Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In 1981, a woman working on artificial intelligence for a large corporation begins to suspect that her company has something to do with the recent assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
About: Damien Ober broke onto the screenwriting scene in 2013 with this script, which made The Black List. He was able to parlay that into an assignment for Robert Downey Jr.’s company called Black Mirror (not the show), which never came to fruition. More recently, he teamed up with Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Afflek to adapt Robert Olmstead’s novel, “Far Bright Star,” about the hunting down of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa that goes terribly wrong.
Writer: Damien Ober
Details: 114 pages (2013 draft)
I like weird stuff.
As a reader, you’re reading the same crap 90% of the time. Some hitwoman’s trying to take down an evil mob boss. A CIA agent is attempting to stop a rogue nuclear bomb. A couple is stuck in a house with an evil presence.
It’s not that these stories can’t be entertaining. Any idea that’s executed well can be good. But the majority of the time, writers have similar ideas and are following similar beats, and I suspect that’s because they all grew up on the same diet of movies, songs, TV shows and popular culture.
Usually, the writers who stand out are the ones who were placed on a unique diet growing up. Maybe their dad only showed them black and white science fiction movies from the 50s. Or maybe they’re like Donald Glover, whose parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses and therefore didn’t allow him to do or see things the other kids were doing. Or maybe they’re like Quentin Tarantino, who was watching spaghetti westerns and exploitation flicks while everyone else was watching Star Wars.
So I like weird stuff because it means that, every once in awhile, I get to read something offbeat, something where I’m not sure how things are going to go.
And what can be weirder than a movie about artificial intelligence in the 1980s that’s connected to a real-life presidential unsuccessful assassination attempt.
Right?
The year is 1981 and 40-something Wilhelmina Ross (aka “Will,” aka female with a male name, aka “uh-oh, first time screenwriter flag”) works at a billion dollar company called Forefront. Forefront researches a lot of things. But the thing Will’s working on is an A.I. project called “Randle,” a computer program that can respond to basic questions.
One day, while playing chess with Randle, Will realizes that Randle used strategy that she didn’t teach him. This means Randle is… learning. While Will rejoices in this achievement, the rest of the world is obsessed over the recent assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, an attempt he narrowly survived.
Will later hooks up with a studly guy in his twenties named Errol who’s convinced that Ronald Regan was successfully assassinated and is therefore dead. Will isn’t sure what to make of Errol and so keeps him at arm’s distance.
Back at the labs, the evil overseer of Will’s project, a guy named Caylax, says that she needs to speed the project up, and combines her division with another division of human clones. The request is clear. Hook your artificially intelligent computer to the brains of these clones.
Will’s having second thoughts on if her project is actually helping the world, especially with Errol chirping in her ear every 24 hours about how evil Forefront is. Eventually, Will learns what we figured out somewhere around page 5, that they’re trying to create an artificially intelligent replica of Ronald Reagan to replace the real Ronald Reagan, who died.
Okay, let’s unpack this.
I don’t like to be dismissive when reviewing a screenplay. But it bothers me when the writing is sloppy, as it is implies that the writer wasn’t trying hard.
The year is 1981 and our main character has a cell phone. Yes, gigantic impractical cell phones had been invented by the year 1981, but the first cell phone didn’t go into service until 1983. And I know that from a 10 second google search. If I can do that in ten seconds, why couldn’t the writer?
I’ll tell you why this is problematic. It’s because now I don’t trust the writer. He’s indicated that telling this story isn’t important enough to him to check basic facts. And while that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on the screenplay, it does mean I’m reading skeptically moving forward.
It wasn’t surprising, then, when things didn’t get better. Will has been working on this project for five years. In that time, she’s gotten Randle to be a better chess player and access other databases outside of Forefront. Then this guy Caylax comes in and says, “We must accelerate the program or you’re fired,” and THAT NIGHT Will connects a computer hard drive to a human brain and therefore creates the first artificially intelligent clone.
I’m sorry but that’s not how science works. You don’t just place a computer wire against a brain and all of a sudden computer and human mesh into one. I’m not saying you have to put together a 100 page thesis statement on artificial intelligence but it’s your duty as a writer to give us just enough information that we buy into what’s happening. There was no information given here. It was just connecting a wire to a brain.
Even if you buy into that, the structure of the story itself is problematic. We’ve only introduced two ideas in the whole movie. One, that Forefront is trying to connect AI with cloned bodies. And two, that Ronald Reagan’s assassination was secretly a success. Since those are the ONLY TWO plot threads, there is literally nowhere else to go but to learn that Forefront is trying to create a cloned Ronald Reagan. Since we know this as soon as the script begins, we spend the entire story waiting for the writer to catch up to us.
You must always be ahead of the reader. The only time the reader should be ahead of you is when you want them to be, when you’re going to use his assumptions about what he believes will happen against him. The worst thing a script can be is comfortable. And this is the ultimate comfortable script.
It’s funny because yesterday’s review was all about too much happening. Today’s is about not enough happening. As is usually the case, it’s that sweet spot in between that works best.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s a bigger issue at play here and it connects with yesterday’s big talking point. And that’s the idea of centering your story around a hero who doesn’t control their own fate. They’re being dragged through the story by other people. In Ant-Man and The Wasp, Scott is being dragged along by Hank and Hope. In Randle is Benign, Will is being dragged along by Forefront and Caylax. She has no idea what her research is being used for. She has no goal of her own she’s striving towards. She’s just working on Randle for this company. When you create a character that has such a passive presence in the story, it’s hard to make work. It can be done. But it’s a LOT HARDER. Audiences like following heroes with their own plans and who are pushing the story forward themselves, as opposed to following others who are pushing for them.
