Genre: Cop/Found Footage
Premise: Two cops (and best friends) begin taping their daily exploits, which include numerous busts and adventures.  But when they’re marked for death by a local gang, they’ll need to count on their friendship like never before to survive.
About: David Ayers (Training Day, The Fast And The Furious, S.W.A.T.) wrote and directed this.  It stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena.
Writer: David Ayers
Details: 97 pages

Training Day is one of my favorite cop movies of all time.  I loved the simplicity of it.  I loved the characters in it.  I loved the twists.  I liked it so much, in fact, that it’s one of the screenplays I feature in my upcoming book.  In addition to that, I liked Ayers’ other breakthrough script, The Fast And The Furious.  Not as much as Training Day, but as a fun summer flick with fast cars and faster characters, it was perfect mindless entertainment.  So I guess you could say I’m a David Ayers fan.  Which means I’ve been looking forward to this one.  But you know what they say about expectations.  Bastards can ruin your afternoon.

First thing we’re told in End Of Watch is that this is recorded footage.  Yup, Ayers is jumping on the found footage train.  And “train” is an appropriate metaphor for this script.  In a world where most screenplays fly, End Of Watch takes forever to get where it wants to go.  And to be honest, I’m still not sure where that is.

24 year old Mike Zavala and 23 year old Brian Taylor (or Dan Taylor as an old script fragment labels him) are partners.  Not life partners but cop partners.  However, they could be life partners because these two looooove each other.  I mean they really really REALLY love each other.  They hang together, drink together, and repeatedly tell one another they’d take a bullet for the other.  This is a polmance if there ever was one.

Taylor is trying to get his law degree and one of his electives is a film class so he’s decided to drag along a camera wherever they go to tape their adventures.  Seeing as they patrol South Central LA, there’s usually an adventure around every corner.

What there isn’t, however, is a plot.  Ayers takes the found footage thing literally and doesn’t seem interested in creating a cohesive storyline.  It’s like one of those weekend warrior dads editing together the family vacation footage.  There’s no form to it, no direction.  Just long drawn out clips of the experience.  Taylor and Zavala question a notorious gang leader, talk about wives and girlfriends, and save a girl from a burning building.  Our movie instincts keep telling us to be patient, that this will all come together at some point, but it doesn’t.  The script is devoid of arcs, form, focus, setups or payoffs.

I guess if there’s a plot focus for the story, it’s the aftermath of the heroic fire rescue (which doesn’t happen until the midpoint).  Afterwards, the two are heralded as heroes and even make the paper.  But neither seems comfortable with it.  They don’t do this for the glory.  They do it because they love their job.  But again, this doesn’t really go anywhere.  I label the section “focused” because it’s the only development in the screenplay that lasts more than three scenes.

Eventually, some gang members get irritated with them because (I think) they’re abusing their power.  Word on the street it that there’s a green light on them, which is gang code for “they’re going to get capped.”  They don’t pay it much mind, though, I guess because they’re having too much fun on the job.  But it’s something they’ll have to deal with when it’s all said and done.  Gangs tend not to go away until bizness is taken care of.

I think I know what Ayers was going for here.  He was going for the most realistic cop movie ever.  He didn’t want things to be bogged down by plot points and story conventions.  He wanted it to feel like we were dropping in on these guys and seeing what it was REALLY LIKE to be them.

I admire that approach.  It’s bold.  But there’s a reason writers rarely try it.  Real or not real, we go to the movies to watch a story.  For whatever reason, randomness just doesn’t go over well with an audience.  Maybe it’s because we’re conditioned to expect the opposite, maybe it’s because if we want randomness, we can get it in our everyday lives, but if a story doesn’t seem to be going in a particular direction, we get impatient, and that was happening to me as early as page 20.  “Okay, what’s the story here?” I kept asking.  But one never showed up.

This can sometimes work if the characters are amazing, but that was another problem with End Of Watch.  The characters weren’t amazing.  They were barely even average.  I guess Zavala’s character was fun, but the big problem here is that these two LOVE EACH OTHER.  They stroke each other the whole movie.  They laugh, they celebrate, tell each other how great the other is.

In other words, there’s NO CONFLICT in the central relationship of the movie!  Therefore, all of their conversations are boring.  I don’t care how good of a writer you are.  If you don’t have some element of conflict in your scenes, it’s almost impossible to write good dialogue. And that’s where End Of Watch suffered.

