Our good friend Roger is taking the day off to catch up on some writing. That means I’ll be doing five full reviews this week. Where do I find the time? On the docket we have a couple comedies, a little sex, some horror, and….an impressive script! Been awhile huh? And it’s a spec sale that happened recently. So look forward to that on Friday (Amateur Friday being pushed to next week — get your scripts in if you haven’t already). Right now, it’s Millers time.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: (from IMDB) A veteran pot dealer creates a fake family as part of his plan to move a huge shipment of weed into the U.S. from Mexico.
About: We’re The Millers is a script that’s been in development for awhile.  It was recently pulled out of development when the writing team that gave us Hot Tub Time Machine (Sean Anders and John Morris) chose it as their first directing gig. This is not a review of the most recent rewrite by Dan Fybel and Rich Rinaldi , but rather the original script that sold back in 2004 by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, who you’ll remember penned Wedding Crashers.
Writers: Steve Faber and Bob Fisher
Details: 117 pages, 2004 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Pot comedies. Gotta love’em. The movie-going public has always embraced reefer-based cinema, including such classic titles as Up In Smoke, Pineapple Express and ….. um, other pot movies. So when I heard the concept for “We’re The Millers,” I thought, “You know what. That could be funny.” But as we all know, coming up with a funny idea and extending that funny idea out to 110 pages are two totally different things. Usually by page 40 you’re wondering how you used up all your funny scenes already and the majority of your creativity is focused on the best methods for procrastinating. 

One thing I can tell you about good comedies though is that they STAY ON TRACK. The number one mistake novice comedy writers make is including scenes that don’t have anything to do with the story. They think, as long as it’s funny, it should go in. You can usually get away with this once in a script, but any more and experienced readers will know they’re dealing with an amateur, which eliminates all confidence in you. Now Faber and Fisher were pretty new to the scene when they wrote this script, so do they fall into this well-tread trap? Let’s find out.

David Korngold is a 30 year old University of Chicago graduate who’s somehow stumbled into a pot-dealing career. The money’s easy but knowing you’re the King of Underachievement is not. Doesn’t help that he resides in a grimy area of Chicago where he routinely runs into a runaway teen named Agnes, a sexually frustrated dork named Sam, and a stripper neighbor who’s constantly threatening to call the cops on him.

Bad boys. Wuchu gonna do.

This isn’t how David imagined his life so he goes to his overly kind gay drug supplier, Taylor, and tells him he’s out. He’s going make an honest living. Taylor’s supportive, but before David leaves, he offers him a job. Grab a 400 pound shipment from Mexico and bring it across the border.  For the trouble he’ll pay him one million bucks. David’s eyes pop. A million bucks could make his life hella-easy. But David’s a smart guy. He knows that the job is too risky. So he politely refuses and gets an 8 dollar an hour job at Kinko’s instead. David’s fellow pot dealing friends are so offended they actually offer to pay him eight dollars an hour NOT to work at Kinko’s.

It only takes a couple of hours on the job before David realizes that dealing pot may be bad but working at Kinko’s is hell.  He calls Taylor and tells him he’s in.

The question is, how is he going to get 400 pounds of weed across the Mexican border? David quickly conceives of a plan to use Rose, Agnes, and Sam to pose as his family members. They’ll rent a Winnebago, stock it with the weed, and drive back across the border saying they’re returning from vacation.

If you guessed things don’t go as planned, you’d be right. David’s idiot contact in Mexico thinks David is someone else and gives him the wrong shipment, a full ONE THOUSAND POUNDS EXTRA of weed. When the man who was supposed to receive the shipment finds out, he orders the guy to find David’s “family” and murder them all.

In the meantime, our friend Taylor never planned on paying David a million dollars. He was going to wait til he crossed the border, have a couple of his men kill him, and take the weed for free. On top of this, David and Co. keep running into a real family on a real trip, who fall in love with David’s family and want to spend every waking second with them. Problem is the father is a DEA agent.

