Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In a dystopian society, a government worker recovering from a traumatic accident is rescued by a group of rebels who insist that he’s the leader of their movement.
About: I have to give it to Mattson Tomlin. He’s been scrapping away for a while, occasionally getting scripts on the Black List. I’ve reviewed a couple of his scripts before, a Jason Bourne parody script and a different sci-fi entry. I didn’t dislike either script. But neither one had that extra something that puts a script over the top. Well, apparently, Warner Brothers doesn’t agree with me. As they gave Mattson the most coveted job in town – the latest Batman movie that Matthew Reeves is making. I’m not sure if he dropped 2084 before or after he got this job, but I’m assuming just the mention of him being up for the job helped Paramount snatch up 2084. I heard it was pitched as 1984 by way of The Matrix and Inception. That is a lofty pitch! Let’s see if the script lives up to the hype.
Writer: Mattson Tomlin
Details: 116 pages
You guys know me!
There isn’t a big sci-fi spec I won’t read.
So when I heard Mattson Tomlin was taking on one of the granddaddies of sci-fi literature, writing an unofficial 100-years-later spiritual sequel to 1984, I needed to get my hands on it. Especially since Tomlin’s screenwriting star is rising quickly.
Question to the class before we get started. Has anybody here read 1984 cover to cover? I feel like we’ve all STARTED to read it. But I’m not sure anyone’s ever finished it. Extra points for those of you who did so on your own and not because your high school English teacher told you to.
Malcom Ferrel doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just woken up in a dentist-type chair. A dude with a Hazmut suit is standing over him. He’s asking Malcom what his name is and if he remembers his “trauma” or not. Malcom does not remember his trauma. Good. Then we can get you back into society, the guy says.
Malcom enters suburbia, which looks like the 1950s for some reason. Except for the fact that everybody has to wear an elaborate super suit that protects them from the air. It’s like Covid on steroids I guess. Malcom is told by his driver that he works for the government and to stop trying to remember the trauma he experienced. It’s better if he moves on.
Once he gets home, there’s a party going on in the backyard, and then WAM BAM POW a van smashes through the fence. A bunch of black clad SWAT like dudes bust out and start slaughtering everyone. Malcom’s buddy Stan confirms to home base that he has “the package” and the next thing we know… Malcom wakes up in the chair again where he must start the process all over again.
This time, he goes to meet with his wife, who, like the last batch of people, tell him to stop thinking of his past trauma. It will only make things worse. Then those SWAT DUDES show up AGAIN and there’s a firefight between the people protecting Malcom and the people trying to steal him. The SWAT guys finally get him, escape, and take him back to a secret base.
At the base, Malcom meets his real wife, Rachel, who informs him that he used to work for the government until he started this rebellion. But the government then stole him back, erased his memories, and tried to reintegrate him back into society. But they kidnapped him back. And then the government kidnapped him back. And then they kidnapped him back. And sometimes, if they can’t get him, they kidnap HER. Which is what happens next!
The government BUSTS into the underground base and while Malcom escapes, they get Rachel. We now follow Rachel in the dentist chair. Her memory has been erased. And we follow her as she’s cluelessly integrated into society. She even marries a dude. Will Malcom come save her. That’s their thing, Rachel told him back at the base. They always save each other. So now Malcom, who still isn’t even sure who he is, must save a woman he sort of is maybe sure is his wife.
I’m not going to beat around the bush. This didn’t work for me.
The number one thing you have to get right when you’re writing a big sci-fi script is sell the mythology. If we don’t buy the rules or the backstory or how your characters interact with this world, nothing else matters because we’re going to be so focused on how weak the framework is. 1950s town? Protection suits? Trauma elimination? There was something incohesive about the variables.
The idea of changing the main character and creating a dramatically ironic situation in that we know Rachel is being tricked but she doesn’t isn’t a bad choice on an idea level. The problem is that we got to know Rachel for two seconds before she’s thrust into this situation. So we don’t care about her. Or, at least, I didn’t. And, to be honest, I never got the best feel for Malcom either. Nothing we learned about him was real remember. It’s a bunch of fake memories taped over fake memories. In other words, even the person we’re hoping will save our damsel in distress is someone we don’t know. So we’re cheering on someone we don’t know to save someone else we don’t know.
