Why You Should Read:” Because we all know that feeling when you kinda like the people you follow online, but also kinda want them to die.
Just know that there were a handful of entries that were very close to making the cut. So don’t get down on yourself if you weren’t picked. This was a close race!
If you’re new to these parts, you’re probably confused about what’s going on here. Well, the Scriptshadow Showdown Series is a quarterly screenplay competition where anyone can send in their script and compete. I go through all the loglines and pick my favorite five. I post those five loglines, along with the scripts themselves, so that you can download and read the scripts.
Your duty is to read as much of each entry as you can then vote for your favorite in the comments section (just write the title of your favorite script and your vote is counted). Feel free to add commentary on why you picked the script and also why you didn’t pick the others. Showdowns double as an opportunity for the competing screenwriters to get feedback and improve.
A new feature for this showdown, by the way, which I’m sure you’ll all love. I include the reason I picked each script!
Good luck to all of you. Let’s find a killer screenplay!
Title: Cinder (taken down – writer and script are making progress. :)
Title: My Dinner With Andre
Genre: Horror/Thriller/Black Comedy
Logline: A struggling journalist is invited to dinner by a canceled actor suspected of cannibalism. But as the night descends into chaos and madness, she not only questions if the accusations are true, but if she’ll make it out of the house alive.
Why you should read: It’s a ripped from the headlines story that mixes original Hollywood monster movies and into the real-life monsters of Hollywood resulting in a macabre, modern-age horror hybrid.
Why I picked it: In addition to being timely, this seems like the perfect little intimate horror flick that would be cheap to make.
Title: Alone
Genre: Horror
Logline: Stalked by a supernatural force that only strikes when she is alone, a monophobic young woman joins a group retreat to conquer her fear of isolation. But she soon finds there is no safety in numbers, as the combined anxiety of the group amplifies the demons that hunt them.
Why you should read: This script is fully vaccinated against pandemics. It contains a small cast, limited locations, and a high concept that could be produced on a budget. It takes the primal fear of being alone and packages it as a new brand of monster.
Why I picked it: Anxiety has become a much bigger problem in society since the pandemic so I was drawn to a story about anxiety, and I liked the clever twist of the group anxiety making the monster even stronger.
Title: The Short List
Genre: Horror-Thriller/Dark Comedy
Logline: A self-made Black executive is invited to join an eclectic group of colleagues from his elite private equity firm for a weekend retreat at the estate of their mysterious boss and soon realizes they’re fighting for the same promotion — and their lives.
Why you should read: “The Short List” was a semi-finalist in this year’s Nicholl Fellowship, landing in the top 150 out of nearly 8,200 screenplays. Also, some people who have read it have made favorable comparisons to “The Menu,” which I know you’ve listed among your favorite scripts.
Why I picked it: I was on the fence with this one but I read the first page and really liked the writing. Also, when he mentioned “The Menu,” one of my favorite scripts last year, that definitely caught my interest.
Title: Bloodmouth
Genre: Horror – Creature Feature
Logline: An agoraphobic woman struggles to survive as grotesque winged creatures wreak havoc on the world outside, forcing her to decide between staying in the comfort of her home or facing the unknown and reuniting with family who may or may not be alive.
Why you should read: I hate to talk about it anymore, but COVID really messed with our heads. Not knowing what’s out there, how other people are doing, the feeling of being trapped, isolated, and not being comfortable going for groceries. It was odd and scary (it was fucked quite honestly). During this time, I thought of writing a script where the protagonist has agoraphobia, and not set in a COVID universe, but in a normal universe. In this case, the person may possibly experience those feelings daily, which is terrifying to me. So then the reddit horror screenplay challenge started, and I was assigned ‘creature feature’. Perfect. A woman is confined to her home while something is out there. I wanted to make a modern creature feature, featuring the terror of The Birds and the darkness of The Descent. And voila, out of the darkness on bloody wings flew Bloodmouth. I was also inspired by an engraving titled ‘Knight, Death, and the Devil’. I hope you like it. It was a lot of fun to write!
Why I picked it: I like the timeliness of the concept. And, again, I’m drawn to stories about anxiety right now. Since they’re kind of similar, I’m hoping that one of these two (Bloodmouth or Alone) stands out and delivers on the promise of this subject matter.
Title: Gravesite Crows
Genre: Slasher
Logline: A murder of crows and a haunted shaman’s mask reanimate a disgraced Native American so he can get revenge against five high schoolers that killed him in drunk driving accident.
