Genre: Action
Premise: When a talented hacker is recruited by the mysterious Cicada 3301, she gets wrapped up in a plot that threatens to destroy the entire world. Based on the real organization.
About: This script finished number 4 on the 2019 Black List. The writer of the script, Lillian Yu, made last year’s Hit List with her script, Singles Day.
Writer: Lillian Yu
Details: 108 pages
One of the reasons it’s so hard to make hacker movies work is because there aren’t a lot of ways to make typing on a computer interesting. Even with the fancy graphics, it’s a bit like chronicling the life of a famous writer. The act of writing is boring to watch, just as the act of hacking is boring to watch. I found this out the hard way a long time ago when I wrote a hacker script. No matter how cool I tried to make the hacking process, it always came back to my hero sitting in front of a screen pounding buttons. I could never figure it out.
The more interesting approach is probably to have your hero be operating in the real world and your villain be the one who’s the hacker. That way, they’re controlling the elements around you and you have to constantly adjust. I think The Net, with Sandra Bullock, took this approach. Enemy of the State as well. And probably some recent movies that I’m forgetting. So how does Yu solve this problem? Let’s find out.
Jane is a computer genius, so much so that she got a full-ride to Harvard. Jane is also a bit of a social justice warrior, and when she tries to expose one of Harvard’s premiere fraternities for covering up sexual assault, she finds out that Harvard is more interested in keeping up its pristine image than being Ronan Farrow’s next expose. So Jane is kicked out of school.
She eventually gets a crappy job at an insurance company where she secretly retroactively adjusts policies so that poor people don’t get screwed over. This catches the eye of a secret organization known as Cicada who recruits Jane to be a member. She’s flown to Paris via a remotely controlled airplane, passes a bunch of a tests, then meets the team, which is basically a techno-savvy version of the Mission Impossible group.
The leader, Adam, explains that Cicada is an organization whose sole job is to do right in the world. For example, there’s a guy running a Ponzi scheme 10x worse than Madoff. Cicada digitally transfers all that money back to its rightful owners. All in the background.
The problem is there’s another organization called Zero whose mission is the same as Cicada’s. To save the world. Except their business plan has gone awry recently and their current plan is to infuse North Korea with trillions of dollars so it can launch a nuclear war against the world. All of this is happening at the end of the month, so they need to act now.
There’s a major gathering of the most influential people in the world at a castle and the head of Zero is going to be there. They need to get there and kill the guy. Unfortunately, hacking isn’t going to be enough to do the job. So Jane must go through action training to get her up to speed in hand to hand combat and shooting peeps in the face. She barely passes and off they go.
Everything at the castle goes cleanly at first, but then Jane runs into a Zero member, who informs her that Cicada is lying to her. That she was recruited specifically to be the fall guy when all of this hits the press. Unsure of who to believe, Jane must decide who to align herself with, the company who recruited her, or the apparent enemy.
One of the best ways to convey a script read is to take people inside the mind of the reader as they were reading. Which is what I’m going to do here. The first thing I noticed about this script was that the writing was strong. There was a vibrancy and energy to it that was exciting. The description, in particular, was a cut above what I usually see.
So I was excited. However, I then ran into my first issue with the script. The main character was really angry at the world. And angry main characters rarely work. It’s hard to root for them, plain and simple. Whenever you’re unsure of what you can get away with with your main character, just imagine them in real life. Do you like angry people in real life? I don’t. Most people don’t. So that’s probably not going to work as a main character. It can work with a side character since they don’t need our emotional investment. But it’s a major risk when you’re doing it with the hero.
I think Yu sensed this and, therefore, gave Jane a couple of save the cat moments. Her mom dies. And she helps a wronged insurance customer get their money back. This can sometimes work to balance the character out. But only if the implementation is invisible. I saw these moments for what they were – attempts to get us to like the character. Once we see the hand of the writer writing, we know we’re being manipulated.
Regarding the problem I brought up in the intro, Yu made the wise decision to train Jane in more than computer hacking. She’s taught how to kill and fight and drive which allows her to get into more interesting situations in the big set pieces. The issue there was that it wasn’t believable. She’s trained to be an action star in a week.
This is a common problem in these “ordinary hero thrust into extraordinary situation” movies and writers have developed all sorts of tricks to make the leap passable. For example, in the movie Wanted, didn’t James McAvoy’s character have a father who was special and therefore he’d inherited special abilities as well? He just needed someone to open them up?
To this day, the best movie that’s ever done this is The Matrix. It was instantly believable that a nobody who doesn’t know how to fight could fight like a master since when you’re in a computer system, any skill can be uploaded into you. It’s one of the many reasons that movie was a classic (Matrix 4 coming, baby!).
But the biggest problem with this script is that 75 pages into it, I stopped and thought to myself, “I know I’ve read this somewhere before.” I went into my archives, did some research, but eventually realized that, no, I hadn’t read it before. It was that the script’s beats were so familiar, it just FELT like something I’d read before. And that’s where I mentally gave up on the script.
A few of you have indicated I should add a “Is this produceable” section to my reviews since I’m moving into producing. It’s a great question with this script. Because it feels like a movie. But if I’m going to produce something, I’m looking for some element that’s unique enough to make the film stand out amongst the crowd. And I didn’t feel that here. This is very much Mission Impossible meets James Bond. A few years ago, the female lead might’ve helped it stand out. But now everyone’s writing female action leads.
Then again, who knows. John Wick was the most generic action movie plot ever. A retired assassin comes back to kill a bunch of bad Russians. And after the Action Showdown Contest, one of the conclusions we came to was that it’s really hard to make an original action movie. So I suppose the answer to this question is in the eye of the beholder. We’ll have to see what happens.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When writing hacking scenes, avoid a bunch of character + computer screen gobbledy-gook that sounds like hacking. Stuff like, “Did you close down the firewall?” “I’m still trying to find out if he’s using a password sniffer!” In my experience, that stuff never works. Instead, you need to create a situation – preferably something visual – that the reader can understand. Maybe this isn’t the best example, but in The Social Network, instead of Mark Zuckerberg writing some weird techy hacky program in real time, Sorkin had him competing against six other people in a circle of computers in the midst of a drinking contest. That’s always going to work better than literal lines of code.