So there’s definitely potential for comedy here.  I’m just not sure that Faber and Fisher mined all that comedy in this draft. We’re The Millers is always on the brink of making you laugh, but you never quite get there. Specifically, I didn’t think there were enough set piece scenes to drive an idea of this magnitude.

There were some close calls, such as when the family goes to Sea World, but it wasn’t interwoven into the plot. Someone simply said, “Let’s go to Sea World.” Someone else replied “Okay.” And so you have a scene that should be funny because it’s a non-real family going to Sea World. But since there are no stakes attached, since it isn’t necessary for the story at all, it just sits there. If, for example, they were forced to go to Sea World with the clingy family and pretend like they were enjoying themselves, now the scene at least has a point.

There are a few scenes like this, such a five minute scene where David’s “family” goes into a store and runs up his credit card on junk food. As a quick throwaway joke, this could’ve been funny. But to dedicate an entire scene to it? Is that necessary?

I’m a big believer that the comedy in your film should stem from the concept. That’s usually where the biggest laughs come from. So in a comedy about a museum that comes to life every night, you probably wouldn’t add a scene where your main character runs a marathon. Not that you couldn’t find some funny scenes in running a marathon, but what does running have to do with a museum that comes to life?

Also, everything about this plan hinges on them getting across the border. It’s the whole reason the payout is so high. So when they get to front of the border line (spoiler) and the agent simply waves his hand, “Go ahead,” it feels like a cheat. I mean sure you chuckle because it’s funny how easy it is, but I’m not sure it’s worth excising the scene with the most potential conflict in your movie.

Like all comedies, however, in the end it comes down to the characters. With the exception of Rose (stripper/mom), who I never got a handle on, the rest of the family is pretty good. David’s desire to live a better life resonates. And the romance between “brother and sister” Agnes and Sam was pretty well done. But I felt like each character needed another few drafts to really come alive. It felt like we were seeing the surface level versions of them, and as a result, no one truly stuck out.

I still feel that this idea has tons of potential so I’d be interested in reading Fybel and Rinaldi’s draft, but this initial draft was too raw for my taste.

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

What I learned: Quirks. Quirks are what make comedic characters memorable. Especially villains. Mr. Chow in The Hangover is naked when we meet him. Owen Wilson’s character in Meet The Parents is the single smartest most accomplished man in the world. Lumberg in Office Space always carries a coffee mug and mutters, “mmm’Yeaaaah,” at the end of every sentence. Actually, look at all the characters in Office Space to see how quirks make a character memorable. The only thing going on with the villain (Taylor) here is that he’s gay. As a result, he isn’t memorable at all.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: When terrorists detonate the biggest bomb ever built, a group of survivors find themselves in an impossible-to-imagine scenario.
About: This spec was just purchased by Warner Brothers, whose unexpected buying spree continues. The writer, Gregg Hurwitz, is first and foremost a novelist, who’s written a couple of novels that have been optioned, including They’re Watching, about a writer who receives some strange DVDs showing video footage of him in intimate situations. His most recent novel is “Trust No One,” about a terrorist threatening to blow up a nuclear power plant. Hurwitz is also a consulting producer on ABC’s “V.” This is his first spec sale.
Writer: Gregg Hurwitz
Details: 121 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I have never read anything like Expulsion.

Let me repeat that. I have never read anything like Expulsion.

Why is this important? Well, because when you read scripts non-stop, almost everything you read is something you’ve read before. So when something comes along that doesn’t feel like all the other scripts, you sit up and take notice.

Now let me clarify this. Expulsion is a disaster movie mixed with a Star Trek episode. It’s not unique in the way Memento is unique. But some of these scenes, some of the things that happen “onscreen” are things you’ve never seen on a movie screen before.

