Batman vs. Superman. Pft. How bout Time Shark vs. Dude, Where’s My Ferret?? Now that’s a real showdown! Not that it’ll ever happen but still.
Before we get started, I thought I’d bring you into my world for a moment. I’m honestly trying to do good here. But I still get 1 to 2 e-mails a week that read like this gem I received yesterday: “Carson, I’ve been reading you for years and I’ve sent you several high quality screenplays to read, but I get no response. You pick out the worst dreck you can find and review it. Now I’m done with you.”
Don’t you realize e-mails like this make me feel like Sad Affleck?
Look, we all believe our ideas are better than everyone else’s. Or else why would we write them? But if you’re not getting a good response from sending your logline in (to me and others), there’s probably something wrong with it. The bar some weeks is really low. Sometimes it comes down to, “Can the writer form a cohesive sentence with his logline?” I’m not hiding away a series of brilliant scripts here. If you’ve got something that even sounds capable, it’s probably going to make the site.
If you’re really struggling with why your pitch isn’t getting traction, post your idea in the comments and let others tell you if you have the greatest logline since Jurassic Park. Or get a friend’s opinion. Make sure to INSIST they be honest with you (or they won’t). But seriously, take some responsibility for your stuff instead of passing it onto others. I guarantee you that your writing will improve.
Okay guys, you know the drill. Read the scripts below (or read as far into the script as you can), then vote for your favorite in the comments section (“I vote for BLAH BLAH”). But if you want to be a really helpful dude or dudette, give feedback to the writers. It’s particularly helpful for writers to know where you stopped reading and why. Oh, and if you’d like to enter your own script for a potential Amateur Saturday slot, send me your title, genre, logline, why we should read, to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. We need some fresh submissions so get those scripts in!
Title: FOUND FOOTAGE
Genre: Animation/found footage
Logline: “A group of trainee scout ants who find themselves battling to stay alive after a training exercise in a suburban home goes horribly wrong…this is the found footage”
Why You Should Read: Haunted by all the ants that I’ve killed, I found myself with no choice but having to write this script. I hope it does justice to all the ants that have fallen in battle, most specifically the ants from the Eighth Antiment: For Queen and Colony. Hoo-hah!
Title: Vultures ‘N’ Doves
Genre: Action/Heist
Logline: An estranged group of musicians, of a once successful band, reunite in order to pull a series of robberies at major concert venues, all in one night, in an attempt to take back the millions they feel were stolen from them by their ex-manager, who now runs the venues they target. Their greatest hits, are robberies.
Why You Should Read: I love heist films. Primarily, grounded heist films. Shit that could happen. Shit that, if we put our minds to it, and had just the right opportunity, for just the right reason, we might be able to pull off and would risk doing so. Any heist situation is absolutely nuts to attempt, so it has to be about more than the money. There has to be something so wrong with the system, the person, the past or the present where it seems there is no other choice. Vultures N Doves is unique twist on the heist film, something I’ve never seen in a movie before, it’s amped up fun, there’s a couple of outrageous set pieces, and most importantly, a main character with a rockstar ego, who is struggling to keep his band, marriage, and life together.
Title: Scary Monsters
Genre: Horror/Comedy
Logline: When citizens of a small town begin transforming into werewolves, vampires, ghouls and goblins, the only person who seems to notice is the town’s narcissistic black sheep.
Why You Should Read: The Universal monsters will be creeping their way back into theaters over the next few years. “Scary Monsters” is the comedic answer to this. The script is an R-rated monster mash that I’ve been working on for about three years. It’s heavy on humor, while still maintaining its heart. I feel like the story veers in some interesting and offbeat directions as it goes on, especially in the final act. My style of humor is on full display here, as is three years’ worth of depression, addiction and self-loathing. Fun. If you do read the script, I hope you enjoy it and I would love some feedback.
Title: John Brown’s Body
Genre: Historical Fiction (Based on True Events)
Logline: After a lifetime of failure, John Brown attacks the United States Armory at Harper’s Ferry in one last ditch effort to free the slaves.
