Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: Waking up in a mysterious room, Emily faces a chilling ultimatum: she must decide which of three strangers to sacrifice before her ceiling descends, crushing her.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. The author, Michael Jones, is an Australian screenwriter.
Writer: Michael Jones
Details: 84 pages
I love these old school high concept spec scripts.
There’s something beautiful about big simple ideas.
This one actually feels kind of fresh in the same way that The Platform felt fresh.
So I was eager to see what “Crush” had in store for us. Let’s check it out.
35 year old Emily wakes up in a white room with concrete walls and a concrete ceiling. She tries to talk but for some reason she’s unable to. No sound comes out. Then three of the walls around her turn clear and she sees three other rooms.
In those rooms are 80 year old Vincent, 40-something mouthy Lucy, and 30 year old Earl. Those three *can* talk for some reason. So, naturally, they’re frustrated when they try to communicate with Emily and she can’t talk back.
All of a sudden, Emily’s ceiling dips from 14 feet high to 12 feet high. As she tries to figure out what that means, Earl points out that there are three Roman numerals on her floor – I, II, and III. Maybe standing on one of them does something.
The ceiling dips another two feet and Emily takes Earl’s advice and steps on one of the numbers. When she does, her ceiling ascends back up to the top, and Earl’s ceiling starts coming down. Except there’s no way to stop it. All three people watch as his ceiling lowers and mercilessly crushes him to death.
At the back of Emily’s room are 8 red lights. After Earl’s death, one of them turns yellow. Earl’s room is blocked from view and when it becomes clear again, Earl has been replaced by some dude named Matt. Lucy, quick to figure out what’s going on, pleads with Emily that she has a son. She can’t die. But, just like before, Emily’s ceiling starts dropping.
Vincent, realizing that his age is no asset in this game, volunteers himself to die. There’s no argument from everyone else and Emily crushes him. He’s then replaced by Sarah. But the focus shifts to Lucy and Matt, who begin squabbling about who deserves to live and die. Matt then catches Lucy in a lie (she changed her “son’s” name), which means she’s the next to go. Again, each time someone dies, one of the eight red lights turns yellow.
But a few people later, things get real. Next up in the fray is Emily’s mom, Ruby! Definitely can’t kill her so sorry Matt! But then Matt is replaced with David, Emily’s husband! And then in comes Emily’s son, Benny! After Emily is forced to start killing off her own family, those bodies are replaced with… random babies! What, ever, is Emily going to do!!?? Might she actually do the unthinkable and let HERSELF be crushed???
Three keys to any good sci-fi script are rules, mythology, and imagination. Imagination is probably the most important because people come to sci-fi movies to see things that they’ve never seen before. It’s why 2 billion dollars worth of people paid to see Avatar – giant blue aliens, floating waterfalls, and mechanized war outfits. So if you don’t have the imagination, nothing else will matter.
To Jones’ credit, I think that this script was fairly imaginative. The setup, in particular, was unique.
But don’t sleep on sci-fi rules. Rules are never sexy, like imagination, but if they become too elaborate, too confusing, they can easily sink a sci-fi script. And I see this happen ALL THE TIME. The writer gets so lost in their world that they have 2000 different rule-sets for what’s going on how the world operates. Does anybody understand the rules governing 2006’s Southland Tales? I sure don’t.
In contrast, the rules here were very simple. And the writer did a great job of setting them up. Her ceiling descends to kill her unless she kills someone else. The three numbers on the ground stood for the three other rooms. She steps on the room number of the person she wants to kill. And she has to do this eight times (shown by the 8 red lights at the back of her room) to complete the task.
The Platform had even simpler rules. People on each level get food. They can choose how much to leave for the people below them. Every few weeks, people randomly get shifted to new levels.
A simple rule set is usually where you want to be with sci-fi. Trust me. The more complex you make it, the messier the story is going to get.
Finally, we have mythology. Why is all this happening? What’s the backstory here? This is where a lot of these higher concept scripts fall apart because there seems to be a correlation between big sexy ideas and an inability to explain them.
(Spoilers) This is Crush’s Achilles’ heel. About midway through the script, Emily tricks the powers that be to take her out of the room. She then makes a run for it, trying to escape. We’re in this big cavernous series of rooms and everyone she runs into is wearing masks. When she rips someone’s mask off, their face is deformed and they don’t have a nose. When she finally gets to a doorway out, she opens it and looks out into… space. So they’re all in space.
(Spoilers) Later, when Emily “wins” the game, she’s granted a meeting with the “master” guy, who seems to be an alien. He says they play this game repeatedly with humans to test their moral compass or something.
I mean… point blank, let’s be real. None of this shit makes sense. Space? Really? Masked deformed people running the ship? Huh? Some alien dude who likes to keep playing an ongoing game about choosing who lives and who dies. Despite having done thousands of games already. What else are you going to learn doing this one more time, exactly?
Mythology – the worldbuilding, backstory, and reasoning for why things are happening – needs to make sense. At the most basic level, it needs to be rational. If you can’t even make what’s happening rational, then it’s impossible to build a compelling story on top of that. The foundation is too shaky.
The thing with sci-fi is that you have those three unique traits and yet, even on top of those, you still need to get the drama right. Cause the human dramatic element is the thing we’re going to emotionally connect with. It’s the thing that makes a movie stick with us. And the writer didn’t get that right.
When it’s Emily, her mom, her husband, and her kid, that are left, the answer is easy. You have to kill the mom. The mom even agrees with that, which is another problem with this. Every family member who Emily has to kill tells Emily that they have to be killed. So there’s no conflict involved in killing them. Wouldn’t the scene between her and her husband be so much better if he was screaming at her NOT to kill him?
And then, after you get rid of the mom and the husband, you replace them with random babies. Look, I don’t want to kill babies either. But if you have to choose between killing a random baby and killing your blood and flesh son, 100% of the people in that situation are choosing to save their son. So how is it a dilemma?
This is something that frustrates me so much when I read screenplays – the writer creates a “dilemma” that isn’t difficult at all. The idea is to create a dilemma so even that the audience has no idea what the protagonist is going to choose. It’s Sophie’s Choice. That was the original 50/50 dilemma. These dilemmas ranged from 80/20 to 100/0. There was never a dilemma where I didn’t know what she should choose.
So, this one started off strong. But it fell under the weight of a weak mythology and weaker dramatic pieces. I can’t recommend it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t have your character do something stupid early on or we’re going to dislike them. Emily has her phone in this room. And when she can’t access something on it, she hurls it across the room in frustration (it ends up sliding underneath the doorway). If you’re stuck in a room with ceilings that come down and crush you, you do not hurl your one lifeline across the room! That’s the single dumbest thing you can do. And readers don’t like dumb characters.
