One of the more fascinating scripts I’ve read all year!
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A CIA agent must impersonate himself in order to fend off the most daring Russian double-agent plan in espionage history.
About: This was a big 7 figure spec sale that went to Ryan Coogler’s team and Skydance. Writer Aneesh Chaganty is one half of the “Searching” team and a graduate of the Scriptshadow approach to screenwriting (he and his writing partner used to read the site all the time and, to my knowledge, still pop by) so it should be no surprise that I was very into this one.
Writers: Aneesh Chaganty & Dan Frey
Details: 113 pages
Hey, Superman might as well parlay all his buzz into as many sexy projects as possible
Note: This is definitely one of those scripts that you’ll want to read FIRST before reading the review as it has a lot of twists and turns. Someone in the comments may be able to help you find it.
I’ve been reading a ton of scripts lately.
And what I become very sensitive to when I’m reading a lot of scripts is originality.
Is the writer giving you exactly what’s expected? Or are they going above and beyond to outthink you?
Cause that’s part of the job description of being a good writer. You have to outthink the reader.
As one of you just pointed out in the comments yesterday, Jon Watts got lazy writing Spider-Man: No Way Home. He had to come up with a way to bring in the other two Spider-Mans (Toby and Andrew) and he thought it would be a cool idea right after Aunt May’s death to do it right on the top of a building in the middle of New York.
But then he was reading Spider-Man subreddits and saw that someone already came up with that exact assumption of how they would be introduced. The poster even generated an image of it. Jon Watts said, “Well I can’t do that anymore.” And he changed it to what we eventually saw in the movie.
None of us are fortunate enough to be guiding franchises that have subreddits where commenters can keep us honest. But we can keep ourselves honest if we’re honest with ourselves.
There’s a version of today’s concept that 99 out of 100 writers would’ve gone with. Today’s writers would be the 1 out of 100 that pushed the idea a step further. Which is why the script sold. I’ll talk about that in a second. First, let me summarize the plot for you.
Veer Miller is a CIA agent who has a wife and two kids. Although we don’t get to see him a whole lot with his family, we get the sense that he might not be the best husband or father. He also may not be very good at recognizing that.
One day Veer is shocked to be brought into the CIA Director’s office, who tells him that he’s been picked for a very unique mission. The Russians have located a man in Brazil, Pedro Barbosa, who looks identical to him. Their plan is to get Pedro and teach him to be Veer. They will then kill Veer and replace him with doppelgänger Pedro so that they have a mole inside the CIA.
The CIA’s counter-plan is to send Veer to Brazil to secure doppelgänger Pedro, then take his place, pretending to be Pedro. This way, the Russians will recruit him instead, and replace Veer with… Veer. This will mean that Veer will be in constant contact with the Russians, who think he’s Pedro, and the U.S. will be able to manipulate Russia by having Veer tell them false information.
So, Veer is sent to Brazil. Pedro is secured and sent back to America, where he’ll be forced to play Veer while Veer is gone. Veer then meets up with the Russians, who pose the first big snag to Veer’s mission. There are three other doppelgängers!!! That was not part of the intel. The Russians want to make sure that they send the perfect double-agent. So this is a six-month competition to become the most convincing Veer. Whoever wins, goes to America.
Naturally, you would think that Veer has a leg up on everyone. But as the training begins, he constantly fails all of the tests, many of which amount to seeing what he would do in a specific situation. Veer gradually realizes that he has always viewed himself as an idealized version rather than his true self.
In order to win, he must see who he really is and become that person. And who Veer really is, is the person Veer least wants to be.
This is one of the more clever setups to a movie I’ve read in a while. Going back to what I was talking about earlier, I receive spy ideas a lot. But the version of this story that I receive (99 out of 100 times) has the US using our protagonist CIA agent, who they realize looks similar to a Russian KGB agent, to replace that agent in order to accumulate intelligence. In other words, it’s the straight-forward version of a doppelgänger idea.
Chagantry and Frey ask themselves, “What’s the next iteration up from this idea?” And that’s how they come with this really clever version of a spy concept.
I can already hear some of you chirping about the believability of the doppelgänger conceit. But these guys actually do a perfect job of setting that up. They play footage of a real Russian theorist who had this obsession with how many people in the world look exactly like each other, and that’s the basis for how the Russians came up with this idea.
One of the things that all good writers do is they take risks. These writers could’ve written “Salt,” here. “Salt” was a gangbusters spec script from Kurt Wimmer that was just a good old fashioned fun spy thriller. And we could’ve gone that same route with Doppelgänger.
But Changantry and Frey took this giant risk and decided to make this a character piece. This story is more about who Veer is and how we, as human beings, see ourselves, versus how the world sees us.
And there’s some good stuff in here. There’s an actress playing Veer’s wife in the training and he has to have deep conversations with her about their relationship and the specific circumstances help him realize that he’s the world’s worst husband and has been terrible to her.
There’s a lot of that.
I’m not going to lie – I wasn’t 100% onboard with this decision. I understood why they did it. But I assumed, at some point, we were going to go back to the US and see some cool spy shit. We never did, though, and I had some FOMO about that. Or, since we didn’t go, maybe it’s the opposite of FOMO. Cause FOMO is when you’re missing out on something. Or maybe that is the appropriate way to say it—
—ANYWAY!
It doesn’t upset me that much because I SO respect the risk the writers took because it made this script different from any script that’s been written in the past three years. It’s unique. And how often do we get unique scripts? We don’t. If we would’ve gone back to the US and had some US-Russian spy set pieces, then it’s just like John Wick. It’s just like Mission Impossible. We think we want those things until we get to the theater and we watch the film and we say, “That was just like every other action movie I’ve seen.”
Also, if you have a movie idea that allows a director to cast the same actor in multiple roles, SEND IT TO RYAN COOGLER. This is clearly his thing now. And this has even more roles than Sinners. The actor gets to play 4 roles!
This is an imperfect script. It becomes a character-driven story and I’m not convinced they nailed the character-driven parts. But it’s such a fresh premise with a fresh execution – two things you RARELY SEE TOGETHER in scripts these days (I see fresh concepts with standard executions and standard concepts with fresh executions, but I never see fresh concepts with fresh executions) and, for that reason, I have to recommend this script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Double up interesting plot beats and exposition delivery devices. Doppelgänger has an early scene where they need to test Veer so they can make sure that, when he returns, he’s the real Veer. So they ask him all these questions (i.e. what was your happiest memory, what was your saddest memory). This allows us a quick and easy way to deliver exposition (Veer’s backstory) via an entertaining, and necessary, scene. That’s good writing!
