High Concept Showdown is just 11 days away!

For those new to Amateur Showdown, you submit your pitch, along with a PDF of your script. I then post the five best submissions on the site. Those five scripts compete on the site over the weekend. It will be up to you guys, the readers of the site, to read as much of each entry as you can and vote for your favorite. The script with the most votes then gets a review the following Friday.

The theme of this particular showdown is HIGH-CONCEPT. That means you have to have a big splashy idea. It doesn’t necessarily have to be high budget. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a high concept and the movie cost 15 million to make. I understand that “high-concept” is a, somewhat, vague term. So if you think your script is high concept but you’re not positive, submit it. Who knows? Maybe it makes the cut.

What: High Concept Showdown
Deadline: Dec 1, 2022 (Thursday) by 8pm Pacific Time
Include: Title, Genre, Logline, and a PDF of your screenplay
Additional: Also, feel free to pitch, more extensively, why your script deserves to be featured. Sometimes this is the difference between people checking out and not checking out your script. Think of this as your “elevator pitch.” You’ve got the producer in the elevator for a minute. Explain to him why he needs to read your script.
Where: E-mail all entries to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Cost: Free

Okay, I’m a little fired up here but stay with me. The ultimate purpose of this post is a positive one. I want to help everybody reach their full potential as a writer, which means finding them their perfect agent match.

Last week, I posted an article about whether to pursue a studio or artist path as a screenwriter.

In regards to the “artist” path, I said the main thing you’re trying to do is get on the Black List. And since the Black List is voted on by development execs, it’s exclusively fueled by scripts that agents and managers send out.

One of you then pointed out, “Hey, Carson, this article is fun and all but none of it is relevant unless you get an agent.  Since getting an agent is really really really hard, this article is more fantasy than reality.”

That’s what I want to address today because while this commenter was right, the comment was phrased in such a way that we might as well have been placed in a DeLorean and sent back to 1985 with how impossible it is to get an agent in Hollywood.

People.

It is 2022!!!

It is easier to get a rep than ever before in history.

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. The number one strategy for getting on the Black List is going over to the Black List site and downloading the last three Black Lists.

From there, read all the loglines, figure out which ones are the most similar to your script, and write down the agents and managers representing those writers (which are listed underneath the logline). Then get a 7 day free trial at IMDB Pro, search for those agents and managers, which will give you their e-mails.

Then e-mail these agents/managers with a query that looks something like this…

Hey [Name of Agent],

I’m a huge fan of your client’s, [Name of Client], script, [Name of Script]. It was my favorite script of last year.

I have something along the same lines that I believe you’d love. It’s called [Title of Your Script] and it’s about [Logline of Your Script].

Let me know if it’s something you’d be interested in reading and I’ll send it over.

Thanks so much,
[Your Name]

Note the simplicity of the query. That’s on purpose. These people do not have time to read about your trip to Africa when you were 8 and how your close brush with death during a safari inspired you to start writing movies.

The main point you want to get to – and get to fast – is the title and logline. Cause that’s all they care about. If it sounds like a good script, they’ll request it. If not, they won’t.

For an unknown screenwriter, this is your best strategy for getting an agent or manager. Does it help if your script is referred to them by a mutual friend or someone like me? Of course. Referrals are always helpful in an industry that has an endless number of creators competing for attention. But if that option isn’t open to you, you have to do cold querying.

There are some agents and managers who don’t put their contact info up on IMDB Pro. But that shouldn’t stop you. Ask people here in the comments for that info. I know a lot of you have reps e-mail addresses.

And look – I get that this is far from a “sure thing” for snagging a rep but TOO BAD! This process needs to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it, and then you’d have the exact same problem once you got your agent, which is that they represent 6000 other clients and now you’re desperately vying for their time.

The reason it’s hard is to filter out the un-serious writers and the people who don’t try hard enough. If you say to yourself, “I’m going to get a rep no matter what,” and give yourself two months to do so and only do everything to achieve that goal, you’re probably going to achieve it.

But if you’re more comfortable hanging off to the side and complaining that the game is rigged, well, good luck with that. I guarantee that’s not going to get you any closer to finding an agent.

Now let’s say you do this but you don’t get any script requests. As someone who has received thousands of queries, I can tell you that this is probably due to one of three things.

