Genre: Superhero/Procedural
Premise: (from Hit List) A grief-stricken mother sets out to murder the world’s only superhero when he accidentally kills her daughter while battling his nemesis.
About: Today’s script finished NUMBER 1 on the 2018 Hit List. As a reminder, the Hit List is a list of the year’s best SPEC scripts, not to be confused with the Black List, which includes mostly assignment work (writers getting paid before they write the screenplay). As such, Hit List screenplays tend to be a little more raw. Still, there are plenty of scripts that make both lists, which is why it’s so peculiar that this – the top script on the Hit List – didn’t even appear on the Black List. One hint may be that it’s being produced by Joel Silver. Silver isn’t interested in managing social justice quotas or biopicing cineplexes to death. He just wants to make fun kick ass films, something the Black List has mostly moved away from celebrating. The writer, Russian-born Yaroslav Altunin, got his MFA in screenwriting from UCLA, where the script won that school’s Screenwriting Showcase. Screenwriters Showcase is an annual UCLA event at the end of Spring Quarter designed to introduce outstanding student work to the industry. Students can submit feature-length and TV scripts which are read and critiqued by industry experts.
Writer: Yaroslav Altunin
Details: 92 pages
Identify a popular genre and find a new way into it.
Today’s writer takes the most popular movie genre in the world – Superhero – and asks, “What if an everyday person wanted revenge on a superhero?”
Chop out all the pomp and circumstance and instead focus on the real-life human emotions of grief and anger? Make it personal instead of pyrotechnic? Sounds interesting. Sounds like the kind of script that, if written well, could finish number one on a screenplay list. That makes me excited to check out Absence of Courage.
When we meet her, police officer Maggie Temple is inside the wreckage of her car, staring at the dead body of her teenage daughter, Alex. The Guardian, a stoic superman-like superhero, has just laid waste to downtown Los Angeles while trying to kill super-villain, Nemesis. Over 100,000 people were killed during the carnage. And Maggie blames The Guardian for it all, especially the death of her daughter.
A month later, Maggie yells at her husband for encouraging her to sit around and do nothing. She wants to get back on the beat. So she puts on her new special bionic leg (she lost a leg during the attack) and heads to work. Maggie’s thrilled to see her partner, Ray, and the two are assigned to clean-up duty. Lots of fake superhero vigilantes are running around town and it’s the cops job to keep them in order.
But work doesn’t quench Maggie’s real thirst, which is to find the real identity of the Guardian and kill him. One day, while mourning in front of the wall of casualties, Maggie meets a mysterious religious doctor named Henry, who keeps all the candles lit in front of the dead’s pictures. Maggie feels like she can trust this man and the two quickly become good friends.
But Maggie can’t shake the anger inside of her, and slowly descends into the female version of Travis Bickle. Investigating the whereabouts of the Guardian, she learns that the commissioner may have orchestrated the downtown battle to gain popularity (or something). Finally, Maggie charges into the off-limits center of the city, where she finds The Guardian waiting there (just hanging out I guess?). With the help of Nemesis, she fights him, only to learn that he’s… yeah, you’re pretty dumb if you didn’t figure this one out… Henry. Maggie, then, has to come to terms with her anger and decide if killing this man is really going to make her happier.
You can probably tell how I felt about Absence of Courage from the way I phrased my plot summary. Look, I can see how this script gained traction. It’s IP Appropriation. It’s a different way to explore superhero movies.
But man, there’s so much wrong here.
For starters, the script is achingly slow. We’d get scenes like Maggie moaning to her husband about the loss of their daughter and then, 30 pages later, we’d get that exact same scene again. There was a lot of that, where scenes either echoed or repeated stuff that had already been established. The plot had virtually zero momentum, which is hard to do when your subject matter is superheroes.
The script also suffered from something I call Inevitability Syndrome. If you’ve ever watched a sporting event – a soccer, football, tennis, basketball game. – and right from the start, one team is destroying the other, you’ve experienced this. You know, even though there’s two hours left of the game, what’s going to happen. The result is inevitable.
The way this plays out in movies is when the writer follows a genre’s tropes too closely. In this case, we’ve got a cop procedural. Maggie is attempting to find the identity of someone. So there’s a lot of “talk to this person,” “threaten that person,” “lose yourself along the way.” I felt like after page 15, I could turn to page 85 and still have a good idea of what had happened. That’s not good.
I mean even the villain was the most obvious reveal ever. When a character appears out of nowhere, befriends your protagonist for no reason, and acts really mysterious every time they’re around each other, chances are the audience is going to figure out something is up.
A little red herring action could’ve solved this problem. Add a few more characters. Have those characters acting weird too. Keep the audience off-balance. The way to defeat Inevitability Syndrome is to keep the game close. One team goes up, the other team goes up. We should have no idea how the game is going to end. And Absence of Courage might as well have plastered a giant sign at the top of the title page telling you how it was going to end because that’s how obvious it was.
To be honest, I was worried from the very first scene. We meet Maggie right after her daughter has died. There’s nothing technically wrong with this choice, but it’s a choice that has consequences. If you kill off Alex before we meet her, we never have an emotional tie to her. We never see, ourselves, what was so special about their relationship. What this forces the writer to do, then, is create that emotion via Maggie’s emotion. So we have to see Maggie complain to her husband that she can never get over her daughter. We have to see her tear up when she sees her daughter’s picture on the wall of remembrance. And that’s never EVER going to be as powerful as if we’d met Alex.
And all it needed was a two minute scene between them right before Alex was killed. That would’ve done the trick. Or you need to take advantage of the visual medium that is cinema and SHOW us that emotion, not tell us. The most recent version of this is Three Billboards. I mean who doesn’t know how painful Mildred’s loss is after putting up those billboards?
This script was an odd duck. Even beyond the things I’ve mentioned, there were these awkward choices, like the fact that Maggie had a bionic leg. Except the leg played no part in the movie whatsoever. It gets a ton of coverage as a leg of the future but it didn’t give her superpowers or anything. So why include it at all?
I don’t know, guys. I suppose I can see how this script might impress a panel of people coming out of nowhere. But when you read it with all the hype that comes from topping a major screenplay list, it’s a big letdown. Which is too bad because it’s got an interesting premise. However, this thing needs a professional grade punch-up if it’s going to be the next Hancock.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re hiding someone’s identity, and that person’s reveal is a major part of the plot, you need plenty of red herrings. You need at least four other characters who garner suspicion from the reader. Otherwise, we’re going to know who the killer (or, in this case, superhero) is with an hour left to go.
