Genre: Thriller
Premise: An Air Marshal transporting a fugitive across the Alaskan wilderness via a small plane finds herself trapped when she suspects their pilot is not who he says he is.
About: Jared Rosenberg has a few scripts in development. But he’s still scratching and clawing his way to his first produced credit. This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Jared Rosenberg
Details: a slight 93 pages
The contained thriller is BAAAAAAAA-AAACKKKKK.
How come no one here has come up with a contained thriller that takes place in a small plane? The idea was just waiting for you. Then again, that’s usually the effect good ideas have. They arrive with their own personal thought bubble that dances up above your head and wonders, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
BUT!
If you’ve read my contained thriller reviews before, you know what happens to most of these scripts. They don’t have enough meat on the bone. They don’t have enough plot to keep the reader invested.
Tension is everything in these scripts. And when they begin, you get to build that tension. As they reach the second act, you get to hold that tension. But then you start having to answer questions. Then you start having to introduce complications. Things NEED TO HAPPEN to keep our interest. And those things change the dynamics in ways that defuse the tension.
Which means you need to introduce new tension. And that can be challenging for writers. The new tension is never as strong as the old. Figuring out that the guy next to you in the plane is going to kill you – that’s your starting tension. So when you ultimately have to eliminate him as a problem, where is that new tension going to come from? The good writers figure it out. The bad writers either don’t figure it out or they replace it with lame generic tension.
Let’s find out where Rosenberg’s tension landed.
The FBI has tracked Winston all the way out to the middle of Alaska. Winston has good reason to flee. His boss, Moretti, is being tried for lots of criminal acts and Winston was in charge of his books. Moretti’s hearing is tomorrow morning and the FBI has finally got the man who’s going to testify against him by way of U.S. Marshall Madolyn Harris.
Madolyn is just recently getting back on the U.S. Marshall beat after screwing up big time on her last job. Outside of how damn cold it is up here, this job shouldn’t be difficult. She’s got to take Winston on a little Cessna plane over to Anchorage, where they’ll then fly to Washington overnight so Winston can testify against Moretti the next morning.
The pilot who’s flying them is a big gnarly dude named Daryl Booth. After Madolyn handcuffs Winston to his seat, she goes up in front with Daryl. They get up in the air when it’s still daylight and, theoretically, it should only take them 90 minutes.
But we all know it’s not going to be that easy. Almost immediately, Daryl the pilot is acting suspicious. But it’s actually Winston who first notices something is up. A pilot’s ID starts to dribble out from behind Daryl’s seat and it’s Daryl’s pilot’s license… except it’s not Daryl’s face. Which puts Winston in a really sticky situation. He needs to let Madolyn know that Daryl is bad but there’s no easy way to communicate without Daryl hearing.
That’s okay, though, because Madolyn figures it out on her own, and after an intense front seat fight, she’s able to subdue him with her taser. Madolyn then needs Winston’s help to get Daryl to the back where she can handcuff him. But she can’t undo Winston’s restraints because she doesn’t trust him either. But she somehow gets passed-out Daryl to the back and ties him up.
Then Madolyn has a new problem. She has to learn how to fly a plane! She also needs to learn where the hell they are because Daryl sure as hell wasn’t taking them to Anchorage. Madolyn uses her SAT phone to call her office, which only leads to new problems, since she realizes that the only person who could’ve compromised them works in the Marshall’s office. So can she even trust her boss?
And it only gets worse from there. Since Madolyn is so focused on flying the plane, a newly awake Daryl begins his plan of slipping out of these restraints so he can finish the job he was paid for. You begin to wonder if anybody’s going to be make it out of here alive. As Madolyn puts together a last-ditch plan, we pray to the Flight Simulator gods that she’ll figure it out.
I’m happy to report that Flight Risk applies just the right amount of tension turbulence for the running time of its story.
There are a lot of things that work here.
Let me start with the first major plot development. This occurs when Winston finds out that the pilot isn’t who he says he is. When this happened, I knew the script was going to work. Why? Because the more obvious plot point would be for Madolyn to find out first. And that would’ve stolen a good ten pages worth of tension from the story.
Think about it. By having Winston figure it out first, we now have a dramatically ironic situation. Us and Winston know that Daryl is bad. But Madolyn does not. So we’re sitting here screaming at our screen, “HE’S BAD! HE’S A BAD GUY! LISTEN TO WINSTON! HE’S TRYING TO GET YOUR ATTENTION!” You lose that if you start with Madolyn learning Daryl is bad.
It also hints at a way more interesting dynamic, which is that the good guy, Madolyn, is going to have to work with the bad guy, Winston, to survive. I find that to be a more interesting setup than what I was assuming was going to happen, which was that Daryl was working with Winston.
But let’s get to the problem I talked about in the opening of the review. Madolyn subdues Daryl, locking him up in the back seat. You’ve now LOST YOUR INITIAL TENSION. Daryl is still technically a problem since bad guys are always going to try and get out of their restraints. But it’s not nearly as interesting as it was when a free Daryl was right next to Madolyn and we knew he was a killer.
So Rosenberg attacked this problem by introducing a potential inside-job situation with Madolyn’s boss. Her boss is not only the one who, presumably, set her up. But she’s waiting for them in Anchorage. So just by landing in Anchorage, her and Winston are probably going to be offed. Which begs the question, what do they do? They can’t go to Anchorage. And, also, they can’t go anywhere else because Madolyn doesn’t know how to land a plane.
Rosenberg does a good job engaging us with that storyline. I was genuinely worried while I tried to figure out who set them up and what that meant for the three people in this plane.
The only reason why I’m not giving this a higher score is that there’s not anything new here. The execution is great. But if you’ve read these types of scripts before, where you only have a handful of characters, even when you don’t exactly know who’s good and who’s bad, you know enough that nothing’s going to surprise you. And that’s why this doesn’t get some super score. It didn’t shock me.
But it’s still good. And if you’re a contained thriller lover like me, you’re gonna dig this.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “A cramped, analog six-seater, powered by a single propeller. Three rows of two seats, including the pilot’s. Roughly the size and layout of your standard minivan.” A huge mistake writers make is setting their movie or major scene inside an area that they do not give any geographic clarity on. I’ve read countless scripts that have taken place inside a spaceship or some period-piece building, where the writer does not inform us how big the setting is and how the location is laid out. This results in what I call, “fuzzy approximation,” whereby the reader is forced to assume what everything looks like themselves. When readers do this, it’s always a fuzzy approximation. As a result, the entire story is fuzzy in their head. Screenplays must do the opposite to be effective. They must be clear and specific. So this simple paragraph at the beginning of Flight Risk telling us exactly what we’re looking at is much appreciated.
