Genre: Horror/Fantasy
Premise: After a lonely young woman is murdered, she awakens as one of the “Goners,” a group of outcasts who struggle to deal with their post-life existence.
About: Joss Whedon had such a terrible experience directing the Avengers sequel that he disappeared from the public eye for two years. Whedon finally arrived out of his cave a month ago, announcing he’d be taking on the feature adaptation of Batgirl. Then, just this week, it was announced that Whedon would be taking over directing duties (mainly post) on Justice League due to a tragedy in the Snyder family. Whedon joins this week’s Alien theme, as he happens to be the writer of Alien: Resurrection. Today’s Whedon script was written in 2005, which would place it two years after Buffy the Vampire Slayer finished its run. It never got made, and we’re going to find out today if it should’ve.
Writer: Joss Whedon
Details: 120 pages
Whedon is an interesting writer. I’ve always seen him as a guy who thrives in the television format but struggles in the feature department. Look no further than the project he brought to both mediums, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy was a dud on the big screen but a downright phenomenon on television. That can’t be coincidence.
Regardless of whether you like or hate Whedon’s style, there’s no denying he creates an insane obsession with his fans. And, really, that’s all you’re looking for as a writer. You’re trying to find that fanbase. You’re never going to make everyone happy. But if you write in a unique voice and find stories that you tell well, you’ll find a group of people who love your stuff.
Mia is a 30-something lonely cubicle worker whose only happiness comes from her cat, Bonkers. So when Mia’s co-worker, Joanne, invites Mia out for drinks, her first instinct is to blow her off. But then, when she goes to pick Bonkers up from the vet that night, she’s informed that he died. Devastated, but afraid of being alone all night, she goes out.
That turns out to be a bad move, as a man picks her up from the bar and later murders her. We follow Mia’s body to the morgue, where she eventually wakes up. Just as she starts to understand where she is, two creepy clay men slither out of the air vents. Mia’s able to escape through a floor vent, and soon after finds herself in the sewer.
As the clay men continue to chase her, a badass goth chick named Violet shows up and takes them out. Violet leads Mia back to her hideout, where we meet the rest of her crew, the “Goners.” This includes the upbeat Punch, the resentful Shiva, the homeless-looking Black Pepper, and 10 year old Japanese twins who don’t speak English.
Violet lays out the rules for Mia. She’s dead. And those clay people? The group doesn’t know who they are. Just that when you see them, you run away. Oh, and living people can see you, but they forget you within seconds, fallout from being so forgettable in real life.
What Violet can’t tell Mia is what they’re all doing here. But after they’re attacked by the clay men again, Violet thinks Mia’s murder might have something to do with the increased aggression. So they go back to the scene of the crime – the bar – to look for clues. They eventually realize it was the FedEx guy from work who killed her.
Meanwhile, the clay creatures keep multiplying, which Violet is convinced is because some porthole has been opened or something. Which means Mia and the other Goners will have to do what they were never able to do in real life – team up – and defeat the evil before their team is wiped out for good.
I was surprised by how much I liked this.
I freaking LOVED the first 10 pages, before I knew this was a fantasy movie. I thought Whedon might’ve been tackling real life for once, and the manner in which we meet this lonely girl then see her mercilessly killed was incredibly affecting. Mia was such a nice person. I was legit upset when she died.
Even when she wakes up again, I thought this was going to be a serious horror film in the vein of The Sixth Sense, where we follow this dead girl around as she tries to find her murderer.
But Whedon is in love with the ass-kicking 18-25 female character. You’re unlikely to read a Whedon script where that trope doesn’t get applied somehow. So I was bummed when Violet arrived, cause I figured everything would now go down in typical Whedon punch-kick-quip fashion.
But the mythology ends up being solid. The stuff with them being forgotten in life and needing to join together in death, and each having unique powers and the mystery of these clay people…
Let me put it this way. When writers haven’t figured out their mythology, you can tell. Everything is murky. This is what they’re saying about the new Pirates film where there’s a compass with rules and different types of pirates have rules and some pirates can come onto land and some can’t and nobody really knows why. The point is – we know when you’re adding on mythology to fill in plot holes as opposed to building the mythology first, making sure it’s solid, then building a story on top of that. Which is what Goners does. I mean, this script is Buffy meets The Matrix with a splash of The Frighteners, which, in my opinion, is a cool as hell idea.
And I’ll say this. While I don’t like hearing Whedon’s quip-heavy dialogue on-screen… boy is his dialogue pleasant to read on the page. It’s got this flow to it that I can appreciate after reading five scripts in a row where the dialogue is clunky or robotic or lifeless.
Here’s an early scene, where two cops are trying to figure out how Mia was killed after recovering her body from a lake…
“This is not the kind of girl that picks up a guy in a bar.”
“Until the day she does! One night she says ‘Hey, I’m a pathetic spinster with a nothing job and no friends and I’m gonna get crazy for a change.’ She rolls the dice, comes up snake eyes.”
“Did you just say ‘Spinster?’”
“The woman clearly had no real life at—“
“You’re a very old man.”
“Old enough to pin you down and take a crap on your head, you give me grief, Hirsh, you punk—“
“She’s looking very good. Can’t have been under for more’n a few hours. (beat) I’m saying she knows the guy. He comes in here and pulls her out, or maybe at the bar but… where’s the damn cat?”
“He probably took the cat. He killed her for her cat.”
“This is a fresh kill. He’s not far away. I’m leaving a car here.”
“Yeah, he might come back for the kibbles. Stay alert, officer. The motive was cat.”
Not only does he have fun with the dialogue, but notice the DIFFERENCES in the characters. One’s young. One’s old. One’s serious. One’s joking around. New writers don’t think about differences, so a lot of their characters end up saying similar things. That’s how easy it is to write bad dialogue. You don’t know why you can’t make the characters sound more interesting. Well, had you thought about their differences, their dialogue is naturally going to sound different. I don’t even have to introduce these cops to you and you know who they are. The dialogue tells us that.
The script is structurally perfect, too. The first act is us getting to know Mia so we care about her, the murder (inciting incident), and then her arrival into the afterlife. The first half of the second act is “fun and games,” to use an old Blake Snyder term. We meet the team. There’s some clay men battles. The midpoint is Violet realizing that Mia’s arrival has opened up some hole that’s brought more evil into the world. This leads to a goal – find out who murdered you since they might have something to do with this. Mia does that. This leads to them learning about the bigger threat, which propels us into the third act, where our team must vanquish that threat.
But just as a screenwriting lesson, I recommend anyone who’s having trouble with creating likable characters to read the first 10 pages of this script. It’s screenwriting perfection in how you create a hero who’s loveable and who every reader is going to want to follow no matter where that character goes.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Exploit your character’s unique traits to create unique moments. Every character you write should have something unique about them. Once you’ve established that, look for ways to exploit it. For example, Mia’s post-life power is that she can turn into water. So there’s this moment, later on, where she grabs her murderer and pulls his face into her body, which is now water. So his face is inside of her, and he’s drowning. I’d never seen a moment quite like that before, and it came about because Whedon exploited Mia’s most unique trait. And this doesn’t just have to be superpowers. Walter White (Breaking Bad) was a chemistry teacher. In one episode, he uses his knowledge of chemistry to create an impromptu bomb and escape a drug dealer. Find the unique trait. Exploit it!