One, your concept isn’t very good. Two, your concept might be good but your logline is clunky, indicating that you’re not a very good writer. Three, the query itself is clunky. There are spelling issues, grammar issues, or ‘prattling on’ issues.

You need to identify which one of these three things is the problem and fix it. That means sending these queries off to friends – preferably knowledgeable screenwriter friends (which you can find here on this site if you don’t have them) – and asking them for an honest assessment of the logline and query.

I can’t stress enough that if these people aren’t honest with you, this plan is pointless. I even see it sometimes on this site where someone posts a weak logline in the comments and people act like it’s pretty decent, giving them false hope and sending them off on a de facto suicide mission. I don’t want anyone to be mean to anyone else. But there are ways of saying a concept is weak without being rude. “I don’t think this logline works. There’s nothing unique here. I wouldn’t write this if I were you.”

If your concept and logline are getting good reactions from friends but not agents, it might be your query that’s the problem. The problems I see in most queries is that they’re unfocused. They’re sloppy. And they ramble.

The reason this is an issue is because in almost every instance, the problems I see in a query extend out into the script itself. If the query rambles, the script rambles. If a comedy script query includes a few joke-attempts that aren’t funny, the script isn’t funny. If the writer includes a few tells that they’re new to screenwriting, the script ends up feeling like a newbie script.

That’s why I included the above query blueprint. I suggest you use that. If you’re no stranger to the query game, you can go a little further. If you can bring yourself closer to the agent in any way, that helps. For example, if you can say something like, “I recently saw Bones and All at Toronto and spoke with your client, David Kajganich, afterwards. He was such a cool dude who clearly loves writing. It must be rewarding seeing him experience all this success.”

I can vouch for myself here. Personalized touches like that are harder to pass up. When someone e-mails me and compliments something I did, it makes me feel good, so I tend to pay a little more attention to that query. But if someone mentions someone I know that they know, I’ll almost always open the script and read a page or two just to see how the writing is and if I get pulled in.

But let’s not lose sight of the goal here. The goal is to genuinely put yourself out there and query everyone you find an e-mail for. That’s your best ticket to a manager. And it’s totally possible that you get a rep out of this. I mean, you’ve seen some of these Black List scripts I’ve been reviewing lately. I’d say 25% of the people who comment here are at least as good as those writers.

But don’t blow your chance with a weak logline or a weak query. Get feedback first. Also, if you run into the worst case scenario, which is that nobody likes your concept, you’re going to have to accept that and move on to the next script. I know that sucks but we’re not playing in the National league here. We’re playing in the Premiere League. Nobody gives you credit for trying.

Put your big girl boots on and do the smart thing this time. Get feedback on your concept BEFORE YOU WRITE THE SCRIPT. Not after. Cause while there’s a little bit of wiggle room when it comes to dressing up a weak concept in a logline, it’s still putting flavored chapstick on an oinker. So let’s get that figured out before you spend the next four months of your life writing something.

And to jack this up a notch, I’m going to check back in with all of you two weeks into the new year. And I want to hear some success stories about getting agents. I will not stand for anything less.

Let the Agenting begin. Share your concepts, queries, manager e-mail addresses, and anything else related to today’s article in the comments.

While I encourage you to get logline, concept, and query feedback from your friends, if you want to get professional feedback from the guy who’s poured through tens of thousand of queries and read just about every idea in the world, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com for a logline consult ($25) or a query consult ($50). I also do full feature script consultations as well.

Genre: Drama (sort of a romantic comedy too)
Premise: After her son dies, a grieving mother decides to look for a mate who will get pregnant with the son’s frozen sperm.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Black List. If you want to see my re-ranking of all the scripts from last year’s Black List, you can check it out here.
Writer: Geoffrey Roth
Details: 122 pages

Juno Temple for Audrey?

I love a good underdog story.

So there’s no one rooting for today’s 72nd ranked Black List script more than me. There’s already been one Black List “worth the read” that got 7 votes (“False Truth”). Can we make it two??

We meet Ben, who’s in his early 30s. Ben informs us, much like Lester Burnham at the beginning of American Beauty, that he’s dead. Ben lived a really full life, though. He was a fun guy with a lot of friends who traveled a lot. The only thing he didn’t achieve before he died was starting a family.

Ben introduces us to his mother, Laurie, who helps out with a foundation of Ben’s, which has capitalized on Ben’s obsessive travel experience by taking all of his videos and turning them into a virtual reality experience with “VR Ben” as the guide. The hope is to sell the company and use the profits to save our dying planet.

