Genre: Supernatural/Thriller/Horror
Premise: When a retired war journalist returns to the outpost where her son was stationed to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, she uncovers unspeakable horrors.
About: This finished in the middle of last year’s Black List. Peter Haig is a writer-director who, up until this point, has focused mainly on short films.
Writer: Peter Haig
Details: 111 pages
Bullock for Weaver?
No, you are not experiencing deja vu.
I did review an almost identical script a couple of years ago, which was also on the Black List, called, “War Face.” The logline for that was: “A female U.S. Army Special Agent is sent to a remote, all-male outpost in Afghanistan to investigate accusations of war crimes. But when a series of mysterious events jeopardize her mission and the unit’s sanity, she must find the courage to survive something far more sinister.”
So what’s going on here?
That’s a good question. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot because the Black List is notorious for recycling identical script ideas. Sometimes these cloned concepts show up in the very same year.
My two leading theories are, one, none of us are as original as we think we are. We’re all pulling ideas from the same pot. And two, certain managers love certain subject matters and they’re pitching these ideas to their writers to write.
Which sort of makes sense. I love plane crash stories. So if I was a manager, I’d repeatedly encourage my writers to give me a plane crash script to pitch. And if you’re one of those writers, you’d seriously consider it because you’d know I’d push that script hard.
Whatever the phenomenon, it is weird how frequently it happens. The more conspiratorial side of me thinks there’s something deeper going on here. But every hypothesis I come up with sounds wackier than that infamous Shane Dawson conspiracy theory about how Chuck E. Cheese recycles their uneaten pizza.
A conspiratorial mindset is a good mindset to have going into this script because the story is all about weirdness and trying to figure out what’s going on.
Meet Mona Weaver, a 50-something war photographer heading out on her latest mission, joining up with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan to document an outpost for a couple of months.
Except that’s not what Weaver is really doing. Weaver’s son died out here in Afghanistan under mysterious circumstances and this is the outpost he died at. So Weaver’s being sneaky, pretending she’s documenting the army. But really she’s trying to figure out what happened to her son.
The team she’s with is made up of 18 year old Private Chang, who’s big and dumb, so everyone calls him Lennie (Of Mice and Men). We’ve got the hick of the group from Appalachia, Gibbs. We’ve got the doctor, Clemente. We’ve got the commander, Lieutenant Clay. All these dudes are half Weaver’s age. Which means she’s got to get them to trust her on two fronts (professionally and demographically).
They head out to a remote outpost and things immediately go bad. As they’re digging trenches, they collapse into a tunnel where a whole bunch of human bones are found. Nobody here likes this and thinks it’s a bad omen, which it definitely is.
In the first week, they’re attacked by crazed monkeys. But these monkeys don’t seem normal. They have a human quality to them. Then, one night, Chang is surveying the surroundings through his infrared goggles and spots a soldier coming towards him. But the soldier is dressed in 1900s military gear. And when he takes the infrared goggles off, he’s gone.
This starts to wear on the unit’s sanity but Weaver stays diligent. She’s determined to find out what happened to her son. His last known location was next to a strange-looking tree, which he sent his mom a picture of standing by. So that’s what Weaver is looking for. But when the commander learns what she’s up to, he does everything in his power to prevent Weaver from finding out what happened.
One thing I noticed right away here was the strong writing.
Too many times with these Black List scripts, they feel more like people trying to be writers than actually being writers. Note how visual Haig is when describing the story’s first base…
Concrete barriers, gates, watchtowers, bunkers, all in a ring of barbed wire. The substantial base sticks out like a Western sore thumb in the desert terrain of Wardak Province.
I love how we get these concrete visuals to latch onto. The barriers, the gates, the watchtowers, the bunkers, the barbed wire. Then he paints the bigger picture of what this base looks like compared to its surroundings. And he tops it off with some specificity. He doesn’t just give us a generic label. It’s “Wardak Province,” making it all feel specific and real.
Contrast this with his description of their outpost a dozen pages later:
The Outpost is so primitive it nearly defies comprehension — this can’t possibly be a base belonging to one of the most powerful armies in human history.
It looks more like third-world shantytown. A ramshackle village of tin sheds and plywood huts, all encased in sandbags and surrounded by angry, rusty, razor wire.
Again, we get the same attention to detail. I love that word “shantytown.” It puts a strong image in my head. That’s important when you’re writing about places the average person has never been. You need to find words that create powerful images. But I like how he didn’t stop there. We get the combo description of “angry, rusty, razor wire.” The average writer would’ve stopped at, “rusty wire” or “twisting wire.” The “angry” descriptor takes it up a notch. There’s something more visceral about it.
Through those first 30 pages, I felt like I was in good hands.
But the writing runs into some issues in its second act.
It’s important to note the distinction between good writing and good storytelling. Good writing is mainly in the description of things. The writer has a talent for describing characters, locations, and actions, in a way where we can effortlessly visualize them.
Storytelling is about the creative choices you make in a story. In Everything Everywhere All At Once, storytelling is the choice to create all these dimensions and figure out how those work and figure out how our characters access them. And then you come up with the goals for the characters and the obstacles they must overcome and how those goals create intersections between characters. If they both want the same thing, where do they clash and what results come of that clash?
Storytelling is the truly creative side of writing.
I struggled with the storytelling here. The script relied too heavily on “crazy stuff happens” moments. Monkey attacks, 1900s era soldiers, goats voluntarily committing suicide, characters going insane. I’m all for something crazy happening in a script. It can be fun. I just felt there was an over-reliance on it.
That focus on finding the next scare or shock prevented the writer from identifying a lack of fully fleshed out scene-writing. Scenes that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Scenes that have a clear goal, someone standing in front of that goal, the conflict that resulted from that obstacle, and then a conclusion. Instead, we had an endless stream of scene fragments. It felt like every scene was 1 page long. I needed moments that breathed.
With that said, the script got the main part right, which was we cared about Weaver finding out what happened to her son. The opening nightmare she has, where she dreams of her son when he was still a little boy, showed us her grief in a devastating way.
But the back end of this script is so sloppy that I always felt like I was combing through it to find the meat. Like I had to use all my mental strength to dig through the muck to get to the heart of the story. It was too much, “Hey, what was that weird thing out there” and not enough carefully thought out moments that built up to a crescendo. And that, ultimately, stole a ‘worth the read’ from this script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: At a certain point, you just gotta tell us what’s going on. I read too many scripts where the writer talks around a character goal. They’ll ALLUDE to what the character is doing without ever explicitly telling us. That gets old fast when you’re the reader. Cause we just want to know what’s going on! Early on in Fog of War, we see Weaver obsessively looking at pictures of trees on her computer without any context. It creates a sense of mystery. Why is she doing this? But we only have to wait until page 20 to get our answer.
A POLAROID PHOTO of GAVIN DAVIDSON — full combat attire — standing by an peculiar looking KNOTTED HOLLY TREE.
Stubble on his face, in this POLAROID Gavin’s exhausted, wearing a vacant thousand yard stare — far from the lively persona captured in the bunk photo.
Written on the POLAROID’s film frame reads — The tree with the mark, we made in the bark, houses our treasure below.
Finally, this makes it clear that… Weaver is trying to find the knotted tree from the Polaroid.
You see that last part there? The writer straight up tells us what our hero is trying to do. I know we’re all terrified as screenwriters of being on the nose. But when it comes to the most important parts of your plot, don’t dick the reader around. Explicitly tell us what’s going on.
