NEW TOP 25 SCREENPLAY REVIEWED IN NEWSLETTER!
By now, you should have received a hot-off-the-presses juicy Scriptshadow Newsletter served animal style! Today’s newsletter includes a new Top 25 screenplay that came out of nowhere. I’m talking this is the LAST person I expected to write a Top 25 script. One thing I’ll tell you that puts this script above so many others, is that it’s a MOVIE. You read it and you can see the movie. Everybody writes these self-masturbatory “feels” scripts about post-impressionist Sweden or some nonsense. I’m not saying these scripts can’t become movies. But they’re not built to be movies. This script is built to be a movie.
Anyway, if you didn’t get my newsletter in your Inbox, check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS folders. It should be in there. If you don’t see it there, feel free to e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: “NEWSLETTER” and I’ll send it to you. If you’re not on my mailing list and want on, do the same. Send “NEWSLETTER” to the above e-mail.
Also, I’ll be putting an Amateur Offerings post up later today. Probably late afternoon. If you’ve got a script that you think would do well, you still have time to submit. E-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com and include the title of your script, the genre, a logline, a pitch to myself and other readers on why we’d enjoy your script, and, finally, an attached PDF of your screenplay.
Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of consultation scripts with scene issues. Writers are staying inside of their scenes for too long. My advice for this has always been the same. The average scene should be somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 pages. Anything over that needs justification. If you’re writing a big set piece, that’s justification. If you’re writing the climax, that’s justification. If you’re writing a big confrontation between two characters, that’s justification. Otherwise, you should be keeping your scenes lean and mean.
However, it occurred to me, that as often as I gave this advice, I’d never actually tested it. I was going mostly on feel and, admittedly, the advice that had been handed down to me long ago. So today I decided to change that. Get some real world data. What I did was I chose three screenplays, and counted how long each scene was. I then divided the scenes by the page number to get an actual average of pages per scene.
This process was trickier than I expected. There’s some subjectivity in what constitutes a scene. For example, Deadpool does a lot of bouncing back and forth in time. Sometimes, when we bounce to the past, it’s for an isolated scene. Other times, it’s part of a series of scenes you could argue are one continuous (montage) scene. So I had to use my judgement on which was which.
Also, I didn’t want to break down scene numbers into quarters, as it would get too messy. So if a scene was, say, 65% of a page, I would round down to half a page. If it was 75% of a page, I rounded up to a full page. I didn’t measure down to the millimeter or anything, which, when going through the whole script, gave me some imperfect page counts. That’s why the numbers don’t add up EXACTLY to the official page count. With that said, it’s accurate enough for the purposes of this article.
Here’s what I came up with…
DEADPOOL (ORIGINAL SPEC DRAFT)
1.5, .5, 3, 10, 3, 2.5, 2.5, 1, 1.5, .5, 4, 2.5, 2, 1.5, .5, 2, 4.5, 3.5, 1.5, 1, 2.5, 1, 2, 1.5, .5, 1, 3, .5, 2, 2, 2, 1.5, 1.5, 4, 3, 1, 2, .5, 1, 3.5, 2, 14, 6, 3
Page Count: 113
Number of Scenes: 44
Average: 2.6 pages per scene
THE BABADOOK (SHOOTING SCRIPT)
3.5, 3, .5, 1, .5, 2.5, 3, .5, 1, 3, 1, .5, 2.5, 1, 3, .5, 2, 1, 1.5, 1, 1, 1, 2.5, .5, 1, 1, 1, 2, 6.5, 1, 2.5, 1.5, 2, 1.5, 1, 2, 1, 3.5, 1.5, 1, 3, .5, 1, .5, 1, .5, 3, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 6, 2, 5, 2.5, .5, 2.5
Page Count: 100
Number of Scenes: 56
Average: 1.8 pages per scene
THE HANGOVER (ORIGINAL SPEC DRAFT)
1.5, 4, 2.5, 3, 3, 2.5, .5, 2.5, .5, 5, 4.5, 1, 1.5, 4.5, 1, .5, 3.5, 1, 4, 7, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 1, 1.5, 8.5, 3, 2.5, 5, 1, .5, 6, 2.5, 1.5, 1, 1.5, 1, 2, 5.5, 1
Page Count: 111
Number of Scenes: 40
Average: 2.7 pages per scene
So what did I learn here? Well, writing style has a lot to do with how many scenes you’re going to have. Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) had a lot of brief scenes with her protagonist in a car coming back home. Or sitting in a room while her kid was asleep. She seemed to be drawn to moments, as opposed to writing fully fleshed out scenes.
