We’re back with seven new First Act entries! If you weren’t around last week, I’m doing a public dissection of First Act Contest submissions. I give each entry at least 10 pages. From there, I keep reading until I get bored. If the script manages to keep me reading all the way to the end of the first act, that script advances to the next round. Then I re-evaluate every script that advanced, pick five finalists, and choose a winner. Good news. Another script got through this week! Keep reading to find out which one. And, just as was the case last week, let me know if you disagree with my analysis on any of the entries!
Title: WAR HOUND
Genre: Action
Logline: After being honorably discharged from the US Special Forces because of a failed mission in Syria, a former Army operator returns home to a country he defended but can’t recognize anymore. A call from an FBI agent who masterminded the failed Syrian mission brings him an offer to go to Ukraine as a volunteer and exact revenge on the guy who disgraced him.
Writer: Dimitrije Vojnov
Thoughts: This is cool. The writer of this script has NINE produced films in Serbia. And, obviously, English is his second language. I have mad respect for anyone competing in a contest that isn’t in his native language. Not easy to do! So let’s start with the obvious. AVOID TWO-SENTENCE LOGLINES. I’m okay with them if you have a really complex world to set up (sci-fi or fantasy). Or if you’re log-lining a show, which needs a little more explanation. But this didn’t need a two-sentence logline. My big worry going into this (yes, I broke my own rule by reading the logline first) was that it would be too generic. There isn’t a single element in the logline that feels unique. But that didn’t turn out to be the main problem in the script. The main problem is that the English-second-language issue rears its head so aggressively that the read doesn’t flow. A script MUST FLOW. I know this is frustrating for ESL writers to hear as they’re probably thinking, “As long as the core of the story is conveyed, it should’t matter if there are grammar or punctual errors.” Yeah but a script is dependent on suspending the reader’s disbelief. And the ESL kept breaking my focus. There are people who will fix ESL errors in your script, so that’s an option. I even do it myself but I’m not cheap. Only because I’ve found that it’s not just about fixing grammar. Sometimes you’re making creative choices for the writer, and that requires some back and forth, which is time-consuming. For example, there’s a line in this script: “Parker is charismatic and Cameron’s team is focused.” These are two separate sentences. They should not be combined. And if I had my choice, I wouldn’t mention either. They’re not relevant to the moment and only act to gum up the read. So I’d probably cut that sentence. But, yeah. That’s why this script didn’t advance. If you are interested in ESL help, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
Page Stopped: 10
Verdict: Pass
Title: The Law of Worthless Stones
Genre: Action / Adventure
Logline: In 1877 Turkey, when an American demolitions expert inadvertently unearths a billion dollar treasure coveted by a bloodthirsty Ottoman Queen, he must fight for his own life, and the lives of millions, to stop her from funding an all-out war on an unsuspecting world.
Writer: Jeff Stein
Thoughts: I love Jeff. I think he’s extremely talented. He has one of the more unique voices on the site (“An empty bottle of whiskey rolls out of his hand, bumps against the scuffed shoes of a 12-year-old CHINESE GIRL. She is cute, crafty, loyal, and has enough attitude for a dozen Awkwafinas.”). I think he’s won an Amateur Showdown before (Jeff, can you confirm this?). As I’ve told Jeff in the past, his only problem is that he wants to include every single idea he can think of. Whereas I like stuff that’s simpler and more focused. So that’s where our writer-reader conflict lies. — I like the contrast inherent in this opening. We start with the Ottoman War. Then we somehow end up with a cowboy in America. How do these things connect? We’re curious and want to find out. There’s a fun “runaway train” set piece that follows, but something about the writing here is too loose. I’m not *entirely* sure what’s going on in the scene and I find that my concentration is often drifting. I repeatedly have to do the dreaded “back up and re-read that part”.” Sometimes I get the feeling Jeff writes faster than he thinks. We get the benefit of that (wild ideas, imaginative writing) as well as the disadvantage (I don’t feel confident that the writer knows where he’s headed in the scenes or in the story). I’d be curious what you guys thought of The Law of Worthless Stones. The concept sounds cool. But I want to know if my repeated focus-drifts are just my problem or they’re happening to you guys as well. Cause I want to figure out a way to help Jeff here. I would like to give him more concrete criticism so he knows what he has to correct.
Page Stopped: 13
Verdict: Pass
Title: The Sanctuary
Genre: Action/ adventure
Logline: A couple on the run from hit men find themselves shipwrecked on an island paradise where a drug lord hid his treasure, unaware that they are being hunted by wild beasts.