That’s not how writing works.
You have to establish strong characters who we care about before you toss them into the mixer that is their screenplay journey. Both Neo in The Matrix and the character Leonardo DiCaprio plays in Inception have extensive introductions where we get to know the characters well before the shit hits the fan.
This does lead to an interesting screenwriting debate, which is that I always tell you to hook the reader right away. Make something happen immediately. Grab us and don’t let us go. Tomlin does that more than any of the scripts I’ve read so far in The Last Great Screenplay Contest. So then what’s the deal? The guy does what you say, Carson, and you’re still complaining?
Well, here’s the catch – and this is why screenwriting is so difficult – if you’re telling your story in a way where we’re meeting your characters “in media res,” you need to figure out quick ways to help us identify with them and like them. Your “save the cat” moments need to be lightning quick. Your glimpses into their humanity and what makes them sympathetic and empathetic need to be tightly executed.
This is where the best writers make their money. They can get you to fall in love with a character in ten lines. Good Time, the Safdie Bros movie they made before Uncut Gems, has a despicable lead character in Connie, who does some terrible things in the film. But we meet him coming to the rescue of his mentally challenged brother while a heartless social worker demeans him by making him take an uncomfortable test. Instantly, after that scene, we’re rooting for Connie.
And then I just didn’t get what Tomlin was going for here. We’re told that Malcom has been stolen by the Fortification dozens of times and that the Rebellion keeps having to steal him back. Malcom asks the same question we’re wondering. “Why don’t they just kill me?” Rachel explains that if the Fortification kills him, society will know their Trauma-Erasure system doesn’t work. To prove they have everything under control, they must erase his Rebellion memories and reintegrate him back into society every time.
I’m sorry but if I was a citizen in this society and I found out one of our main guys had been kidnapped by the Rebellion two dozen times??? I’m probably thinking the system doesn’t work. And just from an objective storytelling perspective, once someone gets stolen back and forth five times, doesn’t it get a little silly? Once or twice, I get. But 20? 30 times? It’s clumsy storytelling.
Another problem with big sci-fi ideas is over-development of the mythology in ways that hurt the story more than help it. Everyone wears these over-the-top super suits to keep them from transmitting diseases to each other (supposedly). But wouldn’t this movie have been better without this component?
Cause it’s hard enough to buy into this memory impregnating slash memory restoring tug-o-war as it is. When you throw in, “and oh yeah, everyone wears big cumbersome bubble suits,” it draws attention to the very lie the Fortification is trying to hide. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to trick someone into thinking everything was normal if everyone WASN’T wearing a big weird suit? It’s even one of the first things Malcom notices after the Fortification procedure. Why is everybody dressed so weird? They might as well have given him a handbook that listed all the other suspicious things he shouldn’t pay attention to.
The thing is, once the script hits the midpoint, it actually starts to get interesting. We go back into the memory of Malcom as all the memories he forgot are implanted in him by the Rebellion. And we’re experiencing them as he is. So we see when him and Rachel first meet and fall in love and what goes wrong afterwards that leads to the Rebellion. I wish we would’ve started with that. It was so much cleaner and more interesting than giving us 60 pages of exposition and setup.
Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. My suspension of disbelief had been broken so many times that I couldn’t get back into the story bubble I needed to be in to enjoy the screenplay. Which is too bad. Cause the end scene with the Counselor where he’s explaining everything was quite good.
There’s a kernel of a story in here. But I don’t think Tomlin’s found it in this draft.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure the bad guy has a good point. One of the easiest ways to add depth to your bad guys is to give their ideology legitimacy. When Rachel finally meets the big bad guy and he explains why they do what they do, he makes strong points. Their system has resulted in zero poverty, zero crime, zero wealth disparagement, zero war. Yeah, they do some bad things. But wouldn’t any society kill to have those numbers? You want to make your hero’s choices DIFFICULT, not easy. You automatically do that whenever your villain has a strong argument.
