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!