Why You Should Read: In earlier forms, this script placed in the top ten in Final Draft’s Big Break, was a semifinalist in Page and received a “Consider” from Coverage Ink. I’ve worked hard on the notes I’ve received and I think I’ve made it better. I understand that it’s a period piece (but isn’t Catherine the Great?), however it’s a really cool moment in history that has been ignored on the big screen. I like to think of this story as the American version of Braveheart.
Title: Sinkhole
Genre: Comedy
Logline: A self-centered, good ol’ boy chooses getting a pool over fixing the house, resulting in him falling through a sinkhole into another dimension where things are deceivingly better.
Why You Should Read: Brandi didn’t leave a “Why You Should Read,” so this is Carson explaining why I picked this. I’m obsessed with sinkholes. I’m not kidding. I think they’re fascinating. So there was no way this wasn’t getting onto the site. (p.s. If you have any sinkhole pitches or scripts, send them to me!)
Genre: Comedy (Stoner)
Premise: After accidentally losing her company’s mascot, an uptight junior food scientist reluctantly enlists the help of her pothead building superintendent and together they battle against a relentless vermin exterminator to recover the missing ferret before her career goes up in smoke.
Why You Should Read: With marijuana being legalized all over the place, it’s a topical subject, plus it has a fresh twist with the ferret angle. Stoners and ferrets go together like macaroni and cheese! I’ve directed several short films featuring ferrets, including a short called DUDE, WHERE’S MY FERRET? that is meant as a teaser for the feature version, featuring Bubbles from The Trailer Park Boys. I also directed THE MAGIC FERRET, which was Jacob Tremblay’s (Room) first leading role. I like working with ferrets because it’s something different than what most people are used to seeing – and I know something about them because I have one as a pet (used to have two, R.I.P. Falcor the Ferret). I think this is a great recipe for a stoner comedy – but we need some help to get it to where it needs to be. I say ‘we’ because I’m the director but not the writer – I found someone to write this for me while I learn the craft. We could highly benefit from a review by Carson and our peers. I’m smishsmosh22 and promise to participate in the comments if we get chosen!
Writer: Tim McS
Details: 93 pages
Dude, where’s my ferret?
It’s fun to say, right? Go ahead, try and say it without smiling.
Like a talking ferret, it’s impossible.
Unless, of course, you believe in talking ferrets. And in that case, you’ll like this script. In fact, one of the first things you’ll realize when reading today’s script is that Tim McS really likes ferrets. No, I mean like really really really likes ferrets. And while we’ve always supported the mantra, “Write what you know,” at what point has that philosophy gone too far???
26 year old Laura Frye is a junior food scientist. That means she designs food to taste better, last longer, or look more interesting. And her latest project is improving the lifespan of a pet food company’s ferret food line. As you might imagine, the CEO of the company, Peterson, is none too pleased with this development. The faster ferret food goes bad, the sooner the customer has to buy more ferret food. So Laura’s invention will lose the company money.
After dropping a couple dozen F-bombs on her, Peterson punishes Laura by assigning her to watch the company ferret (lovingly named “Ferret Bueller”) for the evening and bring him to his big ad photoshoot tomorrow. Ironically, Laura doesn’t even like ferrets. But she waltzes back to her apartment with the ferret and somehow ends up in 25 year-old All-Star stoners, Spoke and Noodle’s apartment.
After accidentally eating their pot cookies, Laura inadvertently lets Ferret Bueller loose. With her job on the line, Laura desperately enlists the help of Spoke and Noodle to find Ferret Bueller, who has since crawled into the walls and is running around the insides of the apartment complex.
Laura and Spoke team up, following the screams from apartment to apartment, while Noodle heads down to the basement, which he seems to think is the best place to find stray animals.
I should mention that Noodle lost his memory in a terrible accident years ago and has no idea who he is. So, of course, he starts seeing hallucinations of Ferret Bueller, who begins talking to him, revealing pieces of his past, from which he finally starts putting together his identity.