On the flip side we’ve got The Hangover, which has the most long scenes of our three examples. A reason for that may be that comedy needs to rev up in a scene before it gets going. And also, there’s more dialogue in a comedy, since the characters are making lots of jokes. This naturally leads to longer scenes.
Deadpool is such a crazy script with all the jumping around. But I wanted to include at least one action script. Not surprisingly, the long scenes in the script are the major set-pieces. But I was surprised how short some of the scenes were. I remembered being in the theater and watching Wade Wilson yap his mouth off in a bar for awhile. But in the script, those scenes are under 3 pages.
Despite all of this, the average scene length is surprisingly close to the advice myself and others have been giving. Deadpool and Hangover are a little over 2.5 pages per scene. But that might have dropped had I been stricter about what a scene is and isn’t. Likewise, with Babadook being a very stream-of-conscious type movie, you could make the argument that many of those individual scenes were part of bigger scenes. With those adjustments, all of these movies would be in that 1.5-2.5 page sweet spot for how long the average scene should be.
I want to make it clear though that this doesn’t mean every scene should be 2 pages. A scene should be as long as it needs to be. If all you need to convey is that a character is an asshole, take half a page and show him cut someone in line at Starbucks. Boom, you’re done. But if you’ve got your hero and your villain, who you’ve been building up for 80 pages, finally confront each other in a diner (Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Heat), of course that scene should be longer.
What you don’t want is to make newbie mistakes like coming into a scene too early. Or leaving a scene well after the scene is clearly over. I’ll see this happen in comedy specs a lot. The writers want to get as many jokes in as possible and therefore a 3 page scene becomes a 6 page scene with half the impact. The lesson I would take away from today is that if your scene is over 2.5 pages long, there better be a good reason for it. It has to be an important scene in some capacity.
I hope that helps!
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or 5 for $75. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. If you’re interested in any sort of consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
Genre: TV Pilot – 1 Hr. Drama
Premise: A family is turned upside-down when their flight back from vacation experiences an impossible phenomenon.
About: The high-concept network show is back! We’ve got this one premiering on NBC in the fall. And we’ve got a new zombie show, The Passage, also in the fall, coming from Fox. Manifest is created by Jeff Rake (The Mysteries of Laura) and newcomer, Matthew Fernandez. It’s being produced by Robert Zemeckis.
Writers: Jeff Rake & Matthew Fernandez
Details: 60 pages
Here’s something I’ve never shared on the site.
I’m obsessed with plane crashes. I’m talking, after a plane crash, I will hunt down the black box recording and listen to it repeatedly. I will read accident reports. If there’s a flight that had turbulence so bad it was reported in the news? I will eviscerate the internet to find in-flight cell phone footage of the event. I have watched every single episode of both plane crash shows, Mayday, and Air Disasters.
This may have something to do with my mom being convinced that every plane we were on growing up was going down. Hearing the words, “I have a bad feeling about this flight, I don’t think we should get on it,” was as common a phrase to me growing up as “Do you want me to make you a sandwich?”
This has fueled my morbid curiosity about plane crashes and mysterious plane occurrences (that Malaysian flight was an obsession of mine for over a year), and it’s also led me to want to write or produce or find the ultimate plane-related project. I’m open to pitches. So if you’ve got a good idea, throw it up in the comments. Don’t limit the genre. The best plane-related story to date is plane/horror hybrid, “A Face in the Window,” (from The Twilight Zone movie). If you want to know what I looked like on every flight through my 20s, this is an accurate depiction.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that I’m obsessed with this Manifest show. As soon as I heard about it, I screamed, “I MUST FIND THIS SCRIPT!” I’m such an easy sell with this material that I’d be shocked if I didn’t like it. But it’s a script, so you never know. Let’s check it out.
Ben and Grace, a married couple in their 30s, are at the airport after a Jamaican vacation with their twins, 10 year old Cal and Olive. Cal, we quickly learn, has leukemia, and will be lucky if he makes it past six months. Also with them are Ben’s sister, Michaela, a cop who’s recovering from a traumatic car crash, and Ben’s parents, Steven and Karen.
When the opportunity to give up seats for money-vouchers arises, Ben suggests that him, Cal, and Michaela take them, since the Mayo Clinic is bleeding them dry and a little extra cash will help. So Grace, Olive, and the parents take this flight, and Ben, Cal, and Michaela the next.
