Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A teenage boy, Caleb, and his friends, all of whom live on a moon mining colony, take a road trip to an old cave to fulfill a wish from Caleb’s father.
About: This script just finished NUMBER 1 on The Hit List, which is the screenwriting community’s appetizer for the later-to-come Black List. The Hit List is run by The Tracking Board and consists of the best SPEC screenplays of the year (the Black List, by contrast, tabulates the best of all scripts, including assignments). Because most professional writers are being hired by studios to write their projects, and because the best way to break into the business is still with a good spec, the majority of the writers on The Hit List are writers getting noticed for the first time. To give you a little perspective on the list, Bubbles, which I thought was great, finished number 2. The Water Man, which I reviewed last week and absolutely loved, finished number 4. And Collateral Beauty, written by Allan Loeb, which created some debate on the site, finished number 19. Actually, a script that was featured here on the site, Carver Gray’s Unlawful, finished in front of Collateral, in the number 12 spot. Congrats, Carver!
Writer: John Griffin
Details: 113 pages
So to start off, a lot of you have been asking about the Scriptshadow 250 and when the damn announcements are going to be made. And I feel your impatience! The two hundred and fifty script reads amongst an already busy schedule was always going to be a challenge, but maybe I wasn’t prepared for just how challenging it was going to be.
So the reality is, if I have any hope of finishing this month, I’ll likely need to take a week off from posting to do so. And that week will likely be next week. I’ll be hunkering down like a Jawa during a sandstorm and calling upon my speed-reading Force powers to get things finished. I’ll keep you posted on how that’s going. But there’s a chance this could eat into Scriptshadow posting throughout the month, with Christmas Week coming right after that, and then the weird “nothing week” between Christmas and New Years.
What sucks is that we’re swinging into the heart of “Awards Season” for screenwriting, with The Hit List coming out last week and the Black List soon to follow. At the very least, we’ll get one of those scripts in to review, as “Crater” nabbed the top spot on this list. Let’s see if its lunar pattern matches up with good screenwriting.
It’s sometime in the future where we now have a mining colony on the moon. Caleb O’Connell, 14, is a son of one of the miners. A big reason Caleb’s father and the rest of these miners agreed to this gig was that their children got to go to “Omega,” a utopia planet that, normally, only the richest people get to go to. That timeline gets accelerated if your parent dies in the line of work, and Caleb’s dad just did. Which means in 72 hours, he’ll be on a ship to Omega.
The thing is, Caleb doesn’t want to leave his friends: the rebellious Dylan, the wimpy Borney, the slow-witted Marcus, and his newest friend, Addison. Addison isn’t like these kids though. She actually grew up on earth. Her father was a scientist, which makes her the one “scholar” of the group.
What we come to learn through Caleb’s flashbacks with his father, is that his father made him promise that if he ever died, Caleb would go on a road trip with his buddies to deliver an old piece of memorabilia (a bobblehead), that Caleb’s father once gave him, to a deserted moon cave. So that’s what Caleb does. He steals a moon rover with his four friends and the group heads out to complete the mission.
All of them then talk about the difficulties of being a moon miner’s kid, get their flirt on with the one female in the group, and ultimately learn to let their de facto captain (Caleb) go. The question is, when they run into trouble, will they be able to make it back to the moon colony alive?
I’m not sure I was prepared for this. I saw a number 1 script on the ultra-hip Hit List, I saw the genre “sci-fi,” I saw a title, “Crater,” that elicited a degree of edge. I went into this thing (keep in mind this was before I read the logline) thinking I was about to read something maybe Darren Aronofsky would want to direct.
So I was not expecting what I eventually got, which was “The Maze Runner meets Earth to Echo.” It was kind of like ordering a ribeye at the best steak house in town, only for a grilled cheese sandwich to show up. I like grilled cheese sandwiches… when I’m in the mood for them. In this case, I wanted the steak.
Griffin’s heart is in the right place. He’s trying to create a nostalgic teenage road trip film with heart – I’m guessing “Goonies on the moon?” And I have to give it him, he definitely created something unique.
The structure is pretty solid too. I liked that we had a time crunch here (they’ve got 72 hours). The stakes are high. These are the last moments these guys will ever spend together. There’s obstacles too. The meteor shower looms over their trip. And then, of course, there’s the goal of getting to the cave.
But the script starts sending out red flags almost immediately. One character is described as, “14 going on 15.” Ummm… what other age would he be going on to? And then the flashbacks to Caleb’s father begin. I don’t like flashbacks. But I can live with them if the rest of the script is good. However, we’d go into a flashback with Caleb and his father, only to then jump into Caleb’s father’s flashback of HIS OWN father. So we’d get a flashback within a flashback.
???
Caleb’s motivation is also murky. His father received an astronaut bobblehead from Caleb’s grandfather. So Caleb’s father gives the bobblehead to Caleb, making him promise that, if he dies, he’ll bring the bobblehead to the caves. Which I guess means that Caleb’s goal is to deliver something for a grandfather he’s never met??
Even more egregious, there’s a lot of sitting around and talking in Crater. The characters talk about everything from what earth’s like to religion to their parents’ divorces.
This kind of thing drives me crazy because it feels to the writer like they’re being “deep,” like they’re letting you into their character’s lives and learning more about them. But these scenes never resonate with readers. We don’t care if someone’s dad used to be mean or if someone is scared because when they were nine, their mom made them turn off the bedside light every night.
We care about NOW, specifically the actions our characters take. For the most part, movies are about putting your characters in peril (whether that peril be losing your food supply, like in The Martian, or losing your mind, like in Still Alice) and then seeing how they react to that peril. Actions will always speak louder than words.
Go watch Cast Away, which barely has a lick of dialogue for 90 minutes. Watch how that entire character is built on his actions. Even the similar Stand By Me, reveals so much more through action (running from the train, escaping the junkyard) than through sharing stories about each other.
And even small moments are botched in Crater. There’s a moment when the group has infiltrated an old deserted base. Late in the sequence, Addison walks into a room and sees a tree standing in the middle of it. She’s taken aback, gob-smacked, can’t believe what she’s looking at. But wait a minute. Isn’t Addison the one character who used to live on earth and therefore has seen a billion trees? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to have one of the characters who’s never seen a tree be the one to discover and be gob-smacked by it?
I don’t know. Maybe that early bias put me on the offensive here. But even if I’d gone into this knowing what I was getting into, these issues are pretty huge. The concept’s different. So that’s good. But man, this was tough to get behind. There was so much that felt “off” about Crater. I’ll be honest. I’m kinda surprised this finished number 1.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Everybody in your story needs motivation to do what they’re doing. Mad Max doesn’t join Furiosa cause he’s up for a rollicking adventure. He joins her because teaming up with her is his best option at escape. One of the common mistakes I see in these “group goes on a journey” scripts, is that it doesn’t make sense why half the people are there! At some point the writer, usually through feedback, is alerted to this. They then try to solve the problem by doing what I call, “retrofitting motivation.” This is where they have one of the characters ask the motivation-less character why they’re doing this, and that character gives a vague unsatisfying answer of sorts (here, the answer from Caleb’s friends is, “You go where your friends need you to go.”) The writer now believes they’ve solved the problem but all they’ve done is highlight it. It’s so much better if you do the hard work ahead of time and give each character a personal reason for going on the journey – or, at the very least, something they need to achieve before the journey’s over. The character ends up feeling more like an individual as well as more active. I didn’t get that from any of the supporting characters here, which contributed to my issues with the script.