When Laurie learns that Ben froze some sperm, she becomes convinced that her new goal in life is to impregnate a young consenting woman with this sperm so that Ben can have a child. So Laurie does the only logical thing one does in these situations – she joins Raya as her dead son.

She starts getting matches left and right, to which she then goes on the dates and tells the women that she’s “Ben,” and that the actual Ben is dead, and, oh yeah, could you please get pregnant with his sperm? Naturally, young hot in-heat females don’t respond well to being told that their date is dead and can you get pregnant.

Coincidentally, a swimming friend of Laurie’s, Aubrey, matches with Ben on Raya, and Laurie uses the opportunity to sell Aubrey on the idea. At first, Aubrey is freaked out, just like everyone else. But after she “meets” Ben in his VR traveling simulation, she actually starts to like him. Against all that one would consider good judgement, Aubrey considers the unthinkable – getting pregnant with Dead Ben’s sperm.

For the record, a specific song cue on page 1, accompanied by a 122 page run-time, is not the best way to endear yourself to a reader.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s discuss the script, which is a bit of an odd duck.

On the surface, we’ve got a semi high concept idea here. A grieving mother starts “dating” young women in the hopes of finding one who will have her dead son’s baby via his previously frozen sperm. Like a much sadder version of Juno.

That’s definitely an inventive concept and I give the writer props for that. Especially because one of the hardest genres to infiltrate with any sort of originality is the romantic comedy. This concept allows for a new spin on that formula.

And it gives us some fun scenes in the process, such as young women matching with Ben on dating apps only for Laurie to show up, tell them the guy they matched with is dead, and that she’s hoping they’ll agree to get impregnated by him posthumously. I mean I’m laughing out loud as I type that. Those will make for a hilarious montage.

But something wasn’t working with the script. Let me see if I can come up with an analogy for why that was. The Way You Remember Me is a brand new house where none of the screws have been tightened yet. It feels too loosey-goosey, and in the process, is hard to buy into.

The loosest of the screws is Ben’s VR subplot. This team of people who loved Ben used all of his travel videos to turn them into a VR experience with Ben being the VR guide.

I understand why the writer did this. It allowed for Aubrey to step into that VR world and sort of be around Ben, almost like she’s dating him. But it’s just not believable on any level.

It’s one of those things we writers notoriously do. We see a problem and we’re so determined to solve it that we don’t hold it up to real-world standards. We use our own internal ‘movie-logic’ instead.

The problem-to-be-solved in “Remember Me” was: “Well, if Aubrey never knew Ben, why would she agree to have his child?” So the writer said, “Well, what if there was this posthumous foundation for Ben that was… ummmm, working on a… VR experience!…. And… ummmmm…. Like, Ben used to be a travel nut and taped all his travel exploits and they were working on turning those into a VR experience and THAT WAY we can have Aubrey “meet” Ben almost like they’re meeting in real life!”

Come on already. It’s such a clearly writer-generated fake situation that it doesn’t pass the suspension of disbelief test.

One of your jobs as a screenwriter is not just to solve problems. It’s to solve them elegantly. It’s to solve them in such a way that they are invisible and the audience is so immersed in them that they never consider the idea that a writer is writing it.

You know who I learned this from? “House of the Dragon’s” Ryan Condal. He used to talk about this all the time back on the Done Deal message boards. Your solutions can’t be so big and outrageous and “movie-logicy” that they break the suspension of disbelief.

Newbie writers are the biggest violators of this because they don’t respect the reader yet. They think the burden is on the audience to go along with whatever they come up with, as opposed to truth, which is that the burden is always on the writer.

Another issue with this script is that it was clearly written by someone who doesn’t read a lot. I know this because if they’d a read a lot of scripts, they would know some of the basic things that readers dislike. Like dual-side dialogue. Giant paragraphs. Big page counts. Unnecessarily over-written openings that go on for too long and, therefore, delay when we get to the actual plot.

One of the reasons I think yesterday’s book was so excellent – and, mind you, it’s a book with 70,000 more words and yet read much faster than today’s script – is that the author was an editor for 20 years. So they’d read so many books.

That’s why The Maid reads so effortlessly, and why I remind aspiring writers at every turn to READ AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. Because I guarantee you, you will accumulate a list of things writers do that annoy you, and, in doing so, ensure that you never make those mistakes yourself.