Meanwhile, unlikely sparks are flying between Spoke and Laura. She’s educated, driven, and organized. He’s jobless, dumb, and addicted to pot. But if you’re both high, none of that matters. And you can never predict how the search for an elongated rat-animal-thing can bring two people closer. But will they capture that little minx before it’s too late? Dude, read the script to find out!
Hey, I got a joke for you. How did one ferret receive money from another ferret? He inferrited it.
Haha. You get it?
Right.
Anyway, Dude Where’s My Ferret is a surprisingly well-constructed screenplay considering the subject matter. Typically when I read these kinds of wacky comedies, there is zero effort or even understanding of how to add structure to the story. The scripts are usually a series of loosely-connected sketches.
We’ve got some great GSU here (goal, stakes, urgency). Goal – find the ferret. Stakes – Laura’s job. Urgency – the photo shoot. So we’re always clear on what needs to happen and where we are in the story. That’s important. A lot of writers don’t know how to do that, causing their scripts to wander.
It’s a clever little plot too. The fact that we get to chase the ferret through the building allows us to go into the apartments of a varied cast of characters. It was basically a license to go crazy with character, and as anyone who writes comedy knows, crazy/weird/outrageous characters are key. Melissa McCarthy’s character in Bridesmaid’s. Mr. Chow in The Hangover.
I also liked the technologically sophisticated pest exterminator. An exterminator who uses drones to search for his prey – I’d never seen that before. But more importantly, McS was employing a classic storytelling technique. Figure out what your main character wants, then put as many obstacles in front of that “want” as you can. The more creative the obstacle, the better.
So with all this good, why didn’t I love Dude, Where’s My Ferret? Well, to put it plainly, I thought the comedy was too standard. One of my big red flags when it comes to comedy is excessive swearing. It’s not that swearing can’t be funny. With the right character, it can be hilarious. But usually it’s a sign of the writer not being creative enough. A guy who swears a lot (in this case, Peterson, who says “fuck” every other word) tells me, “I’m not willing to put in the effort to come up with genuine thoughtful comedy.”
I mean look at one of the movies this was inspired by – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Hilarious movie. Not a single swear word.
If it’s an organic part of the character (for instance, the character has Tourette’s), that’s fine. Otherwise, it’s a signal that you may be reading something where the comedy’s not going to rise above “swearing is funny” level.
Another issue with the comedy here is that it feels dated. These stoner characters could’ve been transplanted right out of a 1980s film. They talk, sound, and act exactly the same as the characters from those movies used to sound.
It’s fine to be inspired by movies from your past. But the difference between creating a movie that’s inspired by old films and movies that feel plain old is taking what worked in those old films then ADDING SOMETHING NEW.
Where’s the “new” in Spoke and Noodle? How have you made their stoner schtick different from past stoner schticks? I’ll give you an example – the movie, “Friday.” That was a movie about potheads, but told in a completely different cultural setting from where we were used to seeing potheads.
So all the spaced-out jokes were crammed up against new environments and fresh problems. In the past when a stoner got high, he ate cereal. In Friday when Ice Cube got high, he ate cereal with water cause they were too poor to buy milk.
That’s what I mean by fresh, and it’s something I discuss here all the time. It doesn’t stop with comedy. You have to ask yourself, “What am I bringing that’s new to the table?” I’m guessing McS would say that the ferret is the new element. But typically the “fresh” component has to be represented by the characters somehow, and that’s not happening here. These characters are exact replicas of 1980s stoner movie characters.
That’s why I read this with an occasional smile, but never laughed out loud (okay, that’s not entirely true. I did laugh at them trying to figure out if the exterminator was actually an “ex-Terminator”).
So moving forward, my suggestion to McS would be to add fresh angles to both Spoke and Noodle to bring them into the year 2016. I don’t know if you need to change their culture, their race, their ages, their sexual preference, but it has to be something. 25 year old white stoners is the most “first choice” of choices a writer can make, and therefore shows a lack of creativity.