I mean look at Training Day.  Because of the heavy amount of conflict between lead characters Alonzo and Jake, the dialogue was a blast!  Alonzo was always pushing Jake.  Jake could never impress Alonzo.  Jake was always nervous around Alonzo.  Alonzo would tell Jake to do things he didn’t want to do.  Go watch that movie again.  Every single scene is steeped in some kind of imbalance, in some kind of conflict between the main characters.  Which is what made it so fun.

End Of Watch doesn’t have that.  And if you don’t have a plot and you don’t have any conflict between your leads…that’s a big hole to pull yourself out of.  I hope Ayers’ directing vision is able to override some of these weaknesses, but in script form, “Watch” is a disappointment. :(

What I Learned: One of the easiest ways to juice up dialogue is through conflict.  Create an imbalance between two characters (one wants one thing, the other wants another) and you’ll find the dialogue writes itself.  If you have two characters without that imbalance, you’re forced to try and write clever fun “chummy chummy” dialogue between them, which can work for a scene or two, but rarely has the weight to last an entire screenplay.

Genre: Crime/Period
Premise: A gang lord in 1949 Los Angeles becomes so big that the only way the cops can handle him is to go off-book and wage a war against his empire.
About: I think Gangster Squad is based on a bunch of real articles from 1940s Los Angeles newspapers.  But it may also be a book, as the script says it’s based on “Tales Of The Gangster Squad” by Paul Lieberman.  Either way, the story is adapted by author Will Beall, who burst onto the screenwriting scene with his script L.A. Rex (another LA war script – this one set in the present), which one of my other reviewers, Roger Balfour, loved, and which made the 2009 Black List.
Writer: Will Beall (based on the book by Paul Lieberman).
Details: 3/11/2011 draft.  (It should be noted that this draft is newer than the main one that’s floating around out there.  So this script might be slightly different from the one you’ve read).

I’ve been hearing about this one forrrrrrever.  And the word on it?  GREAT.  But I haven’t read any scripts by Will Beall yet because peripherally (hearing about him through others) his writing sounds like a bit of a loose cannon.  He makes up rules as he goes along, bolds, underlines, italicizes way too liberally, delves into the dreaded dual-line dialogue more than a fat man hangs out at Mickie D’s, and generally favors style over substance.

BUT…I admit that’s my take from afar.  And forming opinions on people before you meet them?  That’s so high school.  So it was time to see what Beall was about on my own  And time to see if this script was as good as everyone said it was.

Mickey Cohen is a naughty naughty guy.  When he doesn’t like someone, he ties them up to the back of two Cadillacs and has each drive in the opposite direction.  Why?  Because Mickey wants it all.  And he wants to instill fear in every single entity in LA so he can have it all.  He’s got the cops.  He’s got the judges.  No one fucks with Mickey Cohen.

And if you do manage to catch him in the act?  Well, he’s got the best lawyers money can buy too.  Guys like Mickey NEVER go down.

Which is what the LA police realize.  They see that this man is slowly turning Los Angeles into a steaming pile of trash.  And if they wait around any longer, they’ll be driving the dump trucks.   The guy who knows this more than anybody is Sergeant John O’Mara, one of the only clean cops left in the city.  He and his superiors come up with an idea.  If they can’t stop Cohen legally, why not attack him at his own game?  Why not put together a vigilante police unit, one that doesn’t have to abide by the rules and regulations cops are bound to, to, pardon my french, fuck them up Old Testament style?

O’Mara is in.  Now it’s a matter of finding his team.  He grabs: A tech expert, the first black lieutenant in the department, the “deadliest cop in LA,” a young Mexican cop eager to prove himself, and a wild card dude who isn’t sure which side he wants to play for.  The team goes in hard, hitting up Micky’s deliveries and anything else he has his dirty paws in.

Mickey, along with everybody else, is just confused.  I mean, who the hell attacks Mickey Cohen??  The most feared man on the West Coast!!  But after he gets over his shock, he realizes these mystery dudes are a real threat, and he gets all his little horses and all his little men riled up for one specific purpose – to take them down.

Who’s going to win this one?  Mickey?  Or the Gangster squad?

I know this is going to upset people, but this script was kinda designed for me to hate it.  Period crime dramas aren’t really my thing, but a good story is a good story, no matter where it’s set or who it centers around.  Case in point.  I’ve been reading Ken Follet’s novel, “Pillars Of The Earth,” set in the year 1100, about a mason looking for work in a world that doesn’t have any for him.  If there’s ever a subject matter I was designed to dislike, it would be this one.  And yet, it had me from the first page.