The Way You Remember Me is like a lot of Black List scripts these days. It’s imperfect. It has some good things. But it doesn’t feel ready in the way that you pour over your work and make it the best it can possibly be before showing it to anyone ready. Which is why I’d retitle it, The Way You Won’t Remember Me.

Script Link: The Way You Remember Me

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

What I learned: Controversial take! This script was super heavy on the music cues. But I’m telling you, music as writing inspiration is HIGHLY DANGEROUS. The beauty of the songs you listen to, and the way they reverberate within you, fools you into thinking that the stuff you’re writing is amazing, when, in reality, it’s just the songs you’re listening to that are amazing. A great scene or a great sequence should be great without a single note of music behind it. This script read like the writer was lost in the power of his music. As a result, the music was doing all the heavy-lifting.

Say hello to the movie that’s going to win Florence Pugh her first Oscar.

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: A maid on the autism spectrum unexpectedly finds herself wrapped up in a high profile murder at the fancy hotel she works at.
About: This book was sent out last year, before publication, to Hollywood, where Florence Pugh got hold of it and quickly signed on. The book was officially published this year and quickly rose to the New York Times best seller list. This is author Nita Prose’s first novel. Just to show you how important it is for writers to read, Nita was a long time editor before she finally broke out with this book. She is from Canada. I will try not to hold that against her.
Writer: Nita Prose
Details: 290 pages

It is becoming harder and harder to make non-gigantic IP properties theatrical releases. Anything that has even a hint of drama and genuine acting in it is dismissed as a streaming movie.

The only way these movies can now become studio releases is if they go TO-THE-NINES on the production. They get a big actor or actress. They give the film 3x as much money as a movie like this would normally cost. They build the most amazing sets and costumes imaginable. And they get a high-level director who directs the s**t out of the movie.

I’m talking every shot is a piece of art.

That’s the only way something can stand up to a Wakanda Forever or a Fast and Furious. You’ve got to see the trailer and it’s got to physically look amazing.

They should do that for The Maid because it deserves it. It’s a really fun story with a great star-making role.

Molly Gray works at an upscale hotel in New York. She’s a maid. And not just any maid. She’s the most dedicated maid you’ve ever watched clean. All she cares about is cleaning. All she cares about is leaving every room in perfect condition.

A big reason for this is that Molly is on the spectrum. She is autistic and while she doesn’t understand the complexities of human interaction, she understands how to make any room look and smell brand new. This is in large part because of her grandmother, who was also a maid. Unfortunately, her grandma, who was her only friend in the world, died recently.

What begins as a normal day at the hotel turns very un-normal. While cleaning the room of the hotel’s highest profile guests, the Blacks, Molly finds Mr. Black dead on the floor. She immediately alerts the hotel manager and that’s when the craziness begins.

Long story short, Molly has been friendly with Giselle Black, the wife of the dead man, who becomes suspect numero uno. Terrified for her friend, Molly tells the cops that she doesn’t know Giselle well, which they quickly find out is a lie. Molly then goes to her crush, the guy she considers her best friend at the hotel, bartender Rodney, for help. But what she doesn’t know is that Rodney may be involved in this somehow. And he’s not afraid to throw Molly under the bus if it means saving himself.

When Molly then becomes the number one suspect, she will have to team up with a local lawyer and get several of the hotel workers to covertly admit that they had a hand in this. But with her unique condition, will she be able to pull it off? Or will she, for one final time, be taken advantage of?

The way actors used to hunt for that big Oscar gold was to take on the role of a mentally challenged person. From Forrest Gump to Sling Blade to I Am Sam to Radio to Me Time. Some had success getting that Oscar, others didn’t.

These days, Hollywood’s become so terrified of Twitter attacks that they don’t want to get anywhere near the “R” word. So they’ve come up with a replacement – autism. Autism allows for characters battling difficult mental conditions. However the characters are still fully functional and, therefore, okay to portray.

We saw this in Silver Linings Playbook. We saw it in The Accountant. We saw it in The Imitation Game. This is one of the best character strategies screenwriters can use because actors will fight each other in gladiatorial arenas to land one of these parts. And it’s rising star, Florence Pugh’s, turn, to put on the armor.

Now, not every autistic role is created equal.