That flight is uneventful except for a brief bout of severe turbulence. Once they arrive in Baltimore, they find themselves oddly moving towards a warehouse instead of a gate. A group of federal agents are waiting for them. Once outside, they’re told that their plane disappeared 5 years ago, and that everyone on board was assumed dead. But the real kicker is when he informs them that they’ve all missed their connecting flights.
After a lot of questioning, the miracle passengers are allowed to go home. Olive is now 15 years old, which makes the twin connection between her and Cal a lot weirder. Grace had given up hope on Ben, and can’t believe that he’s returned. Ben’s mother died. Oh, and good news for Cal. In the five years that he’s been gone, they found a breakthrough treatment for his cancer. It’s looking like he’ll be cured.
The rest of the pilot focuses on Michaela, who keeps hearing voices in her head. One voice keeps telling her to “let them free!” and grows louder when she’s jogging past an old junkyard. She eventually breaks into the junkyard, where the voice guides her towards an old shack. She opens it to find two girls who were recently kidnapped and is heralded as a hero.
The only person she can tell about this power is Ben and he tells her to keep it quiet. He has a feeling that the government isn’t going to let these weirdos integrate back into society easily. And if they give them any reason to snatch them back into custody, they’ll take it. And so Michaela, along with the rest of the passengers, begin their new life after this bizarre event.
We’ve talked about this before. The high-concept TV show is a tough one. It gets you eyeballs early. But you have to wonder if a show can sustain itself if the coolest event that happens in the entire series occurs in the first five minutes.
If you look at shows like X-Files – that show ensured that every episode would be high-concept. Then there’s Lost. The brilliance of that show was that the exciting plane crash was only the beginning. The island itself was the real star.
I’m not convinced that there’s much of a story here beyond the awesome teaser. The only character with anything going on is Nostradamus Michaela. And my problem with that is, her premonition power doesn’t evolve organically from the event on the plane. I mean, you can explore premonitions without a 5 year plane trip, can’t you?
As is the case with every TV show, the characters need to be great. That’s the key to adding longevity to your show. I would go so far as to say you should spend just as much time writing backstory for your six biggest characters as you spend writing the pilot itself. And when I say that, I mean EACH character. Not combined.
You may balk at that but what do you think is going to happen if you slap some half-realized characters on the page? The reader can tell. Trust me. It’s so easy for me to tell when a writer has put a lot of work into someone, when they’ve put barely any time into them, and when they’ve put in just enough.
That’s definitely how I feel about these characters. Who’s the stand-out here? Michaela I guess? And even she’s vague (when we meet her she’s unsure if she wants to get married, yet when she arrives in the U.S., she’s devastated to find out her fiancé has moved on to someone else). Cancer Boy has no personality or development outside of the fact that he has cancer. Cancer can’t define a character. There’s gotta be more there.
And yet… dammit… because I like plane stuff and weird sci-fi stories, this still kept my interest until the end. The moment early when the family decides to split onto two planes – that was a pro screenwriter move right here. Most writers would’ve had the family on the plane together. It was so much more interesting to split them up and see the family reunite afterwards.
I just question whether they have enough to move forward. This needs more mysteries. It needs more questions. Either more characters needed the premonition power or each character needed their own unique power. I hope I’m wrong. I still miss the trippy WTF world of Lost, where you never knew what was coming next week. Is there a mind out there that can recreate that excitement? I hope so.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Network TV shows (and all TV shows to some degree) need to embrace their soapy elements. TV is about character. Which means plots are going to be dictated by character. That means things like death, cancer, cheating, pregnancies, characters romantically getting together – these will fuel a lot of your plot points. Not all at once! You will spread them out over the course of the season. But when something big needs to happen, soapy reveals are usually your go-tos. So here (SPOILER), a late reveal is Grace (the wife) having a hushed call with a man. We realize that she’s fallen in love with someone else, and is deciding when the best time to tell Ben is. It sounds a bit hacky, but TV thrives on this stuff as long as you don’t overdo it.
Genre: Action-Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) When a veteran hitwoman is mysteriously poisoned on her last assignment in Tokyo, she has 24 hours to track down her killer before she dies.