The novel starts with the hanging of an innocent man.  It’s a heartbreaking and heart-pounding scene.  This is followed by the mason and his family losing their only lifeline, a pig they saved up for all year, stolen by an outlaw, who belts their daughter with a hammer to complete the crime.  Subsequently, the family follows him to town and comes up with a plan to attack the man to get their money back.  After another heartbreaking failure, the now homeless family is forced to live in the woods as outlaws.  The pregnant wife soon gives birth to a child and dies in the process.  The mason decides to leave the newly born baby in the woods to die, since there’s no way to feed him.  Every once of these sequences just grabs you and yanks you in.

The point being, Follet uses basic character-focused storytelling to transcend subject matter, to make you connect with and care for the characters.  After someone belts a little girl with a hammer, who doesn’t want to see the family get the villain back?  Take them down?  I never saw any of that with the characters in Gangster Squad.  I mean, they’re much better written than yesterday’s entry, “Oz The Great And Powerful.”  But even the big dog, O’Mara – I only knew the basics about the guy. He was a clean cop and was in the war and…well, that’s it.  He was a clean cop who was in the war.  Not exactly a five star motivation.

But the real problem here is the endless number of characters.  I stopped counting but I’m guessing there’s somewhere around 40.  How am I supposed to keep track of 40 characters??  All the obvious problems popped up as a result.  I’d constantly forget who was who and have to go back and check, leading to dozens of read interruptions, a cardinal sin in writing (A reader should never feel like he’s working to figure out what’s going on).  After awhile I got sick of having to stop every two pages so I just kept reading, even though I wasn’t 100% sure who I was reading about (writers should know this happens all the time.  At a certain point, a reader just gets sick of having to check back on stuff, and barrels forward without exactly knowing who’s who – At this point, your script is usually screwed.  So always make sure every character is distinct and memorable!)

The real problem with this though is that the more characters you add, the less time you have to develop the key characters in your story.  A character is going to come off a lot more interesting if you have 40 pages to develop him as opposed to, say, 15, which is what I’m guessing the 6-7 key characters in Gangster Squad got.

This can be done (and needs to be done with Gangster movies, which are usually character heavy), but it basically amounts to figuring out ways to make characters relatable and interesting and deep in 1/4 the amount of time you usually have.  And only the most skilled writers can pull that off.

The thing is, the idea for GS is cool.  I love the notion of a team of cops putting down their badges to wage a war against a kingpin because that’s the only way they can defeat him. That’s a movie I want to see.  If we only would’ve focused MORE on that group, and not the thousands of other little subplots and characters instead.  Get to know each of those guys intimately, care about them, and then send them off against Cohen.  I mean that’s how they did it in The Godfather and that worked out okay.

BUT! As we all know, this is a preference I get attacked for all the time.  It’s the reason I didn’t like Dark Knight Rises.  I like clean narratives where I’m not confused 30% of time about what’s going on.  Some writers like to take the more ambitious “epic” route and some readers/audience members enjoy the larger canvas as they like having to work for their meal.  I dig that kind of story if the writing’s clear enough to handle the larger tapestry.  But I didn’t personally see that here.

On the flip side, the dialogue in GS is top-notch, and I’m guessing that’s why a lot of people love it so much.  It is SO HARD to create authentic fun crackling dialogue for period crime pieces.  Believe me, I’ve read plenty of scripts where the writer couldn’t come up with a single convincing sentence of dialogue from that era, so I know.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for me to join the Gangster Squad.  I think I’m going to go see what Mickey Cohen’s doing.

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

What I learned: I will say this until the day I die.  The more characters you add, the less time you’ll have to develop your protagonist (and other key characters). So think long and hard before adding that new character.  Do you really need him?  Can you use one of the characters you already have instead?  We’d much rather learn more about your hero than endure two scenes of Random Dude #5.

Genre: Superhero
Premise: (from IMDB) Eight years on, a new terrorist leader, Bane, overwhelms Gotham’s finest, and the Dark Knight resurfaces to protect a city that has branded him an enemy.
About: The final film in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.  Last year, I did a “Nolan Theme Week,” breaking down Inception, Memento, The Prestige, and Batman Begins.  I also had Roger break down The Dark Knight.  Check out those reviews for my feelings on Nolan’s writing.
Writers: Jonathan and Christopher Nolan (story by Christopher Nolan and David Goyer) (characters by Bob Kane)
Details: 164 minutes

I’m just going to say it: Nolan, you’re getting sloppy.