Writer: Mariano Rueda
Thoughts: This one started out really strong. Great cold open. We have, what looks like, soldiers, on a boat, headed towards an island at night. Once they get there, they head into the jungle, then come upon an old abandoned mansion. They’re looking for something. They then come across a cage with a still rotting lion carcass inside. That was the first moment where I was like, “Okay, this is cool.” Again, as readers, we’re looking for things that are original. Stuff we don’t typically see. I’ve seen military guys hop on shore and go try to execute a mission hundreds of times. But when I realized these guys were looking for something more treasure-related, I became intrigued. And the lion carcass snapped me to attention. It was a fresh choice. The rest of the scene plays out well. We then cut to Florida and meet this couple who’s had brushes with the law. I found their dialogue to be a little simplistic. It lacked specificity, which is what helps make your characters stand out. They’re just talking in generic relationship-speak. To the writer’s credit, we get another exciting scene, as the couple is chased by someone. But once they hid on the boat it felt like we’d stuck around the scenario for too long. The dialogue continued to be barely passable. I could feel my interest dropping quickly. When the boat owner fell off the boat, it just felt like hi jinx at that point so I gave up. But overall, this is a top 20% entry. Maybe even top 15%. So there’s nothing to be disappointed about here.
Page Stopped: 17
Verdict: Pass
Title: The King of Ghosts
Genre: Drama
Logline: When a survivor of the Burundian genocide is reunited with his daughter, he must decide between pursuing a new life with her, or remaining with the orphan boy he’s caring for and the violent existence he’s carved out for himself in the underground world of machete fighting.
Writer: No Given Name
Thoughts: You can tell the good writers right away. I liked, for example, the simple but effective description in this script (“KARENGA MUMBOYO (50s) sits with eyes closed. He might be napping. He’s shadow-black and lean and his face is horribly scarred. So are his arms. A man built from pain and survival.”). The writer uses a British character as the engine pushing the story forward (a journalist looking for the elusive Mumboyo, a notorious machete fighter). We then meet Mumboyo himself, who’s struggling to make ends meet in these underground machete fights to the death. And then we have a third character, Zecharia, who’s caring for his ailing sister. The writing is purposeful (it’s clear the writer has a plan, and every scene pushes us forward to accomplish that plan) and the story moves along quickly. We also have a unique world, which I just told you readers are always looking for. So everything felt new and fresh here. Easily one of the best entries in the contest so far. If you’re looking to see what the writing bar is, check out this first act!
Page Stopped: Read entire act (27 pages)
Verdict: Advance!
Title: The Patriotic Hitman
Genre: Action/Thriller
Logline: A sniper assigned by a government agency to assassinate a senator at a public rally catches a glimpse of a suicide bomber in the crowd.
Writer: Alex Beattie
Thoughts: We’ve got character naming problems right off the bat. Jake Ryan? As in one letter removed from Jack Ryan? Mary Swanson? One of the most famous comedy female characters of all time (Dumb and Dumber). I’m not asking for names like Locoio Markopolis. But if you’re not thinking hard about names, that makes me think you’re not thinking hard about anything in your script. With that said, the first ten pages are better-than-average. But it’s all very routine. Even the sniper cold open. You’re going up against American Sniper here with its similar sniper scenario. Your goal should be to give us a sniper opening that’s even better than that, not a notch less exciting. A female suicide bomber who takes out a team of marines? I read that scene every other week. I don’t think writers realize just how common their ideas are. You have to work harder than you’re working if you want to stand out. Nothing has happened in these first 12 pages that’s any different from anything I’ve read before. By the way, this is why scripts like, “The King of Ghosts,” do well. Their very setting is so unique that every single page is going to provide us with something new. Whereas when you write about covert agents, you’re going up against thousands of other covert agent scripts around town. So you’re going to have to move mountains and push yourself beyond your creative limits to find fresh new ideas in that space.
Page Stopped: 10
Verdict: Pass
Title: On the Lam
Genre: Fun Action/Thriller
Logline: A wealthy man who has worked as an underground doctor of assisted suicide for 20 years must condense his fortune, pack up his life’s work, and head across the Canadian Border in order to hideout from the multiple parties interested in finding him, arresting him, using him, or killing him.
Writer: Josh Bullock
Thoughts: I highlighted this one specifically because, as writers, we get so tunnel-visioned that we don’t notice the most obvious things. Look at the genre here and then look at the first half of this logline. “Fun Action” and “has worked as an underground doctor of assisted suicide for 20 years.” Do you see how those two things don’t go together? And worse, they seem comical when read together? This is why you need feedback on your loglines and scripts. If you can’t afford feedback, you must become an expert at seeing your writing through the reader’s eyes. You must learn how to become a different person and then read everything (the logline, the query, the script) as if you’re reading it for the first time. Because when I see something like this, I already know the script is in trouble. And that’s a problem because getting people to keep reading your script can’t happen if they don’t open your script in the first place. But I did open the script and I got what I was afraid of, which was a tonal mismatch. The opening scene is a gun to the back, “I’m taking you out of here,” bad-guy-catches-our-protagonist…. during a screening of Titanic. The dialogue borders on comedic: “Did you know that James Cameron
actually sketched that picture? It’s true. Winslet originally protested the nudity. She only agreed to it when James told her it would be a closed set with minimum crew. So to avoid bringing in an artist, he sketched her himself.” This scene is then followed by an assisted suicide, which is one of the most depressing situations a human can imagine. The two scenes don’t naturally come together. So I would tell Josh that he needs to work on incorporating a consistent tone, both in his loglines and scripts.