Why you should read: This script has lots of chase and thrill scenes that I think the faithful at Scriptshadow will have a fun time dissecting. — For those on the fence when it comes to slashers, I’ve brought in some unique ideas and effects that have never been done before. Gravesite Crows is not a knock-off Halloween (1978) or any other horror movie. There is humor to be found in the filmables and the unfilables in this script. — Finally, you should read Gravesite Crows because it looks unlike any other script you’ve ever read. I used colors and fonts to break-up the static, black-and-white page to emphasize the unique elements of the script and draw attention to the visuals in the story.
Why I picked it: What can you say!? I’ve seen E.C. grafting like a boss these last two weeks and I just can’t ignore the determination this man has. He’s so easy to root for and I had to give him a shot!
Lessons from arguably the best zombie film ever made!
TODAY (THURSDAY) IS THE ‘HALLOWEEN HORROR SHOWDOWN’ DEADLINE. Get your entries in by 11:59pm tonight! The five most compelling pitches will be posted tomorrow for everyone to read and vote on. As a reminder, here’s how to enter…
What: Halloween Horror Showdown
Genre: Horror
When: Entries are due Thursday, October 21st, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
How: Include title, genre, logline, Why We Should Read, and a PDF of your script
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
While I eagerly await the remainder of the horror entries, we’re going back to the zombie genre for another Halloween Horror 10 Tips! I had so much fun watching Night of the Living Dead last week, I thought we’d check out its sequel, a movie many consider to be the best zombie movie of all time. This is the movie where a group of people hole up in a shopping mall during the zombie apocalypse. Lots of good lessons to learn here!
1) Even More In Media Res – As we talked about last week, Night of the Living Dead throws us right into the action. Zombies are coming at us in the very first scene. Dawn of the Dead takes that approach and multiplies it by a thousand. We’re plopped down on a news set as zombies take over the world. Everything is falling apart in front of our eyes. People are screaming to get off the air. Newscasters are determined to stay on and keep giving the news. It’s absolute chaos. If you’ve never seen this movie, go watch it now just for the opening. It feels insanely realistic and scary. More importantly, Romero doubles down on his ‘in media res’ approach to zombies, showing us, once again, how effective it is. A tremendous opening scene (and a good follow-up scene as well).
2) Exposition Mastery – I noticed something very cool about the initial exposition being used to describe what’s happening in the world. 99% of the time in these movies, the exposition is offered through people watching the news on TV, which is a passive, and therefore, boring way to convey exposition. What Dawn of the Dead does that’s really clever is they PUT YOU IN THE ACTUAL NEWSROOM as the news is being given. Because we’re experiencing the news from the inside, as all the chaos surrounds us, the exposition feels a lot more active and compelling.
3) Create ticking time bombs WITHIN the story – When I talk about ticking time bombs, I’m often referring to the kind that frame the entire story (“The hero has 48 hours to find his missing daughter!”). But remember, you should be creating smaller “self-contained” ticking time bombs as well, as they help keep that section of the screenplay tense. For example, helicopter weatherman Stephen approaches news producer Francine and says, “Meet me out by the chopper at 9pm sharp. We’re getting out of here.” This “mini” ticking time bomb creates an intense little storyline now where we’re determined to see whether our couple gets out or not.
4) Set characters up through their reactions – I recently read a script where none of the characters stuck. I couldn’t remember them from page to page. The most common reason this happens is that the writer didn’t do enough to properly establish the character when they were introduced. A great way to establish someone is through their reactions. We see that here with Peter, the big burly SWAT team member who joins our group. He’s forced to kill a bunch of zombies who’ve been stuffed into the basement of a hotel. He must shoot each of them in the head. As he does this, one after another, he starts crying. That’s the reaction audiences latch onto. They now know this guy is a sympathetic dude who hates that he has to do this. Not only do we have a good feel for the character moving forward. But we like him as well.
5) Look for opportunities to split people up – There’s safety in numbers. Which is great in real life. But bad for horror movies. Audiences are less scared when your characters are together. Which means you should look for ways to split them up. When our heroes land their chopper for a refueling, Stephen and Francine go one way looking for supplies while Peter goes another. Now all we need is a few zombies lurking and we’ve got ourselves a couple of cool scenes to crosscut between.