I remember first arriving in Los Angeles and lucking out with a meeting for a really terrible script I’d written. I’d bullshitted my way past some dumb people and gotten the script into the hands of a big agent, someone I had no business meeting with. It was the moment I realized you can trick some people, but you can’t trick the true professionals. Indeed, this gentleman told me straight up, your script is horrible. He then proceeded to tell me that in order to separate myself from the glut of screenplays that land in agents and producers hands every day, you have to give the audience something they’ve never seen before. You had to give them a dinosaur theme park before there was Jurassic Park. You had to give them live-action anime before there was The Matrix.

I didn’t really understand what he was talking about since 99% of the movies I saw getting advertised were exactly the same as everything else I’d ever seen at the movies. Now it’s taken me a long time to understand why all the derivative stuff gets made and how that’s not really a part of the spec game, but I’ve finally realized he was right. If you want a legitimate chance at getting noticed, you gotta give’em something they’ve never seen before.

While Expulsion doesn’t keep that rule going for the entire script, the holy-shit-what-the-hell-just-happened first act may just make up for it.

Expulsion starts out like any disaster movie. It’s 2015 and a couple of suspicious middle-eastern men walk into a random skyscraper with a strange device, turn it on, and the building collapses in on itself, imploding into nothingness, killing everyone inside.

The president’s cabinet is then informed that there are more of these imploding bombs set to go off soon. The president’s play is a tough one since the attackers are rogue, but eventually he decides to neutron bomb the countries that are sponsoring this terrorist activity to send a message.

This only pisses off the terrorists more though (surprise surprise), and a group of them is somehow able to steal the largest bomb America’s ever created, a bomb so powerful that there is no way to measure it’s potential destruction. Well, they detonate the bomb and we find out.

Thus begins the most insane fucking sequence you will ever see onscreen. If any of you have seen the movie 2012, this makes the destruction of that film look like a bunch of ping pong balls bouncing around on mouse traps. No, that is not hyperbole.

I don’t even know if I can describe what I read but basically, the earth’s crust gets ripped from its core, as if you were tearing the felt off a tennis ball. The bomb is so powerful that it demagnetizes the entire solar system, causing space time to no longer exist. The moon gets shot INTO THE SUN within a matter of seconds. The president and a small number of others are able to get underground into a special de-magnetized bunker. This bunker, along with the rest of North America, are shot out into space. I believe North America crashes into Mars. Somehow, this bunker continues on though, slicing through the rings of Saturn, then shooting out into unknown space and out of the solar system, until it finally crash lands on a mystery planet.

Yes, you read that part correctly. North America crashes into Mars.

After recovering from this sequence of events (I’m talking about myself of course, not the characters), we’re left with a team of survivors led by a president unsure of his leading ability, who must now figure out where they are and what to do next. The story becomes a cross between Pitch Black and Land Of The Lost (the TV show) with a little original Star Trek (the TV show) thrown in for good measure. The planet itself is extremely hostile, with all sorts of weird creatures, and even though there’s a couple dozen survivors, we realize pretty quickly that only a few people are going to make it out of this alive.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. I guess we’ll focus on the male anatomy. Specially, balls. And what kind it takes to rip your characters off an exploding planet earth and have them land on a random planet 8 quadrillion miles away. The event is so beyond what any character in any movie has ever had to deal with before, it almost makes it impossible to tell a story. I mean there’s human fortitude when your plane crash lands on an island. There’s human fortitude when a tsunami wipes out your city. Then there’s your planet blowing up and you somehow crash landing on a planet in another solar system. How do you reconcile moving forward after that one?

I don’t know about you but I’d need at least 48 hours sitting on the ground, staring at a rock, saying to myself, “Did what just happen really just happen?” You have to remember, all this happens within MINUTES! And yet, this is exactly why I kept turning the pages. This is the kind of thing writing should do. It should make you think. It should make you wonder. What would I do if I were in that situation?

