Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: (from Hit List) In the face of a massive extinction event on Earth, a team of scientists are chosen to restore the human species once the planet is hospitable again. However, when they wake up millions of years later, Earth is nothing like they expected.
About: Today’s script landed on the 2016 Hit List with 31 votes. The mythology-heavy sci-fi spec comes from the mind of Andrew Baldwin, who wrote the stylish Netflix drama, “The Outsider,” starring Jared Leto. Genesis was scooped up by mega-producer Simon Kinberg at 20th Century Fox. Baldwin is also the latest writer to take a stab at the Logan’s Run remake, a project they’ve been trying to revive for several centuries now. I would not be surprised if they’ve spent upwards of 30 million dollars on developing that script (serious).
Writer: Andrew Baldwin (story by Baldwin and Kyle Franke)
Details: 128 pages
If you think the Black List is hit or miss, you haven’t checked out The Hit List. I was in the mood for an action script today so I tried to read something called, “Bravado,” which, as it so happens, finished ahead of today’s script. It was about policemen and former soldiers (or something) tracking a series of heists. I have never read something that was trying so hard to make you love the writing and that was as ON THE NOSE as this script. I was convinced it was a parody of an action film. So much so that I double-checked the genre. It’s listed as an action-drama.
Anyway, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Ditching that script meant running into this one. And while Genesis has its faults, the mythology behind it is intriguing. Friday I reviewed a mythology-heavy script (Most Dangerous) and one of the critiques was that we’d seen that world before. We haven’t seen the world of Genesis. Which is its big selling point.
We meet Aaron Bishop in a near future where earth is dying – as in, humanity will be extinct within a year. So science has come up with a Hail Mary. Drop a bunch of people (sleeping in high-tech cryo-beds) into the ocean and have them wait while the earth reboots. It should take somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 years. They’ll wake up and start repopulating.
But when Aaron awakens, he senses something is off. He’s in a swamp. And the other 99 cryo-beds are nowhere to be found. After stumbling around, he eventually finds Reeves, a female biologist with a grim outlook on life. And with the help of their robotic AI sidekick, Michael, they find a third member, Noorani.
Noorani, it turns out, isn’t part of their mission. He was sent down in a secondary mission six months after their mission. And there’s a very specific reason for why. Mankind was able to create something called “Genesis” that would, basically, speed up the process of bringing earth back “online.” But Noorani doesn’t know where Genesis is. Nobody does.
Aaron is determined to find this magical device and leads an expedition into the nearby mountains to find it. It’s around this time when our group learns that they’ve been asleep for a little more than 100,000 years. Try 100 million years. Yeah. And in that time, an entirely new set of plants and animals have evolved. Imagine the gnarliest dinosaur mixed with a rhinoceros. That would be one of the nicer species.
Up in the mountains, Aaron and crew come across two warring human tribes, both descendants of the dual cryo missions. One of them, led by a dictator, wants to find Genesis, which we now learn has a glitch that will destroy the earth’s ecosystem. The other tribe is doing everything in their power to stop him. The arrival of Aaron clues the bad guys in on where Genesis is. So the race is on between the tribes to get there first.
I really liked the first half of this script. I’m a sucker for “wake up and where the hell are we?” setups. So I was drawn in immediately. I wanted to know where we were. I wanted to know what year it was. I wanted to know what happened to all the other team members. The first 40 pages are driven by this mystery and I was riveted the whole time.
The script starts running into trouble, however, when they find the other tribes. On the one hand, I understand why Baldwin did this. When you’re writing these movies, every section has a lifespan. “Where are we?” and “What year is it?” aren’t questions that the reader is willing to wait 120 pages for to have answered. So Baldwin gave us a mid-point twist that offered new plotlines.
The problem with these new plotlines is that they moved us away from the simplicity that drew us in in the first place. Cue the record scratch because I’m about to repeat myself. The best stories – especially sci-fi – are simple. Or, at least, if they’re complex, the writers do a good job of making the plot easy to understand.
Star Wars is complex. It’s got a masked dude running around on a giant ship, a princess sending secret messages, a boy on a wind farm, a planet-destroying weapon, we’re parsecking all over the galaxy. But they did an amazing job of keeping everything simple and easy to understand by framing it inside of a giant chase.
Genesis does the opposite. We’re after this “Genesis” thingamajiggy, which was sent back with humanity because it’s going to regrow our planet. But then once we’re in the future, we learn that because it’s been 100 million years instead of 100 thousand, Genesis will actually destroy the ecosystem instead of rebuild it(??) and then humans will die, not now, but in a generation or three? So now we have to stop Genesis instead of activate it?
Whenever you have to write out a giant explanation in science-fiction for why something needs to do something to achieve something, there’s a good chance you’ve made it too complicated. The long-winded explanation of how Genesis was originally good but is now bad was the moment I officially stopped suspending my disbelief. It was obvious that the writer was trying to write himself out of a corner.
Look at two of the most successful movies in this genre: Mad Max and Mad Max: Fury Road. Look at how incredibly simple both plots were. In one plot, the bad guys were trying to get oil from the good guys. And in the other, the bad guys were chasing the good guys. Screenwriters keep trying to write these Lord of the Rings like mythologies only to get lost in the weeds. I would’ve preferred if Baldwin kept things simple. Or at least SIMPLER.
With that said, I like this world. I don’t know many movies that take place 100 million years in the future. I like the idea of rebuilding earth. I like the idea of creating a whole new flock of predators that rule the planet. And if we reconstructed the narrative into something simpler, I think there’s a movie here. The first change I’d make is limiting the tribes to 1 instead of 2. But I’m not sure you even need that. Watching a group of people traverse a dangerous world in search of the thing that reboots the planet may be enough assuming all the characters are compelling. I hope they figure it out cause it’s either this or X-Men 9.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Characters should never be used as pawns to escape from the corner you’ve written yourself into. It’s always better to fix the plot point at the source. In the case of Genesis – how it being 100 million years instead of 100 thousand reverses the entire design of the program – you need to fix that plot problem at the core. You’re not going to be able to explain something that preposterous without alerting the reader that you’re digging yourself out of a hole.
What I learned 2: Make sure your stakes have immediate consequences. Saying that Genesis will kill all of them…. within 100 years of being turned on, is not threatening. It means everybody here is going to be able to live their entire lives regardless of what happens. With movies, the stakes have to be immediate and permanent. If you don’t stop Genesis, we all die. That’s it.