Page Stopped: 10
Verdict: Pass
Title: One Flesh
Genre: Horror
Logline: When a disease causes humans to fuse when they physically touch, a cult leader sets her sights on her estranged family as she seeks to spread her vision of love and a new fused human race.
Writer: Evan Job
Thoughts: This one started off strong. We see a group of naked people, all of them with aggressively cracked skin, go to a house at night and then a member of the group, a girl, run into the house and steal a baby, which we realize is hers. As her ex-husband chases her out, the baby fuses to the girl’s skin. I definitely haven’t seen that before, so I was intrigued. We then cut to a different character, Tasha, who also has this rare skin disease. She’s taking care of her father. And a member of that same car group, Anton, comes to her house and wants to reconnect with her. It turns out he’s her boyfriend. This is where I began to lose interest in the pages. Their dialogue felt very simplistic and it went on for too long. A good scene always has a point. We’re then moving towards that point during the scene. For a big long chunk of this scene, it felt like we weren’t moving at all. And the dialogue just wasn’t sharp enough to carry it. “Why are you being like this, Tasha?” “I am not playing this game, I want you to leave.” “I don’t want to leave.” “You’re going to leave.” Something about that exchange didn’t feel sophisticated enough to me. But kudos to Evan for writing a first scene that pulled me in. And this subject matter seems unique. So nice job there as well!
Page Stopped: 16
Verdict: Pass
Share your thoughts on these entries over the weekend! Curious what you think!! Especially about The King of Ghosts.
GET PROFESSIONAL FEEDBACK BEFORE YOU SEND YOUR SCRIPT OUT THERE!!! – I give screenwriting consultations for every step of the process, whether it be loglines (just $25!), e-mail queries, plot summaries, outlines, Zoom brainstorming sessions, first pages, first acts, full pilots, full features. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested in any type of consultation. I want to help you make your script as good as it can possibly be!
The Scriptshadow Newsletter is either in your Inbox or in your Spam. So go check it out! I talk about Marvel’s Phase 5 and 6, High Concept Showdown, a secret trick to improve your chances of getting that big industry contact to read your script, my spirited thoughts on the Oppenheimer “trailer,” some discounted script consultation opportunities, and all sorts of other goodies. I’m moving the First Act Contest Entry Breakdown Post to tomorrow. So feel free to discuss the newsletter in the meantime!
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Genre: Comedy
Premise: Patricia Ford feels pretty good about trading her South Boston roots for a “perfect” life on New York’s Upper East Side, until everything falls apart and her raucous girlfriends throw her a Divorce Party at the home she’s about to lose. As the night goes from wild to totally insane, Patricia takes back control of her life.
About: Imagine being a writer nobody’s heard of with no credits and then finishing top five on the Black List! This life-changing experience happened to today’s writer, Rebecca Webb.
Writer: Rebecca Webb
Details: 105 pages
I will bet my retirement savings that Aniston plays Patricia.
I’ve put off reviewing the number 3 script on the Black List long enough. But it’s only fair that I give it a shot. Hey, I still remember when I waited two years to review the number one Black List script, Blonde Ambition, thinking it was going to be yet another boring biopic, and it turned out to be great! Can Divorce Party do the same?
I do think there’s something to building comedy scripts around trendy phrases in pop culture. There was a spec script that sold in 2006 called “Bromance” back when that word was a thing. We got “Cougarville” after the mainstreaming of the word “cougar.” And here, we’ve got “Divorce Party,” which follows one of the newer trends, having a party for your divorce.
An additional trait that helps elevate this concept is irony. You’re not supposed to have a party for a divorce. That’s what makes the whole ‘divorce party’ trend fun, and is why someone decided to turn it into a screenplay. Now let’s see if that screenplay is actually good.
We begin in the aftermath of the biggest party ever. A beautiful Hamptons home has been trashed beyond all recognition! Oh, and there’s a dead dude with an arrow in his head lying face-down in the pool. Whatever happened here was really bad.
Cut to several months earlier.
40-something Patricia Ford finds her long-time husband getting pegged by a 23 year old woman in a hotel room, initiating her worst case life scenario – DIVORCE! If that’s not bad enough, her ex-husband takes everything, leaving Patricia with nothing except for one night a year at their Hampton’s home.
