Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A woman wakes up on a spaceship that has landed on a distant planet but has no memory of how she got there or why her uniform is covered in blood.
About: This came from the 2018 Hit List. I’ll paste the info from there about the writer: “Jonni is a German-Brazilian screenwriter who has seen every inch of the globe. Born in Switzerland and raised in Spain, he moved to London to get his degree in Film & Television Production. Since then, he’s worked in advertising and the broadcast department for the London Olympics. He’s recently found himself in New York where he received his MFA in writing from Tisch School of Arts. Since finishing ASH, Jonni is working on several projects for both film and TV.”
Writer: Jonni Remmler
Details: 108 pages
It’s been a rough few days. I suffered through ten hours of people singing and dancing about the Constitution. After that, I battled through a script that had more description in it than the Bible if it were translated by Leo Tolstoy. And while my gym has finally reopened, they’ve mandated that I wear the equivalent of a hazmat suit to work out. As if I didn’t have enough excuses not to go the gym already!
It was clear what was needed. The ultimate Scriptshadow picker-upper. The thing that got me juiced to start this website in the first place. The SCI-FI SPEC! To me, sci-fi and spec screenplays are the screenwriting world’s equivalent of peanut butter and jelly, the special sauce in an In and Out burger, the blinking “Hot Now” sign on the Krispy Kreme marquee.
I needed a shot of all those things directly into my bloodstream. So take a trip with me into outer space, Adam Driver Inside Llewyn Davis style. Link hands script friends and pour yourself a milky way sarsaparilla. Actually, pour the drink first, then link hands. We’re about to be blasted off into spec script nirvana. At least I hope we are…
28 year-old Riya has just woken up in a strange futuristic room. Her uniform is covered in blood, seemingly from a large gash in her forehead. The large metallic room has all its furniture pushed up against the only door. Riya stumbles over and looks through the window in the door. There’s a hallway with a large blood stain in it. Uh-oh, don’t want to go in there.
Luckily, there’s an automatic food processor in the room so Riya can easily stay fed. In the meantime, she tries to figure out how she got here, and we experience that with her via flashbacks. She remembers earth, something about the planet dying, and possibly being part of a crew that may have fled the planet.
Eventually, Riya gets out of the room and starts seeing dead members of her crew, who all seem to have been beaten to death. She also finds a window to the outside, and that’s when she realizes she’s on some distant volcanic planet. Riya continues to remember bits and pieces of her past and zeroes in on how one member of her team, Jones, is missing. She must be the one who’s killing everybody.
Before Riya can test this hypothesis, a man named Brion shows up. He says he came down from an orbiting ship that’s part of the same team she’s on. And that he’s here because SHE sent a distress call. Since a sand storm is moving in, they’ll have to wait two days to walk back to his shuttle.
In the meantime, they try to find Jones. But, of course, there is no Jones. (spoilers!) Brion ultimately reveals himself to be the killer. And to make things worse, he’s not even human. He’s an alien entity from this planet who has slipped inside Riya’s own brain! Which means that Brion isn’t even real. Brion, aka the alien, is Riya herself. Unable to process that she’s the killer, Riya asks what happens next. Brion explains that he will slowly consume all her brain functions and she’ll cease to exist. The End.
There’s nothing bad about this script. In fact, it would’ve easily passed the Last Screenplay Contest First 10 Pages Challenge. Waking up into a strange situation with no memory of how you got there is an easy way to quickly pull readers in.
But this is the definition of what all screenwriters should be wary of: the standard execution screenplay. Standard Execution is when you have a concept and you execute it the same way 99% of other screenwriters would’ve executed it.
A girl wakes up on a spaceship with amnesia.
There’s a mystery about someone killing crew members.
A mysterious man shows up outside. Wants to be let in. He appears to be friendly. But is he?
I’ve read this exact scenario in screenplays, maybe 250 times. Not long ago, we reviewed a script about how earth lost all its oxygen and a family in a bunker lets in a couple of strangers. So it’s a common setup. And to be clear, it’s used a lot because it works. But it only works when you play with the formula in unexpected ways.
And while I wouldn’t say this feels exactly like other films. It’s familiar enough that you’re always ahead of it. That’s where you don’t want to be as a writer. ESPECIALLY if it’s a mystery script like this one. Because the whole point of adding a mystery is to give the reader an unknown experience, something where they’re constantly trying to figure out what’s going on and then you keep pulling the rug out from under them.
I’m not sure anybody reads this and doesn’t know that Riya is the one who killed everyone long before the third act reveal occurs.
Another thing I wanted to point out was there’s this prevailing belief that budgetary constraints lead to more creative choices. When 90s vagabond director Robert Rodriquez was the hottest thing in Hollywood for making an $8000 movie, he would talk about this all the time.
But I’m not so sure this is true. Because while I read this, it felt like a lot of uninspired choices were made due to wanting to keep the movie cheap. Like the fact that there’s an alien involved, but he’s always strategically in human form. Humans are cheaper to shoot than aliens. But aliens are so much cooler than humans. So did budgetary constraints in this instance really make the movie better?
And now that we’ve had some distance from Robert Rodriquez’s filmmaking heyday, can we really say that the choices in his movies made them any better? He’s certainly good at making a lot of goofy nonsense. But maybe we shouldn’t be taking advice from a guy who’s basically become the D-level version of James Cameron.
All of this is to say that special effects are getting cheaper by the year. The Stagecraft technology that they use on The Mandalorian shows just how far a dollar can go these days. So yes, you want to be aware of budget as a screenwriter. I’m not telling you to write World War 7 set on Mars in 2744. But don’t let it handcuff you if you have a really cool idea in an otherwise low-budget film.
Again, I didn’t dislike this script. I always get excited when I read a sci-fi spec and I’m always looking for the writer who’s come up with the next Source Code. I’ll continue to champion everyone writing in this genre. But this script played out too predictably for me. It needed to take more chances in its plotting.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the things you should be trying to do in a script is make your characters sound different from one another. But never do this at the expense of logic. So here, Brion comes in and he says things like, “You don’t remember none of that.” He likes to use the word “ain’t” occasionally. Astronauts are some of the most highly educated people in the world and, therefore, would never talk like this. So yes on talking differently. No on talking nonsensically. (note: this is *sort of* explained at the end but not convincingly enough to void this lesson).
