Genre: Drama/Mystery/Sci-Fi
Premise: (From Black List) A soldier, forced to relive her worst day in combat, begins to question her sanity when the VR simulation she’s experiencing doesn’t match her memory of the mission gone wrong.
About: This script finished #2 on this past year’s Black List, receiving 20 votes. Co-writers Reiss Clauson-Wolf and Julian Silver seem to know this subject matter well. They are both story editors on the TV show, “SEAL Team.”
Writers: Reiss Clauson-Wolf, Julian Silver
Details: 103 pages
It hasn’t hit me until now how weird the 2019 Black List is. Ever since agents realized that the Black List could be used to advertise their writers’ screenplays, they’ve relentlessly promoted the material they’ve wanted to promote. And that material wasn’t always the best material. It was the material representing the projects the agencies most wanted to make.
We’re seeing the first Black List since 2007 that isn’t influenced by agents. And I’m not going to know for sure how much of a difference that’s made until I read a couple dozen more scripts from the 2019 Black List. But based on these first two scripts, I can tell you they’re unlike anything that made the top two slots in previous Black Lists. The only people promoting scripts now are managers. And managers don’t have the same motivations as talent-focused WME and talent-focused CAA.
If anything, these scripts feel like specs. And the commonality I’ve found with specs over the years is that they’re a little messier. They tend to be written by newer writers who haven’t yet learned how much is required to make a script great. And that makes sense. Because if you’re a seasoned writer, you’re making big money on assignments. You don’t have time to write specs.
With that said, Field of View is a lot better than the number 1 script on the list, Move On.
Mel Harris is a NAVY officer in a team of four men running into a house in Afghanistan during the war. The team charges into the house and starts throwing grenades everywhere. Mel sprints into a room, sees an Afghan fighter, shoots him dead. She then takes position near the window before hearing an explosion in the other room. She runs into the other room to see that one of her team members, Connor, is dead.
Cut to 3 years later.
Mel, who bartends at the local watering hole, is now the physical manifestation of PTSD. Anything can set her off. And something does. A road rage incident leads to her slamming her car into the back of a Beamer then challenging the driver to a fight. He simply calls the cops. The next thing Mel knows, she’s facing 10 years in prison.
Unless she wants to participate in a new military experiment called VICTOR – a virtual reality program that makes you relive your worst moment in battle over and over again until you’re able to move past it. The idea being you’ve finally conquered the event that triggers your PTSD. Mel decides VICTOR sounds better than 10 years in prison, so she heads over to the lab, gets hooked up, and she’s right back in Afghanistan 3 years ago.
Mel sees the events as a third party. The event being displayed is based on all the soldiers reports of what happened. But Mel starts noticing little things wrong here and there. When they breach the house, for example, the wrong soldier is in the front of the line. Or the nearby house is the wrong color. VICTOR’s head scientist explains that there are little quirks in the program and not to worry about them. But something doesn’t feel right about the whole thing.
In between VR sessions, Mel hangs out with her old team, the soldiers who were there that day. Two of them, Ellis and Bryant, seem miffed by her participation. Ellis, in particular, thinks she should stay away from it. Something about Ellis’s insistence makes her want to go back. And each time, she gets further and further into the simulation, getting closer to the event that killed her team member.
When the doctor leading the simulation loses faith in Mel, they consider cancelling the program. But Mel is determined to find the truth of what happened that day. In her final simulation, she watches every little moment carefully, only to learn that she’s been lied to. It wasn’t the enemy who killed Connor. It was one of her own men!
I like virtual reality ideas. There are a lot of unique things you can do with VR in storytelling. And a nice bonus is that nobody’s made the preeminent virtual reality film yet (hint hint – potential script idea for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest?).
What I liked about Field of View is it took a very uncomplicated approach to the concept of virtual reality. This is a mystery. Somebody’s dead and our hero isn’t convinced that the murderer is who she thought it was. The virtual reality is a way to go back and get more pieces of the puzzle so that the viewer can solve the mystery.
But the suspect virtual reality technology and Mel’s faulty memory give the story an “unreliable narrator” quality that adds an extra layer to the mystery. Even if we figure out who the murderer is, is that actually the murderer? Maybe our hero is misremembering. I thought the writers did a really nice job of playing with that possibility.
From a technical aspect, the writers take a chance by writing all the virtual reality scenes in bold. It’s always a risk when you break from traditional formatting because nobody’s going to be mad at you if your formatting is normal. But there will always be someone who’s annoyed when you break from tradition. So it’s a risk. However, because the VR scenes never lasted too long, it didn’t bother me. It would’ve been a different story if half the script was in VR. Nobody wants to read half a script in bold type. It’s always a case by case basis when you’re doing this stuff so really think hard if you’re going to do something different. It may be more trouble than it’s worth.
The script had a couple of nice twists. One of them was that Mel was secretly in love with Connor – the man who was killed. Mel is married in this story and, in the past, I’m not sure writers could’ve gotten away with that. With a male character, sure. But not with a female character. That’s changing though. And I liked that here because it helped make the character more complex.
The second twist is that the murderer isn’t who we think it is. The script does a good job putting all of our focus on: Did the Afghan soldier kill Connor or did Ellis kill him? Ellis was the sketchy one. He was always telling Mel not to mess with the virtual reality program. So we’re trying to figure out if he did it or not. It turns out it was a misdirect, though. It was one of the other soldiers, someone we liked. That gave the ending a nice little bump.
Unfortunately, the script never rises above “good.” It seems like there was another level to find here and we never got to it. There were also things that annoyed me. The opening scene, which is the first time we see the house breach, is purposefully vague. The way it’s written is like reading through fog. They knew we couldn’t know too much about what happened or else there’d be no mystery. But it works against the script because I didn’t even know that Connor died in the opening without going back and reading it a second time. There’s vague and there’s just plain confusing. The opening to this script was straight up confusing.
Still, the script gets points for giving us a common story (soldiers home from war try and move past a war tragedy told through flashbacks) in a slightly different way. The virtual reality gives the movie just enough of a unique flair that it stands out from all these other war scripts.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the more overused character descriptions I encounter is some version of, “DOUG, 38, once a strong man, but now looks weak and defeated.” (there are TWO descriptions in Field of View like this). It’s a VERY common way to describe characters. And whenever something becomes too common in writing, you want to avoid it. Like when Shane Black was writing clever asides in his action paragraphs, you didn’t want to be the guy who was ALSO writing clever asides in his action paragraphs. I get the appeal of this description. It gives a clear vision of the character. Everybody knows what a “broken” person looks like. But if you want to stand out, you have to find other ways to say things.