Searching for meaning, Patricia visits her childhood best friend, Amy. Whereas Patricia has become uptight and socially conditioned by her rich New York lifestyle, Amy still dances on Boston bar tops and beats up anybody she doesn’t like. She’s the anti-Patricia. And she thinks the solution to this divorce is a DIVORCE PARTY.
So Patricia invites all of her friends to the Hamptons on the one night of the year that she gets the house, and the group buys a ton of sex toys that they then play games with. As they get more and more drunk, they head to a local bar, where they meet a bunch of men, who they invite back to the house.
After each woman explores the sexual potential that their current relationships aren’t giving them, they find themselves, inexplicably, tied up. That’s because… THIS IS A ROBBERY! I guess these men are professional divorce party targeters who systematically befriend divorce parties that have taken detours to local bars then came home with them so they can rob them. Ummm…. Yeah!
So that happens. And after the men leave, our ladies learn a valuable lesson. Which is that divorce parties are dumb. Or maybe that it’s worth getting all your things stolen if it wisens you up and makes you realize that life is hard and you need to keep overcoming obstacles… or something. Or maybe there’s some other lesson here. Oh, and if you’re wondering who killed the dead guy in the pool, let’s just say you’re going to be disappointed.
Divorce Party wants to be the next Hangover or Bridesmaids.
But it’s missing a very important screenwriting ingredient to achieve this feat.
A clear destination.
In The Hangover, the clear destination is finding Doug, the missing groom. In Bridesmaids, the clear destination is the wedding. We know that’s where we’re headed.
Divorce Party doesn’t have that. The destination is the divorce party, so we’re technically at our destination by page 40. Now, what are we supposed to hang around for? Because I’m sorry, but “shenanigans” isn’t enough. The reader needs a destination.
Webb tries to solve this by creating a murder-mystery element. We start our movie at the end, a la Sunset Boulevard, with a dead guy floating face down, in a Hamptons pool, at a house that’s been decimated by the titular “divorce party.” We then intersperse post-party police interrogations of all the women, as we try to get to the bottom of what happened.
The issue with this approach is that nobody seems all that concerned about the dead man. Everyone’s rather blasé about it, which takes the one element that’s pushing the plot forward – the murder-mystery – and neuters it.
Of course, nobody comes to a comedy film for the plot. They just want to laugh. So does Divorce Party make you laugh?
I think if you’re a 40-50 year old woman, it will.
I don’t think anybody else is going to laugh, to be honest. The jokes and writing are highly specific (“Despite Bonnie’s best efforts, the house is still a cross between a Nancy Meyer wet-dream and a wing of the Whitney”). What the heck is “The Whitney??”
That’s not a dig at the script. I’d actually prefer that a comedy target a specific demographic than go with generic poop and fart jokes that are attempting to make 99% of the planet laugh. Even when you’re laughing at those films, the laughs are always hollow.
To Webb’s credit, there’s an undercurrent of drama here that gives the script more depth than your average comedy. There’s a harsh exploration of how terrifying it is for a woman in her 40s to get divorced. And if there’s an underlining theme, it’s that a lot of women hang on to their marriages not because they love their husbands, but because they’re terrified of being alone.
I feel like any screenplay that can connect the reader to some truth hits harder than the screenplay that doesn’t. And Webb seems to have some keen insight into the world of marriage in your 40s.
She also does a good job with the key friendship in the story between Patricia and Amy. You could feel the pain in Amy when Patricia shows up after 20 years, looking for a shoulder to cry on. Some of the better scenes in the script are when the two try and reconcile their broken friendship, with Patricia admitting that she’s been terrible.
The contrast between the characters – Amy doing whatever she wants and not fearing consequences, and Patricia doing whatever she’s supposed to do in desperate fear of the consequences – makes them fun to watch. You couldn’t ask for two people who were more opposite.
Comedy often comes from contrast. So the more opposites you can have bumping up against each other, the better. And when I say “opposites” I don’t just mean people. I mean anything that’s the opposite. One of Larry David’s best Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes involves a Palestinian chicken restaurant located next to a Jewish deli. Two opposites.
Much like the bulk of the 2021 Black List, though, Webb is clearly a newcomer. One of the easiest ways to tell is all the dual-side dialogue. Nobody I know who’s written more than three screenplays uses dual-side dialogue except maybe for one line when they’re really emphasizing two characters talking over each other. Otherwise, it’s a purely beginner habit.
Which should be motivating to you guys. Cause it shows that you don’t have to be perfect to make the Black List.
Divorce Party is a tough call. It’s probably a better drama than it is a comedy. But it’s marketed as a comedy. So… how do I judge this thing? I suppose I recommend it. I very well may be lowering my standards because we’ve gotten so few good scripts off the Black List lately. But it does have a nifty little twist ending that makes you feel good. And if you make the reader feel good at the end of your script, they’re probably going to recommend it.
