Today’s script is The Fifth Element meets Guardians of the Galaxy meets Stranger Things meets Avatar. Is that a good thing?
Genre: Sci-fi/Fantasy
Premise: A thief-for-hire is sent on an assignment to steal an unknown package from a laboratory, only to have a crisis of conscience when he discovers upon arrival that the package is actually a superhuman little girl.
About: This script finished on the 2016 Hit List with 44 votes (Top 20). The writer, Emily Carmichael, broke out upon creating the animated web series “The Adventures of Ledo and Ix.” She would go on to write Pacific Rim 2. She is also a director and was one of the primary candidates for Captain Marvel. She is making this movie with Colin Trevorrow producing. She’s also working on another project with Trevorrow called “Powerhouse,” that’s set up at Amblin.
Writer: Emily Carmichael
Details: 95 pages
Why is there a part of me that thinks Max Landis wrote this script under a pseudonym? We’ve got a human alien team-up. A 1980s(ish) setting. A series of zany characters who communicate via insult-driven dialogue. We’ve got space prisons. Hmmmm… maybe Max Landis wrote an AI program that created Emily Carmichael so that he didn’t have to write his 15 scripts a year all by himself?
Nobody knows everything. I only know 98.7% of everything. So even my advice should be taken with a grain of salt. Today’s script is proof of that. I tell as many screenwriters as possible NOT to write a sci-fi fantasy script that isn’t based on IP. It’s not only expensive. But even the most well-described fantasy worlds are hard to visualize in screenplay form. Which means you’re often going to be writing to an audience who barely understands what you’re saying.
With that said, sci-fi fantasy is the most imagination-driven genre of them all. So if you can write a good script here? You’re a different level of screenwriting awesome.
“Eon” introduces us to a world that isn’t anything like our own. It’s the 1980s and cyborgs are sprinting onto earth via space-time portals. This means that Brooklyn, where our story begins, is a strange hybrid of old, futuristic, and alien. Oh yeah, that’s because aliens exist in this world as well.
And space prisons.
Actually, one of these aliens, Stryka, a 6 foot tall blue-skinned lizard like thing, is our co-hero. Stryka is teamed up with Callen, a decidedly un-alien white guy. Actually, he’s Scottish so he’s a little bit alien. The two of them are thieves willing to steal or transport anything for a buck. Except nobody told them that their latest job entailed stealing a 10 year old girl from a research facility.
When the pair deliver the cargo to their employer, they get the sense that whatever he plans to do with her, it’s not good. So they grab the girl – who they’ve named “Eon” – and run away. Soon they learn that it’s not just the bad guy employer who’s the problem. It’s the freaking government(!), who’s sent an entire team after them.
Callen and Stryka have always been about the money, so this is new territory for them. Especially for Callen, who gets a kick out of teaching Eon how to speak. Unfortunately, they soon learn that Eon’s got some special blood. And when it’s coupled with a big jolt of electricity, Eon becomes a bomb that will blow up the entire planet. That means Callen will need to make a horrifying choice – kill Eon and save the planet, or let her go and risk the end of mankind.
Except for anyone living on the space prison.
If there’s one area you don’t want to mess with when it comes to writing sci-fi, fantasy, or a combination of the two, it’s clarity of mythology. The worst thing you can do when creating a unique world is to be sloppy about it. There needs to be an internal logic to said world and that logic needs to be clear as day to the reader. Otherwise, everything feels murky.
And that was my big issue with Eon. The rules of this world are too murky, starting with the rewriting of history. In this world, cyborgs showed up in the 80s and space travel accelerated in the 90s and now we live on a planet with aliens and robots?
It’s not impossible to make this work. But you’re already asking so much of an audience to believe in a completely fabricated world. Why would you, on top of that, also ask them to accept rewritten history? I mean, why not set this in 2070 and not have to rewrite a single year?
Unfortunately, when you’re writing inside a murky universe, nothing feels tangible to the reader. It’s all a bunch of unformed images. Which is why if you’re going to create a new universe, you need to spend some time at the outset explaining what that world looks like and how it works. Lots of sci-fi fantasy writers will shy away from this because they hear how exposition is the devil. However, you don’t solve that problem by ignoring it. You need to get creative.
That’s what The Matrix did. It gave us a TON of exposition. But it did so creatively, with Morpheus taking Neo through a series of lessons designed to both inform and entertain.
With that said, Eon does move along at a brisk pace, due to the chasey nature of the narrative. Our criminals have to run Eon around the city while avoiding baddies. And I liked the inherent conflict within our characters as to whether to do the right thing or the profitable thing. I talk a lot here about making sure your primary characters have conflict between them. But it’s even better if those characters contain conflict within themselves. If Callen is struggling to figure out whether to get paid or help this girl, that adds an extra layer to the story.
And that’s the very definition of depth. A layer is something you lay on top of something else. So the more layers there are, the more depth there will be.
Which is why it sucks that there’s nothing else to celebrate here. “Eon” is trapped in a so-so story. The mythology is too murky. The MacGuffin is too cliche (yet another 10 year old lab girl with special powers). And even though the characters are moving around a lot, it’s all very circular. I didn’t feel like we were getting anywhere. The writer even acknowledges that the final twist is weak, delivering it via the caveat of, “Of course so-and-so is who you thought they were the entire time.” If it’s that obvious, maybe we need a different twist.
I wish I could say I recommend this because we don’t get enough writers taking chances like Carmichael does with Eon. Any sci-fi that costs more than 10 million dollars these days is ignored by studios unless it’s giant IP. So when scripts like this are good, it opens up the possibility for other sci-fi writers. But, sadly, this didn’t have enough of any one thing to make it stand out. :(
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Running Away (Eon) vs. Running Towards (Raiders) concepts. The only thing Running Away stories promise is escape. Whereas Running Towards stories promise gold at the end of the rainbow, a reward for all your hard work. If you have a choice between writing one or the other, choose a Running Towards concept.