Unfortunately, when the script moves onto the new planet, it begins to feel a little too familiar – and even worse, it feels kind of like a Star Trek TV episode. We’re still thinking about the crazy shit that just happened, yet now we’re having to focus on huge lizard birds. The exploration of the planet has a very “At The Mountains Of Madness” feel to it, but Mountains had a slow build up to its location, making the location the star. In Expulsion, the location never quite lives up to what came before it.

I liked that Hurwitz attempted some character exploration here, but again, it’s kind of like, who cares about whatever middling problems you had back on earth when the earth’s crust has just been ripped from its core like an orange peel and you’ve been shot into the Buttfuck, Iowa of solar systems. It’s almost like the situation is too big for the characters to exist in. Even as I contemplated summarizing the characters, I realized, “Is it really worth it?” They’re like ants compared to the grandiosity of this situation.

I’m not really sure what to do with this one. All I can say is kudos to the author for creating the single greatest destruction sequence of all time. But the stuff on the planet has to live up to the opening act. Right now it feels like a television episode and the characters themselves are too cartoonish. Again, this might be because, relatively speaking, the opening sequence will cast a shadow on anything that happens afterwards, disallowing for any sort of reality to emerge. But for this to work, the last three-quarters have to be elevated to the highest level possible or this will always be perceived as uneven.

So a ton of work needs to be done here.  But this is worth the read for the first act alone.

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

What I learned: This is a nice reminder to always ask yourself before you start writing, “Has this idea been done before?” But don’t stop there. When you come upon a scene, ask yourself “Has this scene been done before?” When you come across a character, ask yourself, “Has this character been done before?” Sometimes the answer will be yes and you’ll write that character or that scene anyway because it’s right for the movie. But the more elements you give the reader that are unfamiliar, the more original your script will be. You can always ignore this advice and take a time-tested idea and try to execute it perfectly, which *is* possible. It’s just a lot harder.

Genre: Indie Drama/Dark ComedyPremise: A woman is forced to help her aging “ladies man” father get his life back together after a drunk-driving arrest.
About: Buttercup will be directed by Niki Caro, the writer-director of one of my favorite movies from 2002, Whale Rider. It is written by newcomer Alice O’Neil, of whom this will be her first produced credit. The project is set to star Jennifer Aniston and indie-film mainstay Alan Arkin.
Writer: Alice O’Neil
Details: 114 pages – 2/12/09 Draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I don’t know why I’m so fascinated with Jennifer Aniston’s career but I am. I think her being hot is part of it. But also the fact that here’s this woman with all the money in the world, who’s beautiful and smart and funny, and yet it is and will always be impossible for her to find a man. Your dating “level” when you’re that high profile includes like 4 guys, and you already lost one of them to Angelina Jolie. Ah yes, Scriptshadow, sponsored in part by Us Weekly.  But seriously, they should make a movie about that. An actress who has it all but has no chance at finding a husband because her lifestyle is too big.

Anyway, Aniston will next hop into the role of Rosemary Boyle, a confused 30-something woman still trying to figure out her life. She doesn’t know what she wants to do. She doesn’t know who she wants to be. She has an artist boyfriend who she’s considering moving in with, yet also has phone sex with her boss every evening. It’s not clear what Rosemary gets out of either relationship, but the point is, this woman’s having a hard time getting it together.

However, Buttercup is less about these issues and more about her relationship with her father, 73 year old Mike Boyle. Mike was Axe Body Spray before there was Axe Body Spray, the kind of guy who could get laid off a wink and a smile. So far be it from him to let some silly 30 year marriage get in the way of this Wilt Chamberlin like lifestyle. Mike tallied up more women than some small countries and even now, at 73 years old, he’s still looking for the next big score.

Poor Rosemary was too taken by her father’s charm to notice this when she was younger, but now that her mom’s dead, she’s finally come to terms with the reality of the situation: her dad is a fuck-up. At 73, Mike still hasn’t grown up. And if you ask him, it’s because he never planned on living this long in the first place. Mike is living hand-to-mouth, using the little money he does make to drink and pick up girls at the bar.

