If there is such a pitch as “Michael Clayton meets Ready Player One,” this is it
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: Set in the near future, a group of savvy game-developers create high-class characters that they auction on the open market for a popular online game.
About: Today we’ve got a mysterious script from Andor showrunner, Tony Gilroy! You can download the script yourself at the bottom of the review.
Writer: Tony Gilroy
Details: 125 pages
There are so many things to get triggered about in 2022.
So why is it that my number 1 trigger is Tony Gilroy??
Oh, that’s right. Because of Andor!
I watch Andor through this haze of perplexity and frustration because I know it *says* it’s a Star Wars show. But there’s nothing in it that resembles “Star Wars!”
No, I take that back. Last week there was one scene on a beach that actually felt like Star Wars. There were aliens. ALIENS! I know it sounds weird that I’m getting excited about aliens but you have to understand Gilroy’s Star Wars universe only has four aliens and three robots in it. The man hates Star Wars.
But anyway, seeing aliens and robots was this really cool look at what this show could be if it was actually run by someone who had seen a Star Wars movie before he signed up to direct a Star Wars series. Honest to God, I still don’t believe Tony Gilroy knows what a lightsaber is. And Kathleen Kennedy still hired him!
And while we’re here, we need to stop the positive discussion of Andor on the internet.
Stop.
Everyone knows this show is as exciting as watching a womp rat nap. But the internet is so weird when it comes to these shows. I don’t know exactly what’s going on or why people feel the need to prop up a show that everyone knows is lame. But they do. They say this show is groundbreaking because it deviates from the Star Wars we know which is “necessary” for the franchise to grow.
Oh go jump off a Cloud City diving board. You know what will help make Star Wars grow? A good Star Wars show!!!
But anyway, I’ve become so obsessed with why this show got produced, to an, admittedly, unhealthy degree, that I looked back on Tony Gilroy’s body of work to see if it’s not just that he doesn’t understand Star Wars. But maybe he’s not a very good writer.
He wrote that cheesy ice skating romance flick called The Cutting Edge. That’s what started his career. He had that lame Stephen King adaptation, Delores Claibourne. He then wrote The Devil’s Advocate, which I liked quite a bit. It was The Firm meets hell. Which I thought was a fun pitch. That was his first true hit.
From there he wrote Armageddon. I don’t even know what to say about that one because 13,000 writers worked on that script. And I still don’t know if an Armageddon writing credit is a positive or negative thing. I suppose as long as he’s not responsible for the animal cracker scene, his work on the film is a net positive.
From there, he moved into the Bourne franchise and that’s where he really became an A-lister. I liked The Bourne Identity. The rest of the films were slightly better than average. But he certainly gets kudos for that first film.
Cinephiles love him for Michael Clayton. Maybe at some point I’ll revisit that movie but I didn’t like it when I saw it. Can someone pitch the reason why it’s worth watching?
This brings us to Open World, a more recent screenplay of Gilroy’s. Let’s see if this is more Bourne Identify or more Andor.
A quick warning – this was one of the hardest scripts to follow that I’ve ever read. So this summary is going to sound vague. It’s set a dozen years in the future (that’s the one part I’m sure of). Two game developers, Evan and Laurel, work for a mysterious company that builds characters for rich gamers that can be played in a large open-world game.
Their boss, Monty, recently learned that one of their co-workers, Tina, sold company secrets to a rival. So Monty wants Evan and Laurel to keep an eye out, in the game, for any suspicious goings-on. He occasionally sends them to Old West towns that he believes may be housing Tina’s latest character.
In one of these excursions, they see a blue rag of some sort but are unable to get it for some reason. There is a lot of consternation about this blue rag and what it means. There are very important conversations that follow that discuss it in detail. Nobody thinks to tell us, the reader, why we should care about the blue rag. But it’s certainly a priority for the characters.
After this event, Evan and Laurel’s co-worker, Gita, tells their boss, Monty, “The Koreans are in the lobby.” At this point, I mentally gave up trying to understand what this abomination of a script was about. But I guess the big reveal is that some of these characters in the game are becoming artificially intelligent and may be used for military purposes. The end.
So, what went wrong here?
We’re dropped into things in media res – which means we’re thrown into a story that’s already going on. And because Gilroy either isn’t clear or is purposefully being mysterious, we’re playing catch-up from the get go. We know people work on open world video games but we don’t know much more than that.
I didn’t know until page 27, for example, that the company’s primary job was to create characters for rich people then sell them in online auctions. It was very oddly presented. Usually, in a movie, we meet a main character, we learn who he is, something interrupts his life, then he has to go deal with it. The ‘dealing with it’ part is the second and third act.
“Open World,” on the other hand, has us meeting a bunch of random people, seeing them play a video game, watching them mope around in their real life, then go back into the game without explaining to the reader why, then come out of the game and speak in hushed tones about vague things that they saw, then go into work, then get yelled at by their boss, then go back into the game, and then do stuff in the game that we never quite understand. It’s not exactly riveting storytelling.
If you don’t lay out who your hero is and what they have to do within a reasonable amount of time, it’s virtually impossible to make your script work. Cause we’re going to be asking basic questions (such as “who’s the main character”) deep into a script at a time when what we should be doing is enjoying ourselves.
It’s an interesting approach – making the reader play catch-up. I’m not exactly against it if it’s done well. But it’s definitely a gamble. Because if you, the writer, stay too far ahead for too long, the reader just gets frustrated and stops caring. Especially if the mysteries you’re presenting aren’t very engaging.
Ooh, the’s a blue cloth in the game. What’s that blue cloth?? Everyone in the movie wants to know. OH YEAH, BUT WHY THE HECK SHOULD WE THE READER CARE? Does the writer ever consider that question? I don’t think so.
Another huge problem with Gilroy that hurts him here and hurts him in Andor – is that his stories lack playfulness. He sees the world through such a serious lens, that the world of fun doesn’t exist in his eyes.
This script is about gaming. What is out there that speaks to “fun” more than gaming? Yet Gilroy manages to avoid that word at all costs.
You guys remember that brilliant scene in The Bourne Identity where Jason plans this big heist where he’s going to send Marie into a government building to steal important information about who he is so he can find out who’s after him? And she goes in there and he’s going over, in detail, every little move she needs to make to swindle the officials, and a minute later she comes out with the documents and he stares at her in awe before asking her, “What did you do??” And she says, “I just asked.”
THAT’S WHAT I MEAN BY PLAYFUL.
And I’m willing to bet a million dollars that another writer wrote that scene. Not Gilroy. Because Gilroy hates fun. There’s a brief moment in the most recent episode of Andor where the famous MSE-6 mouse droid appears for a second. And you can feel Gilroy’s unbridled anger at having to include the shot in the scene. Just from the way he points the camera and quickly cuts away.
I’m not going to lie. There’s a part of me that thinks I got duped here and that this script isn’t actually Gilroy’s. Cause I can’t imagine even him writing something this poor. Maybe you guys can do some research and confirm or deny it. If it is his script, I mean…. wow. This was really bad. Or maybe it wasn’t. You can decide. Cause I’m including the script below.
Script link: Open World
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you have a lot of characters and your story is complex, you need a “Reminder Character.” This is a character who shows up and basically reminds the characters, and by association us, what needs to be done. Yes, this can feel like blatant exposition. But blatant exposition is preferable to complete and utter confusion, which is how I felt reading this. I had next to no idea what was going on. You needed someone to come in and say, “Don’t forget, we’re going after the MacGuffin and we need it within 24 hours because, if we fail, the entire world blows up.” Lay out the freaking story why don’t you.