Script link: Divorce Party
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is smack dab exactly where you want to be for a comedy script – at 105 pages. You do not want to go ONE PAGE OVER 105 for a comedy.
What I learned 2: An ironic comedic premise is always better than a non-ironic one. Divorce Party is better than Christmas Party. Whereas Christmas parties are expected, you’re not supposed to celebrate something as sad as divorce (where is where the irony comes from!).
Genre: Action
Premise: (from IMDB) When the CIA’s most skilled operative, whose true identity is known to none, accidentally uncovers dark agency secrets, a psychopathic former colleague puts a bounty on his head, setting off a global manhunt by international assassins.
About: This is the Russo Brothers first big film after their Avengers movies, and they’ve brought along their Avengers writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, to write it. The 200 million dollar film is Netflix’s biggest yet. The Gray Man has been in development for a long time and is sort of a peek behind the Hollywood curtain in regards to how complicated these long-running properties are. The Russos’ version of this movie is so different from the original Gray Man project that none of the writers on the previous drafts even get credit. It’s like they only used the title. Which makes you wonder, why not just come up with an original idea? You can check out my review of the original script here…
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely and Joe Russo (based on the book by Mark Greaney).
Details: 2 hours long
In the early 1980s, Francis Ford Coppola famously decried the day when Hollywood started publishing box office numbers. “Now,” Coppola said, “people are only going to produce movies that will make the most amount of money.”
That comment seems a little silly now. Why else would you make movies? For your health? Look at France, a country that still doesn’t care about box office, and the cinematic sludge that comes out of their system. I’m not talking about the one good French film that makes it over to the U.S. every year. I’m talking about the 50 other movies that are all terrible because there’s no incentive to make something that people actually want to see. Is that what we want the U.S. to become?
Well, the streaming revolution allowed us to get a peek into what that process might look like here. Since Netflix movies don’t have any box office, their directors, technically, don’t need to worry about how many people watch the film. It’s why we got such Netflix classics as Mank and Roma (a teensy bit of sarcasm there if you can’t tell).
But now, ironically, Netflix has gone in the other direction, moving away from artsy “who cares how many people see it” movies to 200 million dollar wanna-be-Bond action films. The only difference is that we have NO IDEA if anybody’s actually watching these movies.
If you were just to go by online chatter, a lot more people saw “Nope” this weekend than “The Gray Man.” Which would imply that, if The Gray Man were in theaters, it wouldn’t have surpassed 45 million dollars (Nope’s first-weekend gross). Which sort of begs an opposing question. Just as it seems strange to make small budget theatrical movies that aren’t going to make money, it’s even stranger to spend an inordinate amount of money on TV movies that don’t bring in any money.
If all of this seems confusing, that’s okay, because I would argue that The Gray Man is a confusing project, an action movie without an identity. I have a theory on why that is, which I’ll share at the end of the review.
Sierra Six (Ryan Gosling) is a convicted murderer who’s pulled from prison by his new handler, Fitzroy, to be in a new CIA assassin program. Years later, after becoming one of the most lethal assassins in the world (a ‘gray man’), Six is assigned to kill a target who, as the target lays dying, says he’s also part of the Sierra program, and that Six will be next.
Six grabs a USB drive from Four (I think that’s his name) causing Six’s boss, Carmichael, to turn on him, believing the drive has evidence of his nefarious doings. So Carmichael hires the one killer good enough to eliminate Six, Lloyd Hansen (Chris Hansen), a wise-cracking mustache-twirling (literally!) bully.
Lloyd, a giant weasel and purveyor of such lines as, “If you want to make an omelette, you gotta kill some people,” goes to Fitzroy and orders him to order his own men to turn on Six, which they do. But of course Six escapes. This enrages Lloyd, who then orders a super-hit on him, which means that every single bounty hunting team in the world is now looking to kill Six.
Six teams up with another agent for the first time ever, Dani (Ana De Armas), and doesn’t like it because Six works alone, darn it! When Six learns that Lloyd is holding Fitzroy and his pacemaker-laden daughter hostage, he decides to turn the tables on Lloyd and go save them. But can Six survive going into the belly of the beast? Or will he be Lloyd Hansen’s toast?
These movies are so hard to do well.
You’re trying to differentiate yourself within one of the most cliched well-worn blueprints of modern cinema – the big action movie.
The degrees to which you must differentiate yourself to stand out seem trivial. For example, John Wick’s differentiation revolved around well-tailored suits and tighter, better choreographed, fight scenes. A betting man would say that’s not enough to get audiences to show up. And yet, John Wick is the sexiest action franchise alive.
Meanwhile, Jack Reacher comes out, angling for a “thinking man’s action movie” and it lands with a thud.