Next, push yourself with the comedy. A lot of these jokes feel safe, and a bit dated to be honest. Again, it seems like you’re writing a comedy spec from the year 1988. You’ve got to modernize this somehow. Make it feel current. Or else I’m afraid people are going to label you with the dreaded “dated” tag like I just did.
With that said, losing a ferret in a building is funny. And while I’m not the biggest fan of stoner comedies, this is a prime situation to add pot to. So I think you have a foundation to build on. Oh, and I agree with that commenter who said you should change your title. You don’t want to use a variation of a mildly successful 10 year old movie title. Distinguish yourself. Show that you’re original by coming up with an original title. Good luck!
Script link: Dude, Where’s My Ferret
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the best ways to avoid cliche characters is to ask yourself, “What kind of person would never be this cliche?” What this does is it places you on the other end of the spectrum as far as stereotyping, opening up new avenues to create unique characters. Stoners are one of the most cliche character-types out there. So ask yourself, “What kind of person is never a stoner?” A businessman with his shit together. An intensely religious person. A police officer. You don’t have to choose any of these but they’re great starting points for going against the grain and coming up with somebody original.
One of the most important skills in a screenwriter’s tool bag is being able to convey a character’s attributes through action. So if you want to show that a character is a dick, show him kicking a dog. If you want to show that a girl is kind, show her holding the door open for an old lady.
Where this skill becomes truly powerful, though, is when you use it to highlight a character’s fatal flaw. This combination not only has the power to tell the audience what kind of person your character is, but also highlight the thing that’s holding them back in life, and therefore the weakness they will need to overcome by the end of the movie.
Weak or inexperienced writers try and sell these flaws through dialogue. So if their hero’s flaw is that they don’t believe in themselves, they’ll make sure that character utters the words, “I just don’t think I’m good enough.” Or “I don’t believe I have what it takes.” Not only is this on-the-nose. It’s lazy. If you want to be a power writer, find an action to sell that flaw. A good example is Neo in The Matrix. Whether he’s fighting Morpheus in the dojo or about to jump between buildings, his demeanor is fear. He’s not sure he can do it. That action (or non-action) tells us he doesn’t believe in himself yet.
I’ve figured out a few things about conveying flaws over the years. In comedies and animation, we’ll see flaws expressed through action right when we meet our hero. The first moment we meet Stu in The Hangover, he’s being pushed around by his wife. The first moment we meet Joy in Inside Out, she’s obsessed with everyone being happy. Because these genres tend to celebrate the extremes, being more “in your face” with actions is acceptable.
However, once we get into more dramatic films, writers tend to take their time, exposing flaws gradually and subtly over a series of scenes. Going back to The Matrix, we don’t know that Neo doesn’t believe in himself for awhile. We spend some time getting to know his daily life first, and the Wachowskis drop hints here and there, but we don’t really know that that’s his issue until we get to his training.
I’ve also found that certain flaws are more “actionable” than others. For example, selfishness is a popular flaw in modern cinema at least partly due to how easy it is to convey through action. All you have to do is show Han Solo decline an invitation to do something for the betterment of the group and we know he’s selfish. Ditto with arrogance or stubbornness or envy. These are very “actionable” flaws.
The REAL writers out there can express even the toughest “non-actionable” flaws through action. And that’s today’s challenge. I want you to write a scene – it can be about anything – but you must convey the main character’s fatal flaw through an action. What’s the flaw in question? The character is emotionally distant. They don’t make emotional connections with anybody. Oh, and did I mention that the scene had to be entertaining? Yeah, that’s the thing with screenwriting. Just pulling off one thing in a scene isn’t enough. You have to do it while entertaining the audience.
Hey, I warned you this would be hard. So write out your scenes in the comments. Upvote your favorites. I’ll give a shout-out to the winner tomorrow. Good luck!
Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: A female urologist and a retired hooker form an unlikely friendship when they team up to take down a notorious sex trafficker in Miami.
