Another 7-figure sale. Add to this one of the most bizarre first pages I’ve ever encountered in a screenplay and you have yourself a wild script review Tuesday!
Genre: Heist
Premise: Told out of order in five-minute snippets, a former soldier teams up to rob a bank he used to work at, but must overcome his ex-girlfriend still being a teller there.
About: Simon Kinberg penned this script, which sold to Netflix for over a million dollars (exact amount is unknown). Directors quickly charged in, auditioning for the gig, but, wouldn’t you know it, the job went to Netflix’s good friend, Jason Bateman, who everybody knows from Ozark.
Writer: Simon Kinberg
Details: May 20, 2020 draft (126 pages)
Well, this script sure starts oddly. We get pre-script instruction: “This movie is a series of scenes that should all be 5 minutes and 15 seconds long. They are not in order in the script. And they should not be in order in the film. It’s conceived that way because that’s the way we experience and remember life — the flow between now and then and fears and hopes. The film will have a visual grammar to articulate this.”
Hmmm…
So you shoot a bunch of things and then randomly put them in whatever order the editor feels like that day? This should be interesting.
Noah is a former soldier who’s always found society difficult. When we meet him, he’s talking to Carter, a lifelong bank robber who’s put together a team to rob his latest bank. But this isn’t your normal bank. It’s the kind of bank guys like Jeff Bezos use.
Cut to months earlier, Noah at his day job as a supermarket checker. There, he runs into Rose, an aspiring singer. He helps her to her car and she invites him in the car where she sings for him. Noah’s fallen in love.
Cut to Jordan, many years earlier, where Soldier Noah has just been given intel from his then girlfriend, a local who lives there. She informs him that ISIS has moved into her building. Noah tells his captain who sends the soldiers to that part of town. But it’s a trap. Noah’s girlfriend was never a girlfriend. He was recruited and didn’t even know it. He’s responsible for almost his entire company getting slaughtered.
Back to the present. Or, the sort of present, since time doesn’t matter. Noah, Carter, and the rest of the bank robbers are headed to the bank. Noah texts Rose a sorry, confirming that they’re broken up now. He begins to type, “I know it’s your day off but…” and since we’re savvy moviegoers we know, immediately, that Rose won’t have taken today off.
After jumping around a few more times, we charge into the bank and, what do you know, Rose is working! She yells at Noah, still mad that he broke up with her. She wants to know why. He tells her to shut up or else he’ll be forced to kill her. “Do it,” she says.
The rest of the team notice the spat and scream at Noah to get with the program! But Noah and Rose’s fighting turns out to be the least of their worries. The bank phone rings and they answer it. It’s the police. They say they’re outside. Just like that, this heist got a lot more interesting.
One of the most enjoyable things about writing is playing with time. The order in which you tell a story can have a significant impact on how the audience is affected. The most basic form of this is to start with your ending then spend the rest of the screenplay explaining how we got there (American Beauty).
The more jumping around you do, however, the more complicated things get, and the harder it is to track how audiences are going to respond. Because, at a certain point, things become out of order just to be out of order.
I’m not sure if that’s the case with Here Comes the Flood. But I think it has to be, right? Since we’re told from the beginning that you can put these scenes in whatever order you want?
I guess the only question that matters then is, did it work? I’m not sure. There were times where it didn’t and times where it did. For example, the whole scene where they’re on their way to the bank and Noah, despite being told that they’re two blocks away and that he needs to focus, decides to text Rose. Not only is it obvious that the scene is being used for exposition (we need to establish that, at this point in the timeline, Rose and Noah are broken up) but also to establish that this is Rose’s day off, a piece of info that is so oddly specific to text about, we’re immediately aware that Rose will be there. It was really clumsy.
On the flip side, the progression of the military backstory was well done. I summarized it as if it all happened at once but, actually, we see his team get ambushed and then, later, in a different entry, Noah is informed by his captain that he was played by his “girlfriend” and that it cost his company their lives. That helps us understand why present day Noah has so many trust issues.
And as frustratingly predictable as most of the non-linear storytelling was (Here’s the inevitable scene where we see how Noah and Carter met!), I’ll be the first to admit that it’s more interesting than telling it all in order. At the very least, you’re unsure where we’re going to end up in the next scene, which kept me on my toes.
But really, just like any movie, it’s all going to come down to if the central relationship works. Do we care about Noah and Rose? If that works, it doesn’t matter if the story is told in order or out. I’m struggling to answer this because the characters felt too “written” at times. The meet cute, in particular, was sooooo overdone. Who invites the grocery store checker into their car and sings for them? And before that, we had the cliched “Man tells the slimy guy hitting on the girl to back off” moment. You could feel how hard the writing was trying.
And look, I know more than anyone how hard that part of writing is. You want to create a memorable moment but you still have to make everything believable enough that we buy what we’re seeing. Go too far and it’s artificial. Don’t go far enough and it’s boring. But the way I see it, those moments – the ones where your main characters meet – are such pivotal moments in a screenplay that you need to write them 30 times over if you have to, until they’re right. Until they’re both memorable AND believable. And this didn’t get there.
With that said, there’s more good than bad in this screenplay. And it’s better than the average sale or Black List script that I read, for sure.
On top of that, I have a theory. What if Netflix just plays these scenes on random every time you watch it? I’ve heard that they’re looking to expand into the experimental viewing experience after the success of Bandersnatch. This would line up with that. You have to remember that everybody has been making movies for the last 80 years thinking in terms of ‘this will first be seen in a theater.’ You’re locked in to a lot of things with that distribution model. But the reins loosen up with a digitally driven streaming service and the smart creatives in town are going to find new ways to exploit that. We’ll have to wait and see if Here Comes the Flood is one of those experiments.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Simon Kinberg is easily one of the most busy people in Hollywood. From producing Deadpool 3 to Artemis to Luna Park to Death on the Nile. From writing Killer’s Game to a new draft of Logan’s Run. The guy produces and writes on the new Twilight Zone show and Star Wars Rebels. He’s been writing and directing the X-Men movies for the last decade. Despite all this, Simon Kinberg STILL FOUND TIME TO WRITE AN ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY. So the next time you feel like complaining that you’re too tired to write cause you had a “ruffy-wuffy day at work,” think about how little time this man had to write and he still found a way to make it happen. Suck it up and write that script, pilgrim!
What I learned 2: You can create completely different emotional reactions by playing with time. For example, a movie where we see a man and woman fall in love then, at the end of the movie, see him rob the bank where she works at, will play different than if we see a man rob a bank and then, later in the movie, reveal that this man used to be in a relationship with the bank teller. In your head right now, think about how differently those two sequences play. Don’t lock yourself into linear all the time. Do some creative algebra and ask what happens if you move things around. You might end up finding a more interesting progression of the events in your story.