Where most writers go wrong is they only have the barest understanding of autism. They build their character around other autistic characters they’ve seen on TV and in film. Sometimes this can work if you’re writing a comedy (Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory). But if you’re writing a drama, you better understand autism as well as the greatest doctors in the world. Because in order for these characters to work, they must feel authentic.

That’s why The Maid works. And that’s why it rose to the top of Hollywood’s priority list – so much so that they went to their number 1 “It” girl to see if she’d do it. And she loved the character so she was in.

The great thing about autism (I may be the only person who’s ever written that) is that it enacts what I call “The Protection Principle.” The Protection Principle is when the reader feels protective over the main character. They want to make sure they’re okay. They get angry when others take advantage of them.

It can easily be said that the reason Forrest Gump is so popular is because of the Protection Principle. We love him so much that we want to protect him from the big bad world and all the people trying to take advantage of him in it.

The Maid may be the only story that leans more heavily into the Protection Principle than Forrest Gump. I can’t remember the last time I wanted to shield someone from pain more than Molly. She’s such a sweet girl. She’s so naive. Everyone’s taking advantage of her. And it very well might send her to prison for the rest of her life.

What’s so great about this book, though, is that the desire to protect our heroine grows with every chapter. By the time the cops have angrily arrested and accused her of all these things, we’re so charged up we want to drive down to our closest governmental establishment and demand justice. That is until we remember that, oh yeah, this is a fictional story.

The book is a great reminder that writing any story is about getting the BIG THINGS RIGHT. Concept. Character. Plot. We get so wrapped in the minutiae and, while I’m not saying the details aren’t important, they’re not nearly as important as the big three.

I might even take that a step further and say, even if the only thing you get right is the main character, as long as you get it REALLY REALLY RIGHT, you will write something of value that people will want. Especially in this business because it’s all about getting that big actor to sign on and bring buzz to your project so it can get made and, if you nail your main character, that’s exactly what will happen.

What works so well about Molly’s autism and the Protection Principle is that it introduces a level of dramatic irony. It’s established early on that Molly is obsessed with Rodney, the bartender. She loves everything about him, from the way he smells to the way his forearm muscles ripple when he places his hand down on the bar table.

But as Molly describes Rodney and how much she would love to make him her boyfriend, we see things that she doesn’t. We notice that he calls her “special” to others (“He called me special,” Molly beams. “I knew there was something between us.”). We notice that he’s being nice to her, but in a slightly patronizing way that she’s misinterpreting as romantic interest.

In other words, we know early on this guy is probably bad news. So we want to protect Molly from him. But poor Molly can’t read any social cues so she doesn’t see what we see. And it makes us frantic to keep reading and hope that she figures it out before it’s too late.

There’s a chapter late in the book where Molly needs help with this gun that she’s helped sneak out of Giselle’s hotel room, and she decides to ask Rodney for his assistance. And we’re sitting there screaming, “NOOOOOOOO!!! That’s the last person you want to tell!” And, of course, Rodney then uses that information to frame Molly.

Honestly, the plot itself isn’t anything special. It’s a got a few twists and turns. But the reason we’re so invested is because the character is so great. And the character is so great because of the autism choice, the authenticity through which that condition is explored, and the byproduct of that autism, which is the ignition of the Protection Principle.

Those three things kept me turning the pages and, when I finished, I had no doubt that Pugh was winning an Oscar. It’s a done deal already. Just give it to her now. I know that’s never been done before – that an actor is given an Oscar before she starts shooting the movie – but I promise you this is the one time we can break that rule.

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

What I learned: This is an AMAZING book to read to learn how to make a character likable. Not just because of the autism thing. But Molly’s best friend in the world, her grandma, died recently. The head maid at the hotel, Cheryl (who Molly’s nicknamed “Cherylnoble”), goes into Molly’s rooms ahead of her to always steal her tips. A former boyfriend took all of her and her grandmother’s money.  When others take advantage of our hero, we love our hero more than anything.  And because Prose is a such a good writer (how could she not be with that last name?), it all feels very authentic. None of it is desperate over-the-top “please like my hero” writing. I honestly can’t remember the last time I loved a character this much.

What I learned 2: All of the above only works if the protagonist still has a positive attitude towards life.  It doesn’t work if your hero feels sorry for themselves and gives up.  We love this character so much because in spite of all these things that happen to her, in spite of a job that might depress others, she still gets up every day and has the most positive optimistic attitude in the world.