About: Before today’s script made the bottom half of last year’s Black List, it got a 25 million dollar production commitment from Netflix… WITHOUT A DIRECTOR OR CAST. Wow. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. Actually, I don’t think it’s ever happened. It goes to show that Netflix, in its bid to become the ultimate entertainment destination even if that means going bankrupt, is willing to disrupt any and all models they can. The writer, Umair Aleem, just made headlines yesterday for getting the high profile gig, “Danger Girl,” a comic book inspired by Charlie’s Angels, James Bond, and Indiana Jones, if that’s possible.
Writer: Umair Aleem
Details: 120 pages
I have a feeling today’s script is going to make some of you angry. I mean, it’s another Jane Wick spec – aka, the most unoriginal trend in Hollywood history. But I encourage you to see the light at the end of this tunnel. Writer writes spec. Writer gets direct commitment from Netflix. Writer gets high profile gig in the same vein as his spec. I’d hope everyone would champion that seeing as it means THESE SORTS OF THINGS HAPPEN. And therefore it could happen to you. And as much as spec sales rock, they don’t come anywhere CLOSE to production commitments. Who cares if you sell a spec that never gets made?
Kate is the best hitman/hitwoman who’s ever held a gun. Seriously? Isn’t that always the case with these movies? When are they going to make a movie about an average hitman? Anyway, we open on Kate telling her longtime handler, Varrick, she wants to retire after this hit. He doesn’t like it but he promises to talk to the Firm and see if they’ll release her.
Before Kate, who’s in Tokyo, executes the hit, she has sex with a male prostitute. Then off she goes to assassinate a prominent Japanese something-or-other. Right before she pulls the trigger, she feels an unimaginable pain all over her body. She refocuses, but the pain only gets worse. Somehow, she’s able to kill her target, but she passes out before waking up in a hospital.
They tell her she’s been poisoned with uranium and has less than 15 hours to live. Oh, and her death will be unimaginably painful.
There ain’t a whole lot to do during the last 15 hours of your life than figure out who poisoned you and kill them so off Kate goes, starting with Varrick, crossing him off the list, then the prostitute, satisfied he didn’t do anything. So then it’s time to check the heavy hitters. The Yakuza.
She works her way up to the two biggest families in town, the Sumiyoshis and the Kozakuras, killing entire armies of men to get to the top brass and question why they wanted her killed. But everyone she talks to has no idea what she’s talking about.
Along the way, she saves a 12 year old girl named Ani who, coincidentally, was being used as bait to lure in, guess who? That would be the mark she killed earlier. So now she’s walking around with the girl who she’s just made fatherless. But the two form a close bond, and therefore when Ani gets taken a second time, Kate will have to make a decision what to do with the last hour of her life – find out who her killer is, or go save the girl. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll achieve both.
I constantly preach on this site – GO SIMPLE! Write a simple easy-to-understand plot. A group of people go to a dinosaur park. The dinosaurs get loose and the people must escape. Simple, right?
But when is simple TOO simple? Is a woman who’s been poisoned looking for her killer enough to keep us engaged for 2 hours? Or is there a floor for how simple a concept can be?
A premise is too simple when, despite a clear goal, stakes, and urgency, you don’t do anything original with the execution.
That means either your characters have to be really interesting or you need a location that we haven’t seen before or a situation that’s fresh and unexpected or a plot that takes some risks or you need to have a voice that’s unlike any other writer out there.
Otherwise, if all you’re doing is giving us a generic, “Hero needs to get from Point A to Point B or something terrible happens” plot, it’s going to be too simple.
I’ll give you an example of another hitwoman script that got this write. It was called Ballerina. In that script, we end up in a weird Swiss Alps town and find out that everybody who lives in this town is a hitman, and they’ve been breeding hitmen for centuries.
Weird? Yes. A choice that works for everyone? No. But at least it was unique. At least it was something I hadn’t seen before. And that’s what you should be looking to integrate when you have an absurdly simple concept, like “Kate.” At several junctures during the story, we’ve got to feel that this is different from what we’ve seen before.
So was Aleem able to achieve this?
Well, his voice is a little different. He writes in the Walter Hill style of screenwriting, where the action is short and single-spaced. This fragmented style gives the script a unique feel right off the bat, which helps offset some of the simplicity of the premise.
The setting is a little different as well. I’m not sure we’ve ever had a female action-thriller set in Tokyo. I don’t know how much credit I should give for this since we’ve obviously seen plenty of male action scripts set there. But I admit it helped things feel a little different.