So it probably isn’t a surprise that one night, after pulling a Jerry Buss and landing a pair of 21 year olds, Mike crashes into a tree. He and the girls are fine, but the judge, who sees Mike more than her own children, has finally had enough of him. The only way she’s not throwing him in jail is if she takes away his car privileges and Rosemary agrees to take care of him. If he gets in trouble, not only will he be fucked, but Rosemary will as well.

Rosemary uses this as an excuse to avoid her own problems (her boyfriend wanting to move in) and starts hanging out with her father more, who of course doesn’t believe he needs help. And all of this is complicated by the fact that in the end, Rosemary just wants her father’s attention, his love. And how do you ask for that love when you’ve been officially designated to keep your father in line.

I started this review out with way too much estrogen so I’m going to emit some testosterone for a second to even it out. There was a famous Monday Night Football game back in 2006 where the heavily favored Chicago Bears eeked out a win against the sacrificial lamb Arizona Cardinals. Afterwards, the slighted Cardinals coach, who clearly was upset about being picked to lose by 50 points, screamed out, “The Bears are who we thought they were!!!”

The Chrernobyl worthy meltdown led to the team’s self-destruction but that’s a conversation for another day. The point is, Buttercup is exactly what you think it is. It’s a slow slice-of-a-fucked-up-life indie flick that isn’t trying to be remarkable. It just wants to exist. It wants to explore that awkward time in the life cycle when the kids start becoming the parents and all the weirdness that comes along with that.

Does it succeed in making that story entertaining? I’d say for the most part, yes. Mike is definitely a fun character and there are parts of the script that keep the pages turning, such as Rosemary’s inappropriate relationship with a priest.

But the big problem I had with Buttercup is the character of Rosemary herself. I never really understood who she was. There seems to be this great opportunity to explore her father’s “player” lifestyle and how it’s affected the way Rosemary sees relationships. She has a “perfect” boyfriend, yet she has a phone-sex relationship with her boss, yet she starts trying to bang a priest. So the opportunity is there to show how her father’s lack of commitment has doomed her to the same fate. Yet all three of these relationships feel incidental, as if they’re simply there to spice things up, ignoring a possible connection with her dad even though that might be more interesting. 

One of the hardest things to do in a script is create a complicated character.  The way films are designed, there isn’t a lot of time to get too in depth with a character.  Most of the time, we really only have the opportunity to explore that one “fatal flaw” a character may have and see if we can’t resolve it by the end of the film.  If you create too many competing characteristics, sure, you’ve created a complex character, but in the process you may have confused your audience as to who that character is.  I felt a little of that going on here. Rosemary has so many different things going on that I was never able to identify her defining traits – the things that locked down who she was as a person. Was she a player like her father who could never settle down? Was she having a mid-life crisis? Was she someone who had a problem making decisions?

One of the things I loved about Everything Must Go is you knew who the main character was right away. He was a recovering alcoholic who lost his job, his wife, and his house. We know exactly where he is and where he needs to go to fix himself. But here, I kept asking, Who is Rosemary? What is it we’re supposed to be getting from her?

I also thought O’Neil could’ve forced the issue to create more conflict. In the solid “Smart People,” when Dennis Quaid’s uptight character becomes immobile, he’s forced to ask his deadbeat brother Thomas Hayden Church to move in and help with the responsibilities. Because Quaid is so dependent, he has no choice but to let Church, whom he’d otherwise never trust, help. That creates a great amount of conflict within the living situation.