And who can blame the guy really?  Nolan didn’t want to make this film.  At least that’s what I derived from his interviews after The Dark Knight.  However these days, you can’t just make two of a franchise.  That word “trilogy” has changed all that.  Once that word became popularized there was no such thing as a sequel without another sequel.  And hence we have The Dark Knight Rises.

Why is this important?  Because when you’re not 100% passionate about something, it shows.  And Nolan’s lack of passion is on display here.  I mean, how do you follow up one of the Top 5 villains in cinema history?  Sure, you try your best.  But deep down you know you’re not going to top The Joker.  It’s like trying to get yourself up for the Cincinnati Open after you’ve won Wimbledon.

Now, to Nolan’s credit, he doesn’t go all George Lucas on us.  He doesn’t bust out one draft and say “This is it.”  But there’s no question what we see in this Batman entry could’ve benefitted from another draft or five.  The Dark Knight Rises has occasional high points, but as a screenplay, it’s an occupational hazard.

“Rises” starts off eight years after “Knight” with our favorite billionaire hobbled by a bad leg and a really long game of hide and seek.  No one’s seen Bruce Wayne OR Batman in all this time and a lot of that has to do with Batman being blamed for Harvey Dent’s murder.  Commissioner Gordon knows the truth, of course, but for whatever reason (read: story convenience) he keeps it to himself.

Batman’s absence allows Scottish misfit and air filtration advocate Bane (who operates in the sewers of Gotham) to pick up where the Joker left off and make a play for the city, first through its finances, then through a football game with two pretend teams, and finally via a nuclear bomb.  After blowing up all the bridges to Gotham, he lets the world know that if so much as a shoe from the good guys reaches his city, he’s blowing it sky-high.

He can do this because he’s already taken out a hobbled Batman, sending him back to the prison cave he himself spent the majority of his life in, and is the only person to have escaped from.  This giant hole then becomes a test for Batman to “get his mojo back,” as he must climb up an impossibly high cave cliff to get out, and gosh darnnit if the final jump to freedom isn’t Matrix-like difficult.  Now if I were Bane, I probably would’ve, you know, KILLED Batman jusssst innnn caaaase he turned out to be the SECOND person to escape the cave.  But where’s the fun in that?

As you’d expect, Batman gets out of the prison to the excited chants of his fellow inmates, who he’s since become BFFs with, and races back to Gotham just in time to save the day!  Or does he?  Turns out Batty Bruce will have to make a choice involving saving Gotham or saving himself.  And since we know how cool of a guy Batman is, it’s looking like our winged crusader ain’t going to be saving himself.  Does that mean The Batman dies?  Well if Batman’s armor can’t even stop a kitchen knife from puncturing it, I doubt it can stop a nuclear bomb.  But who knows?  Stranger things have happened.

The Dark Knight is big and grand and epic and annoyingly confusing.  I mean, I understood the broad strokes of the plot, but that was it.  The rest of the script was as muddled as a first grader’s recollection of his day.

One of my big problems with Inception, as you all know, was the 16 hours of exposition needed before we got to the actual story.  Nolan makes a similar mistake here, but with character introductions instead of exposition.  We have four key characters introduced, only one of which I had even the vaguest understanding of what he wanted, that being Bane.  And to be honest, I’m even a little unclear on him.  Bane wanted to take over Gotham because…..because why again?  Because he wears a mask?  Because he’s bad?  Because bad people do bad things?

Who knows?  But hey, as Batman fans are quick to point out, The Joker didn’t exactly have a solid motivation either.  He made life miserable for The Batman because he’s twisted and sick and has nothing better to do.  And that seemed to work.  However, the Joker was incredibly charismatic – impossible to look away from – which covered up a lot of his plot-related shortcomings.  Bane just wears a mask.  A cool mask – don’t get me wrong – but that’s all I remember about the guy. That and he sounded exactly like Sean Connery.

That brings us to our other three characters – Cat Woman, Sleuthy McSleuthems, and Marion Cotillard. I still have absolutely zero understanding of what any of these characters had to do with the story.  The sad thing was that Cat Woman was probably the most memorable character in the film.  She was the only one with energy, the only one who brought life to scenes.  But if you took her character out, the movie would be EXACTLY THE SAME.  That’s Screenwriting 101 there.  If a character isn’t needed to tell the story, get rid of them.