In my experience, big action movies come down to nailing four things, in this order: A protagonist we absolutely love, groundbreaking or unique set pieces, a strong villain, and a plot that’s strong enough to keep us invested the whole way through.
Let’s start with A. As much as I like Ryan Gosling, there’s nothing about this character that stands out. I don’t know if this is the writers’ or actor’s fault, but I suspect it’s the writers. Gosling has proven he can play cool memorable characters, such as the “Driver” in the movie, “Drive.” What was the difference? Well, it might be each character’s opening scene. In Drive, Gosling had this really cool escape scene from Staples Center that set the tone for the character. Here, we meet Gosling sitting in a chair, smiling as a man tells him he’s free. Not exactly a, “Whoa! This character is so cool!” moment.
Next we have the set pieces. The set pieces are all okay but I was expecting groundbreaking stuff when we’re talking about the most expensive movie Netflix has ever made. The movie-killer for me was the ubiquitous plane crash set piece. Not only has this scene been done in the last 20 action movies, but they didn’t even do as good of a job as “Man From Toronto,” an action-COMEDY for goodness sakes.
Next we have our villain, Lloyd Hansen, played by Chris Evans. Chris Evans is definitely having fun in this role, and is hoping for a sprinkling of Henry Cavill magic, donning a mustache just like Cavill did in Mission Impossible. But while Hansen is the most memorable thing about this film, I’d argue he’s having more fun with himself than we are with him.
The showiness of his performance often borders on “try-hard,” which breaks the suspension of disbelief, and makes us see Chris Evans instead of Lloyd Hansen.
Finally we have the plot. I’ve long chastised big action films for overcomplicating their plots when the objective for anyone watching an action movie is to turn your brain off and have fun. It’s why movies like Taken and John Wick are so popular. The plots are mind-numbingly simple.
In movies like James Bond and Mission Impossible, you need a pen and notepad to keep track of the main plot, subplots, motivations, double-crosses, and everything in between. I wouldn’t put The Gray man in that company. It’s essentially one guy chasing another guy. But there were too many times where I didn’t understand exactly what was going on.
For example, there’s this whole baby-sitting storyline where Six babysits Fitzroy’s daughter and it took me a full five minutes before I realized it was a flashback. I get that they wanted to create an emotional connection between Six and the daughter, but a five-minute flashback in an action movie??? Come on.
I have no idea how this movie came together. But I suspect it went something like this. Netflix initiated a meeting with the Russo Brothers. They said, “We will hand you a blank check and a high percentage of franchise ownership if you give us our own James Bond franchise.”
The Russos then scoured the town for the best available action property. They found The Gray Man, which had been in development for 13 years and, therefore, was well-known around town. They didn’t necessarily like it so they totally rewrote it into their own version. And that’s what we got here.
The reason it’s not very good is because they never had an emotional attachment to it in the first place. Again, blank checks are big motivators to make movies. I’m not turning a blank check down and neither are you. But personal emotional attachment is the motivator to make GOOD movies. And that seems to be missing here.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s hard to scare or anger or evoke negative emotion in an audience with a jokey villain, which Lloyd Hansen very much is. If we’re not feeling those big negative emotions from a villain, we’re not going to be scared for our hero and we’re not going to want to see that villain go down.
What I learned 2 (dark evil screenwriting tip): When writers want to get credit on a movie, one of the first things they do is change all the names of the main characters from the previous draft. This makes it appear, to later WGA readers who don final credit, that they’ve made the characters up wholesale. We see that done here. Can’t let those former writers get any credit and take our money!
Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi/Comedy/Monkey Massacre
Premise: A couple of horse ranchers attempt to capture a UFO on camera, but must avoid being eaten up by the pesky flying saucer before doing so.
About: Nope is Jordan Peele’s third directing venture and is performing quite a bit lower than Peele’s previous outing, Us, which made 70 million on its opening weekend. As of the latest numbers, Nope has a 45 million dollar opening (off a 70 million dollar budget, Peele’s largest). The film received a B Cinema score, which is the same that Us received.
Writer: Jordan Peele
Details: 131 minutes
I haven’t thought this hard about how I was going to write a review since, probably, Inception.
There is so much to say here in regards to the director, the industry, the movie, the screenplay, the budget, history, influences, and, overall, the way Hollywood props up auteurs in a way they can’t possibly live up to.
It’s so overwhelming, I don’t even know where to start.
Since this is a movie review, I’m going to focus on the movie, which, ultimately, doesn’t live up to expectations. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the huge swing Peele took. If there’s one good thing that can be said about Nope, it’s that we’ve never seen anything like it. And that’s worth something in SamenessWood.
But the film is ultimately sabotaged by its screenplay, which is so shoddily cobbled together, that, at times, if feels like a first time filmmaker stumbled onto set and started shooting the script he and his buddy wrote over the weekend.