Here, we’re told by the judge that Rosemary has to take care of her father, specifically his driving duties. But almost immediately, we realize she doesn’t have to do this. Mike still drives his own car, ignoring the court order. And Mike continues to live his own life, with Rosemary popping in occasionally for an awkward conversation or two. Although the court-appointed order may have a sitcomish feel if it’s executed too literally, I felt that if you’re going to do it, let’s commit all the way. Move Rosemary into the house. Make it so she doesn’t allow Mike to drive, that she doesn’t allow Mike to do the things he’s used to doing. Create that conflict that’s going to force these two characters to address the issues they’ve been ignoring for the past 30 years.

Despite these problems, I thought there was enough here to make it worth the read. There are some funny moments (my favorite is when a drunk Rosemary goes to the seminary at night and starts throwing rocks at the priest’s window), Mike is a solid character, and I think it has some nice things to say about arrested development and making yourself accountable for your actions. I was just looking for more conflict, more of a commitment to the plot.

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

What I learned: Use your protagonist’s job to tell us who she/he is. One thing I didn’t dig here was that we’re not really sure what Rosemary’s job is until late in the story, and this contributed to the reason I couldn’t get a feel for her character. Jobs are one of the easiest ways to tell us who a character is. If your character is an accountant, that might tell us they’re analytical and boring. If they’re a producer, that might tell us they’re a Type-A personality. If they’re a tattoo artist, that might tell us they’re rebellious and/or laid back. Create your character’s job with the intent of telling us who your character is.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: Two war veterans play a deadly game of cat and mouse up in the mountain wilderness.
About: This is the project John McTiernan, director of Die Hard and Predator, signed onto right before he started his year stint in jail for lying to the Feds over wiretapping. The script has actually been around for a while, making the 2008 Black List, and the writer may be familiar to you, since I just reviewed his 1.5 million dollar supersale of “Snow White And The Huntsman” a couple of weeks ago. As I mentioned in that post, this is the script that won the 2008 Script Pimp Screenwriting Contest. After the win, Evan was contacted by several managers and ultimately signed with Energy Entertainment. He moved to LA and a few months later he met with some agents, finally signing with UTA.  Daugherty went to NYU Film School and had written 9 screenplays before he broke through with Shrapnel.
Writer: Evan Daugherty
Details: 91 pages, 10-3-08 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Your script length is what it is. If you’re telling a sprawling epic over six time periods, it’s going to be long. If you’re telling a thriller about a man stuck in a coffin, it’s going to be short. But as a gentle reminder, nobody has time in Hollywood. Or at least the people who matter don’t. So when they stare down a 130 page behemoth, they already hate you. They hate you for making them say they’d read a script that’s going to take 130 minutes out of a schedule that’s already requiring them to work 2 hours longer than they or their family want them to that day.

Now I’m no Hollywood producer, but Friday I had a million things going on, so there was no way in hell I was picking a script that was taking two hours. I needed something in the 90 minute range. When I saw Shrapnel at 92 pages, I said, “Perfect.” I’m not trying to start another page length debate here. Brigands of Rattleborge is humongous (which it should be) and it’s number 3 on my Top 25 list. All I’m saying is, keep in mind who your audience is – people who are constantly in a hurry. You want to make their experience as enjoyable as possible.

Anyway, Shrapnel is a simple story in the vein of Deliverance or The Most Dangerous Game. It’s the 70s, around the time of the Vietnam War, and an out of shape 50 year old World War II veteran named Ford has decided to live the rest of his life in the wilderness, free of society, free of complications or relationships. This man has paid his dues. Now he just wants to be left alone.

His only inconvenience is the shooting pain up the side of his leg that comes around every so often, the result of some wayward shrapnel from back in the war. It slows Ford down but it never stops him.

One day, while driving through the winding mountain roads, Ford’s car breaks down. It just so happens that a man is passing by at the time. He’s ragged, late 40s, talky but for the most part unremarkable. We’ll get to know him as Osterman. Osterman helps Ford fix his car which leads to Ford inviting him to his cabin to wait out the approaching storm.