What I learned 3: A dead body and a really unique main character is one of the most reliable setups for a story out there.

What I learned 4: NO EXCUSES!  Nita’s job took up her entire day so she got up at 5am every morning and wrote for 4 hours before her day job.  It took her 5 months to finish a first draft.

Genre: Superhero
Premise: After T’Challa’s death, an angry group of people at the bottom of the sea show up on Wakanda’s doorstep and demand an alliance to help defeat the rest of the planet.
About: After the death of the series’ star, Chadwick Boseman, the Black Panther franchise had to reset and construct a new path. After a long and agonizing production that had its fair share of victims (star Letitia Wright claimed, at one point, that she was done with the franchise), the film finally came out this weekend. The movie caps off Marvel’s controversial, “Phase 4,” which found itself taking more chances and putting a premium on diversity, which yielded mixed results. The film took in 180 million dollars over the weekend. The original film debuted with 200 million dollars.
Writers: Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole
Details: 160 minutes!

Can you imagine making this movie?

Your star dies. A pandemic swoops in, handicapping your production. And your replacement star resists getting vaccinated, causing a complete upheaval on set. Oh yeah, and she later suffers a terrible injury, which further throws production into disarray.

I don’t believe in cursed movies. But if you’re going to make an argument for them, Wakanda Forever is Exhibit A. It reminded me a lot of what happened to the Matrix sequels. Those films were so devastating to those directors that they haven’t been the same people since.

But Hollywood has a long history of cursed productions that turned into great movies. Look no further than Titanic. The prevailing theory for a pro-drama production is that on-set conflict fuels an energy that seeps into the movie itself.

Let’s find out if that was the case with Wakanda Forever.

WK starts with T’Challa’s scientist sister, Shuri, frantically working through a computer computation to move the molecules around to save her sick brother, who we do not see. She fails and an elaborate Wakanda funeral follows.

As Shuri and her mother, Queen Ramonda, pick up the pieces after T’Challa’s death, they are visited by a spooky dude from the water with wings on his feet named, Namor. Namor tells Ramonda and Shuri that some American scientist is providing the U.S. with tech that’s allowing them to mine super-resource, vibranium, from their seabed. He wants them to kill this scientist.

So Shuri joins Wakanda’s new number 1 warrior, Okoye, and they head to Massachusetts where they find out this scientist is a college girl named Riri. Riri’s been working on her own personal Iron Man suit, which she’s able to bust out and play with as soon as the government gets wind of this meeting and attacks the three of them.

Our trio escapes, but are quickly captured by Namor and his sea people, who take Shuri and Riri down to the bottom of the ocean. There, Namor explains to Shuri that the Wakandans have to team up with his people and destroy the world because, um, the world is bad?

When Shuri and the Wakandans refuse, Namor kills the queen, making Shuri the new queen. Shuri finally accepts the burden of leading Wakanda, becomes the new Black Panther, and orders an attack on Namor for revenge. The two then battle to the death!

I absolutely loved the opening of this movie.

Well, first of all, I love Letitia Wright, the actress who plays Shuri. She’s unlike any actress out there. And I felt that she captured not just the fictional response to Black Panther’s death in this opening scene, but her own response to Chadwick’s death. It was so heartbreaking. And I teared up myself when the Marvel logo came up but instead of playing all the best moments from Marvel movies like the logo usually does, it played the best moments of T’Challa. It was probably the best creative choice of the movie.

But once the movie got going, it was clear that the screenwriters were lost in the woods as the entire narrative took on a ‘searching’ vibe. It was never quite sure what it wanted to be and, as a result, became a mixed bag.

Let’s start with the villains. The choice of villains felt totally random. Why ocean people? There isn’t any clear connection or irony in choosing these sea villains. The only thing I could come up with was that Namor’s folks were the only ones who could get into Wakanda, since they did so through the water.

Don’t get me wrong. The design of these people was cool. I just didn’t feel any organic connection between them and the Black Panther mythology.

From there, you have this double-whammy issue of no main character and no male characters. Through the first 100 minutes of the movie, I had no idea who the main character was. For those who don’t know, the main character in a screenplay is almost always the one driving the plot forward. They have a goal. And we follow them as they try and achieve that goal.

Here, we get this awkward mash-up of quarter-main-characters with Shuri, Okoye, Ramonda, and Riri. Audiences feel confused when they don’t have a main character to latch onto. They need that guidance. Even in Avengers, Iron Man was our main character. We always came back to him to pull the story together. This film lacked that.