Jordan Peele wrote Get Out over the course of ten years. He whipped “Nope” up in half a year. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the result isn’t as good. I guess I just expected it to be better than this.
Spoilers abound by the way.
After their father dies when a nickel that was accidentally ejected from a plane, flies down and slices through his skull, horse ranchers OJ and Emerald struggle to pick up the pieces of their father’s business, which is built around lending horses to Hollywood productions. In one of the many barely explained components of the film, it appears that they’re running out of money and *might* (it’s important to note that this is never clear) have to sell the ranch.
By the way, the family dynamic of OJ and his sister, Emerald, is never adequately explained. They work together. We know this because when OJ takes a horse to a commercial set, Emerald shows up and helps out. But Emerald does not live on the ranch. She lives somewhere else entirely and, I guess, meets OJ whenever there’s a Hollywood job. It’s all incredibly confusing. Anyway, for reasons that are still unclear, she decides to start staying at the ranch with OJ. So I guess she’s living on the ranch now.
OJ, unconvinced that the nickel that killed his father (I can’t believe I’m typing that sentence) came from a plane, starts putting together this theory that the nickel came from a UFO, which he believes hovers around the ranch every once in awhile. Out of nowhere, his sister becomes infatuated with this idea and figures if they can get the first clear footage of a UFO, they can sell it to the news for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile, a former child sitcom star, Ricky, has put together a fun little theme park nearby where the featured act is a, sort of, goofy rodeo. Peele spends most of the script’s creative energy on Ricky’s backstory, which involves the day the monkey from Ricky’s old sitcom went berserk and started killing everyone. It even ripped off the face of his young co-star. That event ended Ricky’s TV career, which is why he’s here, out in the middle of nowhere, doing this.
Ricky, it turns out, has been buying horses off of OJ to supplement his act (one of many plot points that is so lazily explained, we only barely put it together after the fact) which, it turns out, involves using the horses as bait to lure in that UFO, which then eats them.
Side note: Ricky has apparently done dozens of these shows already to audiences that, presumably, all own a smart phone. The entire point of the movie is for Emerald to get this UFO on video to sell the footage for thousands of dollars. Yet, apparently, all of these audiences that have come here before and watched the UFO snatch up horses – they have never thought to record the UFO themselves. But I digress…
So the big, sort of, twist is that the UFO is not actually a ship, but rather a predator in our skies. A predator who especially likes horses for some reason (I thought aliens were into cows). Emerald and OJ decide to hire one of the best cinematographers in the world to come and get the footage of the UFO that they’re then going to sell. They then set up an elaborate trap to pull UFO Animal Thing down and… well, a lot goes wrong. The End.
Okay, where do we start?
I think we start at the beginning. Cause that’s usually where you can tell if a movie is going to work or not. The monkey killing backstory is definitely memorable. It’s probably the only thing this movie will be remembered for. But it feels so distant, so disconnected from the rest of the film, that we don’t know what to do with it.
I’ve noticed people saying that it’s setting up the fact that, at a very young age, Ricky learned that you can’t control animals. Yet here he is, trying to control animals once again (if you think of the UFO as an animal) for entertainment purposes. So he never learned his lesson. I mean… I guess that sort of makes sense. But it certainly doesn’t come across naturally. I never would’ve made that connection if I hadn’t heard somebody else explain it.
In my many years of analyzing screenwriting, this felt more to me like one of those really sexy ideas that you want to get into a script even though it has nothing to do with the story. So you move mountains to somehow cram it in there and then try to find enough connective tissue to make it make sense.
But to Peele’s credit, it does lead to one of the most tragic and affecting images of the screenplay, which is the actress who got her face ripped off still coming to Ricky’s shows, hanging out at the top of the bleachers, her skinless face occasionally being revealed when the wind whips up her protective veil.
That opening is followed by the dad nickel-killing scene. I mean… it’s just a weird scene all around. It’s not clear what’s happening so we’re more trying to figure out how this dad is bleeding than we are mesmerized by his unique death. (Wait, what just happened? Wait, he got killed by a random nickel falling from the sky?? Does that sort of thing actually happen???).
The plot here is so wonky that it’s easy to overlook the most catastrophic mistake that Peele makes, which is his main characters. OJ is one of the least likable people you’ll ever meet. He mumbles all the time. He’s depressed all the time. He never does anything that makes us like him. Some people have pointed out that he just lost his father. That’s why he’s such a downer. I’m not buying that. He seemed just as sad and depressing before his dad died.
Then you have Emerald, who’s a better character than OJ for sure, because at least she has energy. But she’s still kind of annoying. And she’s the one with this really stupid idea to capture this footage of the UFO. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a lot of respect for annoying stupid people. These are the two people taking us through this story.