And Kate herself, while hardly a world-changing heroine, is a cold-hearted sociopath who had a double mastectomy to prevent the future possibility of breast cancer. I’m not sure how much I liked that choice. But it’s different. And it’s the kind of thing I can see an actress being excited to play.
Finally, I liked the choice of having the girl she saved be the daughter of the man she killed. I say that as someone who’s read lots of similar plots where the kid our hero saves has no connection to them whatsoever. And how that makes the relationship a lot less interesting.
All of these choices helped elevate “Kate” beyond amateur status.
After that, however, it’s standard stuff. We go question Suspect A. He mentions Suspect B. So we go see him. He mentions Suspect C. We go to him. He mentions suspect D. We go see him. It was a very linear repetitive narrative. And once you get in a rhythm like that, the reader gets too comfortable. They know that the next guy you visit is just going to tell us to visit the next guy. Because that’s what you’ve been doing for the past 45 pages.
I wrote an article once about In and Out. The idea behind the article was you want equal amounts of your hero imposing herself upon the story (“Out”) and the story imposing itself upon your hero (“In”). The move from one suspect to the next was all Out Out Out Out Out Out. It wasn’t until the girl arrives, which was after the midpoint, that we got an In. Aleem could’ve used more Ins.
With that said, I genuinely didn’t know who poisoned Kate. And I was surprised by just how much I wanted to know. And when we finally get the answer, I was satisfied (for reasons I’ll get into in the What I Learned section). For that accomplishment alone, this is worth the read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
POTENTIAL SPOILERS!
What I learned: Whoever the killer is in your murder-mystery, you must 100% eliminate them as a possibility early on. You can’t trick audiences these days. There are only so many suspects to choose from. We’re going to figure it out. So what you do is you create a scene or a scenario whereby we know, for a fact, that your killer isn’t your killer. If you look back to Kevin Williamson’s “Scream,” there was a moment where we thought the killer was the boyfriend. But soon after, the boyfriend is with our hero, Sydney, while the next killing happens. We now know, for a fact, he’s not the guy (but then he ends up being the guy). Here, [The Killer] is the first person Kate goes to. She sits him down and asks him if he’s involved. It’s just a scene of them talking, but afterwards, we’re convinced this guy would never hurt Kate. Of course, in the end, it turns out he was just a really good actor.
Genre: Action/Adventure
Premise: (from IMDB) When the island’s dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen and Claire mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event.
About: Three years ago, Jurassic World took the world by storm. The movie nobody thought they wanted became a mega-hit, grossing 1.6 billion worldwide. In a strange twist of fate, the first film’s director, Colin Trevorrow, was fired from his Star Wars Episode 9 job, allowing him to come back and spearhead the back end of the new film in a producing capacity. The sequel is directed by J.A. Bayona, who directed one of my favorite horror films ever, The Orphanage. The sequel grossed 150 million this weekend.
Writers: Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow (based on characters by Michael Crichton)
Details: 128 minutes
Jurassic Park has always felt like a hard franchise to embrace. For the longest time, I wondered why that was. After watching Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom this weekend, it hit me. Unlike franchises such as Star Wars, Marvel, Indy, Harry Potter, etc., Jurassic Park has always been about the dinosaurs. And as awesome as dinosaurs are, they’re not people. They’re not characters we can emotionally connect to. This is why no matter who we plop down into the park, we’re left feeling empty. The characters have always been interchangeable in this universe.
Fallen Kingdom tries to solve this issue with “Blue,” the velociraptor who Chris Pratt’s character, Owen, trained as a raptor pup. Maybe, the theory went, they could turn him into a Disney animal, like reindeer Sven from Frozen. But the problem with these darn dinosaurs is if you make them too cute and cuddly, they come off as dishonest. These are predators and you have to stay true to that. Which means we can only feel so close to them.
The plot for Fallen Kingdom isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. After the events of the previous movie, a volcano on the island has become active. Once it erupts, it’s likely that all the dinosaurs in the park will die. There’s a debate going on about whether we should save them from extinction, or “let nature take its course.” After an impassioned speech by Jeff Goldblum (who never liked us “playing God”), nature wins. It’s decided that they should be left to die.
The estate of the Jurassic Park’s creator, Hammond (the old guy who always said, “No spared expense”), doesn’t want this to happen. They’ve found an island to sneak the dinosaurs off to and let them live in peace. They can do most of the work themselves, but if they’re going to find the elusive “Blue,” they’ll need someone who can find him. Claire says, “I can’t catch him.” And they say, “But you know someone who can.”