And then, you had this strange lack of testosterone in the movie. While I know all-female casts are trendy these days, it seems like a major risk for a movie that’s supposed to be for everyone. To have no male protagonist joining the Wakandans?? You need that balance between the male and female and this most certainly lacked that.

There was something else missing from the story and I kept struggling to figure out what it was until late. Coogler decided to make an origin story. This movie was Shuri’s origin story. Never in the history of trilogies have we ever had an origin story in the second film. Granted, these were extenuating circumstances, but still. If something felt odd to you, that was probably what it was.

And the thing is, they could’ve made it work. But they decided on a structural choice that kept the plot from succeeding, which was they waited all the way until the end to turn Shuri into Black Panther. That sounds great from a character arc perspective. But from an audience enjoyment perspective, it doesn’t work.

Look at The Matrix. Neo doesn’t fully turn into “The One” until the very end of the movie. But he still gets to do cool matrix-like stuff, such as fighting Agent Smith in the subway, or shooting up a bunch of swat dudes in a building lobby while flipping around, well before that happens.

Shuri does absolutely nothing before she becomes Black Panther. And that really hurt this film. Cause we were all looking for someone cool to latch onto. And we didn’t have it for the bulk of the movie.

On top of all this, the motivation is really weird in this film. “Motivation” is the starting point for any plot. Thanos is going to snap the universe in half – we need to stop him. That’s clear motivation.

The motivation here is all sorts of wonky. The U.S. or NATO (it’s unclear) are trying to steal vibranium from Namor’s people. So Namor comes to Wakanda and says, “you need to help us stop them.”

What???

So the main issue isn’t even Wakanda-related? It’s affecting some other group of people we didn’t even know about until this movie?? And they need our help to stop a third party??

What are we doing here?

I call these “one-step removed” motivations. They’re not direct. They require some connecting variable to make sense. And those are never as strong as direct motivations.

So when you combine a one-step removed motivation with no main characters with the oxymoron of a sequel origin story with a “No dudes allowed” sign with a hero who doesn’t do anything cool until the final act… it’s really hard to get a good movie out of that.

YET…. I almost recommended this. As I said, I really like Letitia Wright. So I enjoyed watching her whenever she was onscreen. I thought some of the bad guy moves – such as water bombs and siren songs – were kinda cool. I thought Okoye was a kick-butt fighter. I liked watching all her fight scenes. And while there were too many talking-heads scenes for my liking, I find Ryan Coogler to have a great feel for directing character-driven scenes. They always felt genuine to me.

The reason it doesn’t get a passing grade is Riri. Your movie is too long. Way too long. Yet you’re greenlighting the addition of a character who has nothing to do with the plot and who adds a good 20 minutes to the movie? That’s unacceptable.

How off was the addition of this character?  Namor literally says, “I want to kill this girl.”  That’s his whole motivation for the first half of the movie. Then, he has her IN HIS UNDERWATER PALACE and he doesn’t do anything to her!!!!  He seems unaware that she’s even around.

Someone has to take a stand against this dumb Marvel directive of shoving unimportant characters into a movie in the hopes of building their awareness for separate franchises. Wakanda Forever could’ve been a really good movie. It could’ve been the most emotional movie of the entire franchise. But when you’re forced to rearrange plotlines, making them convoluted and hard to follow, in the process elongating your film to an annoying length, to include characters like Riri, who weren’t even likable mind you, you lose a lot of points for that.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has some shining moments. But its endless runtime and questionable plot choices keep the narrative from ever finding a satisfying pace. I would rank it somewhere in the middle of the pack of the 30 Marvel movies that have been produced so far.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: The Reluctant Leader Narrative, which is what we get here with Shuri, shouldn’t be executed to such an extreme that she only becomes a leader in the waning minutes of the film. There are ways to get your hero into cool situations and have them do cool things without them having to officially lose their reluctance. That’s the entirety of Braveheart. William Wallace was the most reluctant of all the reluctant leaders. And yet he fought in several giant battles throughout the movie. Yes, it’s cool to have that big transformational moment in the end when your reluctant hero finally accepts their calling. But I felt Shuri could’ve done a lot more in this story, and still got that cool symbolic moment where she puts on the suit and officially becomes the leader.