That leads us to Sleuthy mcSluethems, aka Joseph Gordon-Leavitt.  Nooooooo idea who this character was.  He just seemed to pop up every once in awhile looking concerned and distrusting, which was perfect, cause that’s exactly how I felt!  (Spoiler) Clearly, the only reason for this character’s inclusion was his big reveal at the end, which was admittedly cool.  But this is another basic screenwriting tenant.  Don’t make us suffer through a “nothing” storyline JUST for a twist.  The storyline itself has to be interesting, twist or not.  And there was NOTHING about this character that was interesting or even relevant.  Again, had you taken him out, nothing about the story would’ve changed.

Finally, that brings us to Marion Cotillard, the most confusing of all the confusing characters. Who was she?  No idea.  I think she was rich?  Influential?  Owned a company that made the sharpest knives in the universe?  This character was easily the biggest misstep as she had nothing to do with the anything outside of her own twist at the end, which of course had zero impact on us since we didn’t understand who she was anyway.

So after the introduction of all these characters (as well as the re-introduction to Bruce Wayne), we finally got to the actual plot, halfway through the 164 minute running time!  And you know what?  When we did, “Rises” actually started to resemble a movie!  Bane takes over Gotham.  There’s a ticking time bomb (literally).  And Batman has to escape his prison and save the day.  The second half of the film, for that reason, was actually pretty solid.  But I kept asking myself – why did we have to suffer through all that nonsense to get here?  Did we really need to meet all those characters?  Did we really need to set up all those story lines?

It’s no secret that I like streamlined narratives, so I’m hard-wired to dislike this kind of script.  I resisted Dark Knight on the first few viewings for the same reason.  Eventually, however, I learned to like it.  An argument can be made for Nolan pushing the screenwriting medium – to not giving us the obvious “Fast and Furious” formula, but rather layering his stories with multiple character through-lines and heavier thought-provoking themes.  I get that.  But why do I feel like it was all done so clumsily?

Maybe further viewings will change my mind.  But right now, I thought this screenplay was a bloated mess.

What I haven’t learned:  Batman may be the most popular character in movie history.  I walk down the street and hear 50 year old men saying they can’t wait to see this movie.  40 year old women saying they can’t wait to see this movie.  I hear black, hispanic, and asians saying they can’t wait to see this movie.  More than any other film, this character seems to capture people’s imaginations.  People LOVE Batman.  So my question is, “Why?”  I ask because as screenwriters, our most important job is coming up with a main character audiences will love.  If we can do that, we can sell screenplays by the dozen.  So what is it specifically about Batman that makes him so likable by so many people?  I feel that if we can figure that out, it will help us with our own protagonists.

Genre: Drama
Premise:  An 11 year old boy survives a mountain plane crash and must use all the tools his father taught him to survive.
About: This one finished low on last year’s Black List.  Writer Will Fetters broke onto the scene with Black List script “Remember Me,” a couple of years ago, which had one of the more shocking endings I’ve read and ended up starring heartthrob Robert Pattinson.  He then scripted The Lucky One, which starred Zac Efron.  Fetters projects seem to have the young hunky actor market cornered.  Which begs the question – Which hunky heartthrob is going to play 11 year-old Norman Ollestad.  My guess is Alex Petteyfer.
Writer: Will Fetters (based on the novel by Norman Ollestad)
Details: 121 pages (April 15, 2011 draft)

I don’t know why but I was worried about this one.  I mean, dramatically, it had the makings for a good story.  An 11 year old kid survives a plane crash.  He’s gotta use all the skills his father taught him to survive.  That could be cool right?

Yeah, it could be.  Assuming there was some drama in the story.  Assuming there was ANY drama in the story.  Crazy For The Storm is one of the most boring screenplays I’ve ever read.  I mean at least with The Accountant, you’re sitting there going, “Is this writer insane?  What the hell is he going to come up with next??”  With “Storm,” it’s as if the story was stripped of every potential interesting development before being let out into the world.  For a cool premise, it’s shocking to see how little actually happens in this script.

It starts off in 1979 with this 11 year old boy named Norman Ollestad barreling down a slalom run.  Norman is competing against guys five and six years older than him, which means he does’t have the weight to get enough speed to compete.  Therefore, his father has taught him how to ski on ice to make up for it.  This trick is what allows Norman to win.

But Norman doesn’t seem too thrilled about the victory.  He’s more surprised than anything.  Cut back to some really high class hippy commune (does that even make sense?) on the beach where Norman goes skateboarding with his buddies.   It’s back here where we learn that Norman’s father, Norman Sr., has divorced Norman’s mom, leaving Norman to live with his mom and step-father, whom he detests.