About: Cut and Run finished near the middle of the pack in last year’s Black List. Zoe McCarthy is new on the scene. This is the first script she’s been recognized for. She also has another project in development called Bitches in a Boat.
Writer: Zoe McCarthy
Details: 114 pages – undated
Whenever I read a script, I’m always looking for things I haven’t seen before. Because let’s be honest. We’re all stealing pollen from the same flowers. So the chances that your honey’s any sweeter than mine ain’t that good, ya backyard little bumblebee. But every once in awhile, you do run into something new. And it’s these writers who stand out, since they’re clearly seeing the world in a way we aren’t.
However, I’m not sure I was prepared for today’s level of unique. Starting on close-ups of a man’s “bulbous ball sack” and then, a scene later, a woman’s “errant pubes,” left me wondering if I was reading a screenplay or reliving childhood memories of Fourth of July parties at Uncle Mick’s house. With that said, it guaranteed that what I’d be reading today was unusual, and I was game for that. Pubes and all.
34 year-old Anna Rockport is one of the best urologists in Miami. But her OCD behavior and man-like personality has kept the dudes away in droves. But tonight – tonight is different. Because Anna Rockport’s gonna get laid.
She gets done up in her Friday night best and heads out to some swanky Miami club, the kind where the tables shine due to a combination of cheap hair gel and last night’s errant semen, and corners the hottest guy in the bar, Eddie, letting him know she’s ready to bang-a-lang.
Eddie takes the eventually wasted Anna back to his crib, which has a 150 shades of grey back room that has anything and everything you could imagine for a sexual escapade, including, for some reason, lots of My Little Pony outfits. Anna decides it would be fun to pop one of these on and buck around in circles while singing the My Little Pony theme song.
Unfortunately, the repeated circular motion makes her sick and she pukes all over Eddie’s penis. Naturally, Eddie is furious and kicks her out. But that isn’t the worst thing that happens to Anna. No. Not by a long cum shot. Anna wakes up the next day to find that her escapade was taped and is now trending all over the internet. As if she even needs to go into work to find out she’s fired, Anna realizes that her 12 years of medical school is now worthless.
Wanting to drink away her misery, she meets a local hooker, Angel, in a bar. It just so happens that Angel knows Eddie, and the two team-up to get that bastard back. They sneak into his home just as he’s priming a group of foreign girls he’s sex-trafficking, and while one of them has her mouth around Eddie’s penis, Angel and Anna jump in, causing the girl to inadvertently chomp off Ed’s member.
All hell breaks loose and Angel and Anna are able to sneak out, with Eddie’s severed penis in tow! What follows next is a dangerous game of dick and mouse. Eddie wants to kill them and Anna wants Eddie to admit to the world he’s a sex trafficker.
Of course, Anna’s got the upper handjob since she’s in possession of Eddie’s privates. The two eventually agree to a deal where the pee-pee will be reattached. But as you’ve already stupendously imagined, nothing goes according to plan.
I’m sure a lot of you are thinking what I’m thinking. Which is that this had to be influenced by the infamous Zola Twitter blowout story from last year (which they’re also making a movie of, in case you were wondering). I’m guessing it was, but since that story broke in late October and the Black List was released in the middle of December, that would mean Zoe McCarthy would’ve had to write this in a month, which is pretty impressive.
The thing about that story, though, is that it’s impossible to compete with. It was too fucking crazy. Yet somehow, McCarthy gives Zola a run for her hard-earned money. This woman is so deranged, so unafraid to go anywhere and everywhere, that reading Cut and Run was like watching Thelma and Louise after the two had injected horse roids into their craniums after doing coke all night.
McCarthy embraces the insanity, and like a weekend bender in Vegas, rides it until there’s nothing left to ride. This gives the script a first-draft feel. But I think that works in its favor. You don’t want to clean this up. You want it to be rough around the edges. And this certainly is that.