6) Use your unique surroundings to create memorable moments – Not enough writers consider what’s unique about a location. Anything unique should get special attention because that’s where you’re going to give audiences things they haven’t seen before. One of the most memorable zombie kills ever occurs in Dawn of the Dead when Roger is refueling the helicopter. A zombie moves in to attack, has to climb over some boxes, and then while he’s up on the boxes, the helicopter blade slices the top of his head off. That’s way more interesting than yet another gunshot to the head. (pro-tip: A clever writer would’ve had Roger execute the kill himself, shoving the zombie up there with his own hands)
7) Old school social commentary – Probably one of the most famous examples of social commentary ever, Dawn of the Dead puts a spotlight on America’s obsession with consumption, highlighting a bunch of zombies (us) brainlessly wandering the hallways of a mall. Consume consume consume. Buy buy buy. I put this up as a reminder that if today’s highly charged social commentary topics make you squeamish, there’s other, less controversial, commentary you could be making, like Dawn of the Dead does here. If your commentary is clever enough, like “Dawn,” it will get people talking about your script for sure.
8) Start light in your second act so that it can build – Remember that your second act is going to build. So if you start out too big, you may not have anywhere to go. Romero knows we’re doing to be stuck in the mall for the whole movie so he starts off by having some fun. Have the two guys run around the mall like kids in a candy store. Everything they’ve ever wanted: absolutely free. You do this so you can start building, from “happy,” to “kinda serious,” to “serious,” to “very serious,” to “Oh shit, we’re f%$@d.”
9) Give your characters the occasional reward – Horror movies can devolve into a never-ending series of intense scenes. The monsters are getting stronger. People in the group are dying. The remaining characters are at each others’ throats. It’s important to, every once in a while, give your characters a reward that makes them feel good, and by association, makes us feel good. We get that here when our team finally gets into the gun shop. It’s a big fun moment as now they’re able to outfit themselves with a ton of weapons to take down the army of zombies. In general, there should be no singular emotion that lasts, uninterrupted, the entire screenplay. Emotion should fluctuate during a movie, from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, and everything in between.
10) Don’t forget your relationship issues! – You have a choice when you create relationship problems between characters. You can either include a problem that’s already there at the beginning of the movie. Or you can introduce a strong relationship then add a problem to it later on. Dawn of the Dead has both. Francine is pregnant with Stephen’s baby and neither of them are sure they want to have it. That’s their issue. Peter and Roger, meanwhile, are best friends through this whole thing. There’s no problem at all. However, when Roger gets infected, Peter realizes that the time is coming where he’s going to have to kill his friend. Four characters. Two relationship issues. Both well done.
The writer of The Martian attempts to remake Interstellar… with an E.T. Twist!
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A science teacher is chosen for a deep space mission that will save the earth from a virus that is slowly darkening the sun.
About: Andy Weir, who’s responsible for one of the biggest self-publishing success stories ever – The Martian – is back in his wheelhouse with his third book, which currently has a staggering 37,000 reviews on Amazon. The movie adaptation will star Ryan Gosling and be directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Drew Goddard, who adapted The Martian, will adapt this one as well.
Writer: Andy Weir
Details: 482 pages
From what I understand, Project Hail Mary was originally conceived as a space opera, like Star Wars. However, after writing 75,000 words of this space opera and thinking it was terrible, Weir abandoned the novel and went off to write Artemis instead (his second book). But he couldn’t get some of the ideas from Project Hail Mary out of his head so he went back and repurposed the story to be more like… well, the book that made him famous: The Martian. Let’s see what the results were.
Ryland Grace wakes up in a windowless techy white room. He has no idea how he got here. But he does notice there are two other people in the room with him and they’re both dead. He senses he was part of some sort of crew which means that he must be in space. Why is he in space? He doesn’t know that yet.
He starts exploring the multi-module ship and finds a science lab. He’s supposed to work on something scientific. But what? The book is set up to jump back in time as Ryland remembers the pieces of his past, which come sparingly. The first thing he remembers is that the scientists of the world realized that the sun was getting darker. And if this continued, in about 30 years, humanity would be extinct.
Uh oh.
Back on the ship, Ryland starts doing experiments and realizes that the stuff that’s darkening the sun is called astrophage. And boy is this stuff nasty. Because it’s not just darkening our sun. It’s darkening all of the nearby suns in our galaxy. That’s when Ryland realizes that he’s not in his solar system, he’s in a completely different solar system called Tau Ceti. He’s been sent here because Tau Ceti is the only star that isn’t darkening. And his team – aka, him – needs to figure out what it’s doing right.
While Ryland is trying to figure out how to conduct experiments on local astrophage, he sees another ship! But this isn’t Star Trek where you just call them up on your space Skype. This is an Andy Weir novel. Everything is realistic. There are no phones. So these two ships have to figure out how to communicate some other way.