While getting to know Norman’s home life, we flash forward to see Norman, his father, and his father’s girlfriend hop on a Cessna and crash into a mountain.  We then spend the rest of the script jumping back and forth between the crash aftermath and Norman’s recent past, particularly his relationship with his father.

What is that relationship?  Good question.  I have no idea.  All I know is that they talk about life a lot and Norman Sr. goes to a lot of weird places. For example, he takes his son down to Mexico to deliver a washing machine to his grandparents.  On the way, they’re shot at and nearly killed by Federales.  Fun scene.  Absolutely no idea what it had to do with anything.

Back to the mountain where Norman realizes his father and the pilot are dead, but that his dad’s girlfriend is still alive.  Little 11 year old Norman will now have to carry the 30-something woman down the mountain with him.  Don’t worry.  He drops her and she dies.  Still, it will be a challenge.  And if I’m to believe the premise, only his father’s life lessons will allow him to make it out alive.  Except they don’t.  At all.  He just sort of walks down the mountain.  And that is Crazy For The Storm for you.

I mean………what??

I don’t know how one script can be so boring.  NOTHING happens in this screenplay.  Which is really weird to say about a script where a plane crashes into the side of a mountain.  How can you write a script where nothing happens after that?  I don’t know but it happened.

Let’s start with the idea itself.  I remember when this book was optioned and this is how I recall the pitch:  A young boy grows up with an overbearing father who forces him to do a bunch of stuff he hates. Then, when the boy is stranded on a mountain after a plane crash, he’s forced to use all those skills his father taught him to survive.

THAT sounded like a story.  There was some nice irony involved.  A boy hating his father for ruining his childhood but then getting stuck in a situation where all the lessons he taught him ended up saving his life.  Good, right?

Well that’s not the story.  This story has a father who loves his son.  He’s nice to him.  He’s helpful.  He’s protective.  They’re best friends!  In other words, there’s NO CONFLICT WHATSOEVER.  Which means every scene between them is boring.  So when Norman gets stuck on the mountain?  No irony.  Just – “Okay, let’s use the things dad taught me.”

Except NOT EVEN THAT MAKES SENSE!  What did the dad teach him?  How to ski?  How to surf?  Am I missing something here? How do skiing and surfing help you survive a plane crash????  I think there’s one scene where Norman slides down a section of the mountain.  So that’s it?  Is that the big lesson he learned that saved his life??

The only conflict in the script, actually, is focused on Norman and his stepfather.  Not only is it boring, but it has nothing to do with anything.  There’s this weird totally separate subplot about the stepfather wanting Norman to focus on getting a football scholarship to USC.  Uhhhh, HE’S 11!  Shouldn’t we start with graduating 6th grade first?  And we already have skiing and surfing and skateboarding in this movie.  Now we have football??  Aggghhh!!  I’m so confused.

If I were advising this story, this is what I would do.  I would create way more conflict between father and son.  This story only works with irony.  Get rid of the stepdad character. He’s worthless.  Spend WAY MORE TIME on the mountain after the crash.  It feels like there’s 8 pages of mountain in the entire script.  Then, make the mountain scenes actually interesting.  There need to be more obstacles.  It needs to look like an impossible feat.  Outside of losing the girlfriend (who we didn’t care about anyway because her inclusion was so undefined), Norman basically jaunts down the mountain without a hitch.

Watch (or read) Alive.  Those guys had to deal with avalanches and starvation and isolation and turning on each other.  There was an obstacle at every turn, every few minutes.  Here, there are no obstacles!  Where’s the drama in that?

Then, when you do cut back to the past, only cut back to him and his father.  And build up more of a hatred there.  His father should be heartless, unloving, only about teaching his son to be better (at whatever it is he’s teaching him).  Norman then grows to resent his father.  That way the movie is about this kid who’s gone his whole life believing his father didn’t love him, that he only cared about torturing him, only to learn he actually loved him more than anything, because he prepared him for this moment.

I’m not even scratching the surface here.  There were SOOOO many other things wrong with this script – such as the fact that 11 year old Norman talked like he was 22 the whole time.  But I’ve already crashed this script into the side of a mountain enough.  I’m getting off this mountain.  Does anybody have a snowboard I can borrow?

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

What I learned: This script suffers from one of the worst mistakes you can make as a screenwriter – the passive hero.  Norman doesn’t talk much.  He doesn’t do much.  He just listens to his dad and reacts.  Even the 8 pages where he does act (on the mountain) feel restrained.  Be REALLY wary of protagonists who don’t talk and are followers.  There’s an incredibly high chance they’re boring.