Still, this isn’t all stream-of-conscious. There is structure to the story. McCarthy uses the basic McGuffin approach that works so well for big tentpole films, and isn’t it hilarious that our McGuffin is a severed penis. So I guess that’d be called a McCockfin?
I was also surprised that she attempted to inject some heart into the story. For example, we find out that the reason Anna wanted to become a urologist is because her father died of testicular cancer and she wanted to make sure other little girls’ daddies didn’t die of the same thing when she grew up.
And there’s this whole subplot with Irina, the 17 year old model-hopeful who had the unfortunate experience of orally severing a man’s penis off, that covers her desperate attempts to find a passport so she can go back to friendly Ukraine. That story is treated with almost as much compassion as it is craziness, which did the impossible, occasionally grounding a sky-high plot that had as much desire to stay on course as Malaysian flight MH370.
Then of course there’s the fluctuating relationship between Anna and Angel. That’s what these two-handers always come down to: How well the writer is able to place that relationship on a roller-coaster so that it stays fresh and unpredictable and hooks the reader into wanting to find out if the two end up together. I’m not going to say that the execution was perfect. But it was certainly solid.
Zoe McCarthy is undeniably talented. Had my sensibilities been more in tune with hers, this might’ve been a life-changing experience. But there are only so many close-ups of ball sacks, penis-puking, and hookers and johns beating each other up that a man can take. If you’re that kind of dirty, this might be for you. If you’re a testicular tale prude like myself, you might find yourself looking away occasionally. Still, you can’t dismiss a voice this brave. It’s a great example of how to get noticed through the power of fearless writing.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Screenwriters, stop mentioning the movie (Thelma and Louise in today’s script) that inspired your movie in your movie! I don’t know why screenwriters do this. It makes your work look less original in the reader’s eyes and it encourages them to draw comparisons. Don’t you know there’s a secret deal every writer and director makes where they don’t mention all the sources they’re copying and we the consumers don’t ask? That way we can pretend everything is original.
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: After an astronaut’s space capsule crash lands in the African desert, we discover that he’s carrying a secret that may change the world forever.
About: Ares finished on last year’s Black List. Geneva Robertson-Dworet is a writer who has quickly risen up the ranks to become one of the bigger sci-fi writers in demand. She’s part of the writing team writing Transformers 5. She’s writing the new Tomb Raider. And she co-wrote Hibernation, a script I reviewed on the site, which will be directed by one of the hottest young directors working today, Justin Lin. All of this and she doesn’t even have a produced credit yet. Crazy!
Writer: Geneva Robertson-Dworet
Details: 105 pages – May 2015 draft
Hey, we had some success with yesterday’s screenplay so I thought, why not go with another “List” script, this one having finished in the middle of the 2015 Black List.
Also, Ares is an example of the power of changing locales. Moving the location of your story can be the difference between it feeling exactly the same as every other movie in that genre and being fresh and exciting.
Think about it. If you were writing a romantic comedy, wouldn’t it be beyond cliche to set it in New York? But if your romantic comedy took place on the moon? We ain’t never seen that before. So you’d have our attention.
The location change here is the African desert, a place I haven’t seen a whole lot of sci-fi scripts take place in. Let’s see if it paid off.
Evan Lange is an astronaut, but that’s all we know when we meet him, hurtling towards earth in a re-entry capsule with his two co-astronauts, both dead and rotting for who knows how long.
Evan is deliberately trying to steer his capsule towards an African city, where he plans to tell the world “the truth” about what he’s found on his mission. But we get the sense that this won’t be easy, since there seem to be people who want to make sure this information doesn’t get out.
Evan shoots 200 miles shy of his destination and lands in the African desert. As he travels across the endless sand, we flash back to better times when Evan met the love of his life, Chloe, who he had a son with.
That relationship gets a big fat “no longer together” tag on Facebook though, since leaving your fam to hang out in space for three years doesn’t exactly build family bonds.
Anyway, Evan is trying to deliver some secret piece of material he’s secured to the U.S. Embassy in this African City, but must navigate a desert swarming with cops who are looking for him due to a “wanted – reward” poster gone up everywhere.