After a long drawn out process, the other ship docs to his and Ryland meets the sole occupant of the other ship, a spider alien he names “Rocky.” Several long chapters are dedicated to the two species learning each others’ languages (again, this is an Andy Weir novel where everything is dealt with realistically) and Ryland learns that Rocky is here for the exact same reason he is. His planet discovered the same thing, that Tau Ceti is the only solar system that isn’t affected by astrophage.
(Spoilers) Long story short, astrophage was created here. And because it was created here, it has a natural predator that can kill it. Which means all these two have to do is pack up some of these predator particles and head back to their respective homes. However, when something goes wrong at the last second, Ryland will be tasked with either going home to save mankind or going back and saving his new friend.
One of the things I’m a big proponent of is figuring out what you bring to the table that nobody else does and then writing scripts that lean into that strength. Think about it. Why would we show up to see something that feels exactly like everything else we’ve seen? We seek out material, in written and produced form, that has a distinctive voice.
Weir’s voice is science. Literally NOBODY else is doing what he’s doing. Let me repeat that because it’s important. NOBODY ELSE IS DOING WHAT HE’S DOING. If you’re the only one who’s doing something, you are a commodity. The studios can’t go to JJ Abrams or Quentin Tarantino and say, “I want a movie like The Martian that is steeped in hardcore science.” They wouldn’t be able to do it. They can only go to Andy Weir.
So now I ask you – what can studios only get from you as a writer? What is your unique commodity?
But Weir’s talents don’t stop there. If he only gave you science, you’d be bored out of your mind. He’s created a unique ability to package science in a fun easy-to-read way. Part of it is that he knows he has to move the story along so he never dwells for too long on anything before jumping to the next plot beat. But, also, he has an insane love for science, which comes off in the way he writes.
That’s worth something, by the way. Readers can feel when a writer is passionate about what they’re writing. It often adds an extra level of energy to the story.
That doesn’t mean Weir doesn’t have weaknesses. He does. Project Hail Mary has a huge weakness. Weir wants to write a thriller. He wants to keep the pages moving. But he also has to explain all this backstory so you know why he’s doing this. And writing a thriller in first person with extensive backstory doesn’t make sense.
So Weir cheats. He creates this amnesia storyline whereby Ryland only remembers the past bit by bit, and each time he remembers, we cut back to the past to get that new piece of information. Conveniently, these pieces of the past come to him in perfect linear order, allowing him to tell a perfectly linear story from the past as he intercuts to the perfectly linear present.
It’s a sloppy device and it almost derails the story. I mean here’s a guy who can spend ten pages on the importance of why a door corner must be measured by the Pythagorean Theorem in space lest the entire ship blow up, yet the rules of amnesia just happen to align perfectly to the extent that each bit of remembered past matches up perfectly with the story’s structure.
I think the big question coming out of Hail Mary is, can this be adapted into a movie as good as The Martian? And the answer is I honestly have no idea. I suspected, after reading The Martian, that we’d be bored hanging out with Matt Damon in a single room through that entire second act but I was wrong. So I’m not going to write Project Mary off.
But the make or break part of Hail Mary is, without a doubt, going to be Rocky. It isn’t just creating Rocky that’s going to be difficult. It’ll be the tone. Because he kind of sounds like a slightly smarter version of E.T. But the focus here on genuine science would imply that they’d want Rocky to feel more realistic. And yet, the way he’s written, he’s like a spider-dog that communicates through singing. I’m just not sure how you make that work onscreen.
I’m getting some Jar-Jar Binks vibes – or, gasp, Mac and Me – where he could inadvertently come off as comical. If he works, the movie will work. If he doesn’t, Ryan Gosling is going to be memed to death for the rest of his life. I would go so far as to guess that they’re going to change this alien to something more human. I just don’t know how you make a spider dog with no eyes that sings work.
All in all, Project Hail Mary is a fun book. It reads like a movie. It’s got a lot of fun little twists and turns along the way. If you liked The Martian, I see no way you wouldn’t like this too. It does have some weaknesses but they never overwhelm its strengths.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I hear a lot of writers share stories similar to Weir’s experience on Project Hail Mary, where they start off writing something and, once they get deep into it, realize it sucks. When that happens, it can be very difficult for the writer to give up because now they have the sunk cost fallacy in play: You’ve already written so much of the story. Therefore, even if it sucks, you should still finish it. However, I think the better option is to do what Weir did. Understand that just because a novel or a script isn’t working, that doesn’t mean giving up on it now means giving up on it forever. What often happens when we get some distance from our failed stories is that we realize there are still some kernels in them that could be used to create a different better story. We can then extract those kernels and write a book like Project Hail Mary, which was pretty darn good. That’s a better option than spending years trying to make something work that’s inherently flawed.