The two get to talking and Osterman encourages Ford to join him for some hunting the next day. Ford’s reluctant but Osterman seems like good company and it’s not like Ford’s planner is bursting with activity. It’s pretty easy to cancel “Stare at plants for an hour.”

So off the two go, splitting up at one point, staying in contact via walkie-talkie, innocently concocting a strategy, when all of a sudden Osterman starts blurting out random German, his cordial friendly tone ditched for a sinister-as-shit one. It doesn’t take us or Ford long to realize that Osterman didn’t come here to hunt animals.

He came here to hunt Ford.

And so begins a mano-a-mano duel in which Ford tries to escape Osterman, whose relentless pursuit indicates that there is something personal going on here, something that goes back way before two guys meeting on the side of a mountain. So when these two men clash, when they twist and turn and squirm and try and take the life from one another, a troubling secret will be revealed that ties it all together in the end.

Shrapnel is one of those simple concepts that, if done right, can be really good. But with only two characters, it’s hard to stretch these puppies out to feature length. They usually require a handful of things to make them work.

The first is the surprises or twists in the film. If you have a large cast of characters in your script, when things slow down in one storyline, you can always jump to another one. Can’t do that here. These are the only characters you’ve got. So when things get slow or when it starts to feel like not much has happened in a while, you need to throw in a surprise or a twist to spice things up again.

In this case, during one scuffle, Ford notices a permanent scarred “O” on the back of Osterman’s neck. His reaction tells us he knows what this “O” means. This seems to change Ford’s assessment of the situation. We’re not exactly sure why, but we know that at some point we’re going to find out. So this little “twist,” this little “surprise” spices the screenplay up at a moment where it was getting repetitive. I mean what are we going to do, watch these men battle for 70 straight minutes? You need to break up the monotony somehow.

Next, it’s really important to change the dynamic of the situation at least once in the script. Again, because the plot is so simple, it’s easy to get bored. So at some point, Ford turns the tables and gains the upper hand on Osterman. Ford is the hunter and Osterman is the hunted.

Finally, the ending has to be really satisfying in these flicks. Remember, you’re not giving us a whole lot to work with here. The plot is merely one man versus another. So you want to make the journey worth it. You want to reveal something at the end that makes us reevaluate everything we just watched. Indeed, there’s a specific reason Osterman is hunting Ford, and that reason comes out in the end. Is it a good reason? Well, it wasn’t bad. I mean it didn’t knock my socks off or anything but I thought it was strong. Regardless, I liked the attempt at the ending. The writer took a chance and came up with something unexpected and interesting.

I also thought the theme was strong here. We’re exploring the atrocities of war and how they affect the soldiers of that war, no matter what the time period. What happens to soldiers, people trained to kill, when they’re thrown back into a society that sees killing as the ultimate atrocity? It’s obviously going to fuck with your mind. And the ones who adapt without a hitch are probably the ones you need to worry about the most. I thought Shrapnel tackled that subject matter well.

Shrapnel isn’t a world-beater but it’s a solid script. I liked it much better than a similar script that got a ton of pub a couple of years ago titled “Villain.” Let’s hope that the Los Angeles Correctional Institution allows for some pre-production offices in its cells so McTiernan can set this thing up faster than a wiretap.

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

What I learned: World War 2 is the single most mined real-world event in the history of movies. Which is fine. It’s one of the most important events of our planet. But when you start making World War 2 movies about a guy and his piano…I think it’s time to admit that the well is dry. I didn’t mind the World War 2 connection in Shrapnel because it was more of a backdrop and not a piece of the present-day storyline. So I’ll just say this. If you’re going to explore World War 2 in your story, make sure you have a unique angle that’s never been used before. “Life is Beautiful” is a perfect example. A comedy set in World War 2? In a concentration camp no less? I still remember hearing that idea and thinking, “Man, I have to see that. I’ve never heard of a story like it before.” This goes back to the same principal I was harping on with Memento. Take a concept, a genre, an idea, and turn it on its head.
*