We eventually learn from flashbacks that Evan was working for a Russian billionaire who secretly sent Evan to Mars. Now that Evan is going to expose what they found, our billionaire is doing everything in his power to get to Evan first so he can kill him.
Evan meets up with his ex-wife, who’s working in the city, as well as his son, who’s now 14. Now’s a good time to let you know that Evan has a mental condition where he hallucinates. And if we believe Chloe, everything Evan’s been telling us is in his head. He needs to see a doctor, pronto.
Or is it? That’s the question, as Evan tries to lead the family to safety in the hopes of exposing this Russian billionaire’s scam. That’s assuming there really is a Russian billionaire. And that there was ever a mission in the first place.
I’m a strong believer that spec scripts (and by that I mean specs that unknown writers write on their own to sell or get noticed) need to bring you into the story right away. If you’re being hired to write Spotlight and you’ve got your director set and financing behind you and the studio figuring out their release strategy, you can start as slow as you want. Hell, start with the history of the Catholic church if you’re feeling frisky.
If you’re a “nobody” writer writing a spec, bring us into the story right away. Imagine it this way. Spec scripts? They go to a special kind of reader who works inside of a special kind of building where every single person there has ADD. You are not allowed to walk into that building unless you have ADD. These are the people you’re trying to win over.
Ares starts with us in that cockpit, speeding towards earth, two fellow astronauts dead and rotting nearby, our main character disobeying a command from control. Hell yeah. You’ve got my attention.
And despite the rest of Ares taking place in the desert, it never lets up. We’re always moving forward. Even when we’re doing flashbacks. I guess we can call this an extension of yesterday’s discussion, since this is yet another way to do flashbacks right.
Now normally I’d say don’t do flashbacks unless they’re built into the concept. Ares’s spiritual cousins and inspiration, The Martian and Gravity, could’ve used flashbacks for cheap backstory. But neither did. Because both writers know the law of flashbacks. Which is that if you’re going backwards, you’re not going forwards. And movies always work best when they’re moving forwards, dammit.
BUT.
If you place a mystery at the center of your story – in this case: what the hell happened in space that put Evan in this position? Then you can use the flashbacks to gradually feed the audience clues that will lead them to the answer of your mystery. They’ll allow the flashback because it’s GIVING THEM SOMETHING.
That’s important to remember. Flashbacks tend to take. They’re like shitty relationships. Take take take. If you can get your flashback to give though? It just might be okay.
However, now we get to the question of all questions. Was the answer to the mystery satisfying? That depends on how you like your movies. Do you like them grilled? Baked? Deep-fried? If you like ambiguity, if you like when writers make you formulate your own answers, you might like this.
Because it’s one of those movies where you’re constantly asking, “Is this really happening or not?” I’m not going to answer that question but what I can tell you is that I’ve grown skeptical of this format. It seems to be a free pass to fuck around with the reader instead of tell a clever story.
With that said, Robertson-Dworet does a pretty good job with the device. And as with all good sci-fi stories, it’s not really about the plot so much as it is about this broken family. I was discussing this with a writer the other day. She said “I don’t get sci-fi. It seems too complicated to write.” And I explained that actually, the best sci-fi isn’t complicated at all. It’s rooted by a simple relationship or two. Like Ex Machina. Get the main relationships sorted out and build the bells and whistles around that.
That’s what Ares does, and it does a good enough job that I wanted to get to the end. That makes this worth the read, baby. Let me know if you feel the same.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The two main story engines in screenwriting are the GOAL (find the Ark – Raiders) and the MYSTERY (What happened to Amy Dunne? – Gone Girl). But remember you have a third engine. I’m talking about the MYSTERY GOAL. This is what powers Ares. Evan’s goal (get this information to the Embassy) is coupled with a mystery (the mysterious element he’s found that’s going to change the world). And it works. I definitely wanted to know what he had found and I also wanted to see him get to the Embassy. So, bravo!