So Claire recruits Owen to go to Jurassic World to help lure Blue, only to find out it’s all a sham. There’s no second island. They’re going to take these dinosaurs back to the mainland and sell them off to the highest bidders! After being jailed at the head mansion by the bad guys, Claire and Owen orchestrate an escape, and run to the room where the auction is taking place. Of course, a few dinosaurs get free, and then all hell breaks loose. Now it’s back to basics. Get the hell off this compound without getting eaten.
The plot is by no means perfect. But it’s hard to come up with sequels to “monster-in-a-box” scenarios. You can’t repeat the plot from the first film, even though that’s the only way to make these concepts work. So you’re stuck stitching together plots like these, which have sections that are fun, but don’t add up to a complete experience.
The best stuff in the film, by far, is the stuff on the island. There were four, arguably five, good set-pieces. My personal favorite was running down the hill of the island with all the dinosaurs while a volcano blows up behind them. But the set piece I was most invested in was the drowning scene. Claire and her assistant are stuck inside one of those glass bubble vehicles which has plunged into the ocean and it’s filling up with water. Owen is able to come down and jimmy open the door just in time to save them.
This was a reminder of something I preach all the time here. The simplest set pieces are often the best. There are no dinosaurs in this scene. Just characters. But the scene is so perfectly paced and the threat of death so prominent, that I was holding my breath along with them. Really good stuff.
Ironically, this placed the script in a huge predicament – how do you follow such a strong island sequence? Unfortunately, they failed with their choice, setting the second half of the movie in a mansion. You cannot, under any circumstances, make the second half of your blockbuster action movie smaller than your first half.
Yet that’s what happens. We regress into small rooms and small scenes (time to sell the dinosaurs!). The whole time I kept wondering how they were going to get all the characters and dinosaurs to a final location where the giant climax will be. But it never happened. The movie remains inside the mansion/compound the whole time. The choice was so baffling, I assumed it had to be a budget issue. But who puts budget constraints on sequels to movies that gross 1.6 billion dollars?
Another problem with this dinosaur world is that the writers try to have it both ways. When it suits them, the dinosaurs are nice loving animals that need to be saved. When it doesn’t, they’re cruel heartless predators that you have to run from. This happened all the time. Help the raptor, THEN RUN FROM IT! Help the T-Rex, THEN HIDE! In defense of Connolly and Trevorrow, I’m not sure this is any different from the original Jurassic Park, but I noticed it a lot more here. And it left me confused about what I was rooting for. Are these things good? Are they bad? What am I supposed to be feeling? And if you’re going to say to me, “That’s the point Carson. It’s complicated!” Give me a break. This is Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World. Not Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless.
The one big talking point coming out of this film is the ending (MAJOR SPOILERS moving forward). Some people have praised the film for finally “moving the Jurassic franchise forward.” I’m calling B.S. What happens at the end of the film is they let all the dinosaurs free, which allows them to scurry into the mainland, into society. For the first time, Jeff Goldblum post-scripts, man and dinosaur will co-exist.
Mark my words. This will doom the sequel.
Monster-in-a-box movies only work when there’s a monster and a box. You take either one of those away and you don’t have a movie. They’re taking the box away. So what’s the plot going to be? Are we going to cut between Japan, China, the U.S., France, and the U.K., observing how different nations adapt to the dinosaur phenomenon? That may work as a National Geographic series. But it won’t work as a movie, which needs something more contained, both in location and urgency. If you disagree with me, pitch your “Dinosaurs are everywhere in the world now” idea for Jurassic World 3 in the comments. Watch as it gets shot down. And it’s not your fault! There’s no way to make this setup work.
You may say to me, “But Avengers Infinity War, Carson! That took place all over the universe.” But that’s not a monster-in-a-box story. We’re dealing with characters there who have their own goals, their own flaws and fears and conflicts to overcome. That’s the inherent problem with dinosaurs. They’re not smart. They can’t have dino-arcs.
If I were grading this on the first half alone, I would say it’s worth the price of admission. But once we get to the mansion, each sequence is less compelling than the previous sequence. Not only that, but the writers didn’t recognize that while even though the dinosaurs are the stars of the show, the audience needs to connect with the characters. And they don’t give us anyone to connect to.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Never go smaller in your second half. Movies need to build. This was a problem I had with Looper as well. We went from this giant time-traveling world-traveling opus to hanging out on a farm.
