Genre: Action
Premise: A mercenary takes on the job of tracking down a target on a plane but must protect her when they’re surrounded by people trying to kill both of them.
About: Writer Brooks McLaren wrote the 2018 Netflix movie, How it Ends. Co-Writer DJ Controna is an actor who was most recently in Shazam as one of the grown up super-kids. The script was picked up by Thunder Road. It doesn’t have a director or any actors attached yet. It finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writers: Brooks McLaren & DJ Controna
Details: 107 pages
A couple of promising things going on with today’s script. First, the script is co-written by Brooks McLaren, who wrote one of my favorite early scripts on Scriptshadow, How it Ends. It was a super fast read with a determined hero shooting across a United States which was quickly becoming overwhelmed by a mysterious apocalyptic event. The movie would go on to be subpar, unfortunately. But I loved that script.
Also, I love plane movies! You guys know this. And this one’s got Thunder Road attached to it, the production company I want making Kinetic! (You hear that Scriptshadow readers working at Thunder Road? Let’s make it happen). I don’t see how I’m not going to like this. But the Black List has been on an extended Scriptshadow losing streak so who knows what’s going to happen. Let’s find out together.
CIA agent Aaron Hunter gets a call from headquarters to get the hell to work! They’ve got a problem. That problem is “Ghost,” an infamous assassin who’s been off-grid for a year, but who has just taken out an entire team of CIA agents in Malaysia! Since Ghost is so hard to find, this is one of the few times they’re close enough to track him. And they track him to Singapore where he’s getting on a plane.
Lucas Reyes, a contract killer in the area, is called by the CIA and told to get to Singapore Airport immediately. They believe Ghost (who nobody’s ever actually seen) will be on a plane to San Francisco soon and they want him on that plane STAT! He has to kill this guy! Lucas isn’t in the mood but he’s so low on cash, he doesn’t have a choice.
Once the double-decker A380 is in the air, Lucas gets a text that they made a mistake. Ghost duped them and got on a flight to London instead. So you can relax, they say. Uh-huh. Riiiiight. We know something is up because this is a movie! Immediately, Lucas’s seat-mate tries to poison him. So he kills that guy and stuffs him in the first class bathroom.
Then Lucas starts looking around for Ghost. When he gets attacked by another passenger, he suspects this job is more complicated than what he was told. Lucas finally tabs the charming stewardess, Isha, as Ghost, and just as he does, they’re BOTH ATTACKED. After a little recon, Lucas finds that these assassins on the plane have both his AND Ghost’s pictures on them. They’re trying to kill them both!
Still with no idea what’s going on, Lucas and Isha make a temporary alliance to fight off all these assassins together. What they ultimately learn is the CIA may have tricked all these assassins to be on this plane at once so they can all kill each other off. Will Lucas survive that plan? Will he spare Ghost if he does? You’ll have to jump on this flight to find out. And make sure to wear a mask!
Friends, lovers, fellow script readers. Quick SPSA here (Screenwriting Public Service Announcement)
If it all possible, don’t put a peanut allergy character in your screenplay. I encounter a dozen of them a year in the scripts I read. It’s far too frequent a choice.
And you don’t want to get in the habit of including gimmicks in your screenplays anyway. Gimmicks are things you know will work but have a very low ceiling of effectiveness. These include peanut allergies, asthma inhalers, the lovable little deaf girl, insulin injections, stuttering. Strive for better. Strive for originality.
Fight or Flight is basically Bullet Train in the air.
I love comparing scripts like this because you get a direct comparison of how different choices affect a screenplay. Both of these scripts are about assassins on a moving public vehicle. But Bullet Train took a more artistic approach, backing up a few hours at a time to introduce characters before they got on the train. It felt like there was a clear plan in place. And that structure worked well.
Fight of Flight engages in a messier approach where chaos reigns supreme, both in how the villains operate and how the plot unfolds. We’re sort of stumbling from one section of the plane to the next where battles ensue. For example, when Lucas gets into the first class section, he’s attacked by a team of Chinese Triads. After that, he must take on a service dog who’s had half his skull replaced with metal, which means he has steel teeth.
There’s also this sort of wild mystery of who Ghost is, and then, once we find out who Ghost is, why all these people are trying to kill Ghost AND Lucas. This question keeps pinging back and forth between our plane and CIA headquarters as we learn bits and pieces about who’s really in charge and who’s screwing who over.
The script moves fast and has an undeniable energy to it. But it’s that messiness that kept getting in the way. I was constantly stopping to ask, “Wait, what’s going on right now?” I still don’t entirely know why they’re targeting Lucas and I’m not sure you can have that. It leaves too much up to interpretation. I wanted clearer answers sooner so I could engage with what was happening.
All of this is a reminder that while I love plane concepts in theory, they’re incredibly difficult to pull off. I would even say they’re harder than simplistic contained locations such as basements. Cause you have to explain what’s going on in the cockpit and why they don’t get involved. You have to account for the 200+ clueless passengers. If people start killing each other, surely the passengers would find out. And they would freak out. And now you’re dealing with rogue passengers running around.
Just to give you an example of this in practice, once Lucas and Isha couldn’t keep their killing a secret anymore, they had to go up and tell the pilots what was going on. Of course, by doing this, you run into the issue of how this event would be treated in real life. The pilots would call for a military escort and be forced to land at the nearest airport. But you can’t have that happen or you don’t have a movie. So, instead, we get a conversation with the pilots where they think this might be good for their careers. They could get a book deal, “like Sully.”
Once you make a decision like that, it has seismic repercussions. Since the pilots wouldn’t really make that choice, you have to slide your script from “action” over into some version of “action comedy.” With the tone now shifted, not everything feels as scary as before because we’re all just having a good time with a goofy plane comedy-action flick.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Arnold Schwarzennegar and Sylvester Stallone made an entire decade of those movies, some of which I still love to this day. All I’m saying is that you don’t want your script to control you. You want to control the script. If the script is taking you in a direction you don’t want to go in because you have to explain away some difficult things, take a step back and figure out how to keep the tone the way you envisioned it. This used to happen to me all the time. The script would keep pulling me away from my original vision. And even though it felt wrong, I’d let it.
Even as I type this review, I’m still not clear what the tone is. Sometimes it seems goofy and sometimes it feels serious. Comparatively, I understood the tone of Bullet Train within five pages.
If Bullet Train does well, expect this to be rushed into production. It’s one of the operating procedures in Hollywood – luck. You must depend on things outside of your control to get your project through the system.
This was a tad too messy. Feels 4-5 drafts away from its best life.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s not uncommon to finish a first draft with an unclear tone. The script feels serious sometimes, goofy others, an action movie sometimes, a drama others. One of your jobs in rewriting is too establish which of those tones you’re going for and taking the stuff out that doesn’t fit. This can be very hard for writers who fall in love with their stuff. For example, a writer who LOVES a joke he wrote may refuse to get rid of it, even if he’s going for a full-on dark drama. He’s like an addict when you bring it to his attention, coming up with a million reasons why the joke “still works.” Don’t be that guy. Understand what tone you’re going for and get rid of anything that doesn’t support it.
What I learned 2: Just to be clear, when I said to avoid writing gimmicks (peanut allergies, asthma inhalers, the lovable little deaf girl, insulin injections, stuttering), I’m not saying they NEVER WORK. They can work under two conditions. One, it’s organically infused into the concept/story. If you have a movie about a family that struggles with diabetes, an insulin injection character is a natural extension of that. Two, if you can find some spin on the gimmick that people haven’t used before, by all means include it. If you’re bringing us a stutter in some new fresh way we’ve never experienced and it works for your story? Hell yeah put it in there.