Oh! And there’s this guy Angel, who is a Best Buy installer guy. He helps install the elaborate security system that Emerald needs to track the UFOs (wait, I thought they didn’t have any money) and then just decides to hang around the whole movie. I’m laughing as I type this but nothing in this movie makes sense. Since when do the installer people just keep hanging out at your house?? That’s the lazy logic Peele uses throughout the writing of this script. He wanted a comedic relief character in the mix. He just didn’t want to do the work to come up with an organic way to get him in the script. So he created a brand new first-ever way to make friends: Order stuff from Best Buy and have them install it.
Speaking of sloppiness, the stakes are never clearly established here. I can’t emphasize how important this is. It’s never made clear that they need money. It’s implied. But you never outright hear it. And because of that, the goal – to capture the UFO on camera – seems trivial. A goal without stakes is cereal without milk. We need to understand why the characters *need* to do this. If we’re unsure whether getting the footage saves the farm or not, then why would we care about getting the footage?
Go watch Goonies again. They establish that the entire community is selling their houses to the golf course developer. They’ve got less than 24 hours to stop this from happening. They hear about a treasure buried within the area and go searching for it. We now know, with extreme clarity, that if they find the treasure, they don’t have to sell their houses.
We never get anything approaching that level of clarity here.
In addition to this, the world-building is never clear. At a certain point in the story, OJ realizes that if you don’t look at the UFO, it won’t eat you. Once you tell the audience that, that’s an established rule. However, throughout the movie, the characters are racing away from the aliens, and yet the alien is still trying to kill them. I thought if you don’t look at the alien, it doesn’t kill you. So that… changes… sometimes???
This leads to one of the clumsiest climaxes I’ve ever seen. They try to lure the alien down so they can get footage of him. That’s the goal. Again, we’re not clear why they need the money this footage is going to bring them or why the hundreds of people who saw Ricky’s show haven’t already got the UFO on camera, but whatever. That’s the goal. However, midway through the climax, it appears they now want to kill the thing. So the goal becomes killing it. But then, in the very end, they want footage of it again. So they’re trying to kill it but also get the footage of it???
It’s so confusing.
Finally, Emerald leads the UFO over to Ricky’s adventure park, and the big moment revolves around this odd picture-taking mechanism. I guess there’s a fake Old Western water well that you look down into and it takes a picture of your faces looking into it. And so Emerald realizes that if she can get the UFO to fly directly over that well, she can take a picture of the UFO. So that’s what she’s waiting for and she keeps trying to take pictures but the UFO is never directly over the well.
Meanwhile, she releases this giant float into the air by accident that the UFO tries to eat (I’m not making this up), which ends up exploding the Ufo (I’m not making that up either) and right as that’s happening, she’s able to take the well picture of it. And she’s so freaking happy that she got her photographic proof! She’s going to be so rich now! She’s got the proof! She’s got the proof!!!
Except, um, there’s now the remnants of a GIANT UFO A MILE AWAY THAT EVERYBODY IS GOING TO SEE AND IS GOING TO BE ON THE NEWS FOR THE NEXT YEAR that sort of kind of makes your little picture worthless?
I’m verifiably confused about some of the positive reactions this movie is getting. It’s so sloppy it’s almost embarrassing. The only thing that keeps it from being a total embarrassment is that it’s shot so well, has a couple of fun creative ideas, and has some memorable imagery. But the story and main characters are so poorly conceived that the film is, sadly, really bad.
The defining moment when I realized Peele was high during the majority of his writing process was when, out of nowhere, at minute 115 of the movie, a brand new character enters the story named Tron TMZ Tesla Motorcycle Guy. This random TMZ journalist who dressed like he’s in a sci-fi movie, just shows up out of nowhere and becomes a major part of the climax! What are we even doing here????
It’s sad, man. Because I would rather live in a moviegoing world where we get the occasional big budget original idea like Peele’s. But Peele has to understand that, in order to stay in this prestigious position, you need to take more time on the script and get more people vetting the screenplay to show you where it’s weak. If he had 3 strong script guys look at this script, it would’ve been a thousand times better.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You can’t be theoretical when it comes to stakes. Emerald randomly coming up with the idea that a clear video of the UFO would be worth 100,000 dollars… what is that based on? She just makes these stakes up. Stakes can’t be theoretical. They have to be actual. This would’ve been so easy to fix, too. Because there was actually a guy, for a while, offering, I think, half a million dollars for verifiable photographic proof of a UFO. All you needed to do was have Emerald go online, see this guy offering this money, and us see it as well, then establish that if they don’t get that money, they lose the ranch, and boom, you have your stakes. It’s frustrating because Get Out is such a well-written script and yet, here, it seems like Peele doesn’t understand basic storytelling principles.
