Genre: Action
Premise: (from the Black List) An underwater earthquake decimates a research crew working at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, leaving two survivors with limited resources to ascend 35,000 feet and reach the surface before their life support runs out.
About: This script finished on the 2015 Black List with 6 votes. Newbie writer, Pete Bridges, would later sell his second script, The Fall, to Amblin Entertainment. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Writer: Pete Bridges
Details: 104 pages
Plot.
Character.
Every time you come up with an idea, it’s going to be heavily weighted one way or the other. So you have a movie like The Force Awakens, plot-heavy with every character needing to do things and other characters trying to stop those things. Goals, stakes, urgency galore.
Then you have a movie like Manchester by the Sea. Almost no plot. A character-focused script if there ever was one. With that movie, it’s more about emotional beats, introspection, overcoming inner obstacles.
One of your jobs as a screenwriter is to identify which kind of idea yours is. Is it a plot-heavy idea? Or a character-heavy idea? Once you have your answer, form your plan of attack. And this is how that plan of attack should go:
If it’s a plot-heavy concept, YOUR PLOT MUST BE FUCKING AWESOME. This is what your idea is selling. The plot. So that plot better be something to write home about. If it’s a character-heavy concept, same thing. YOUR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT and CHARACTER EXPLORATION better be the kind of thing that makes other writers shiver in their boots because they know that they can never touch your expertise on the character front.
The point is – whatever you’re selling your script on, that thing better be great.
Now here comes the second part. And this is the one most screenwriters screw up on. You still have to do a solid job in the other department. So if you have a plot-heavy script, you still need to spend some time making the characters compelling, going through tough inner obstacles, and having problems with one another.
Same with a character piece. Don’t forget you still need to add some plot.
Cause here’s the thing, see…
If you only focus on the side that you’re selling, your script is going to feel thin. Who here has watched an action movie or a thriller where you didn’t feel any emotion towards the characters? Or who here has watched one of those aimless character pieces that’s all about feelings and crying but GOES NOWHERE? That’s what I mean by thin.
The reason I don’t review scripts like Resurface as much anymore is because the writers who write them make this mistake all the time. They have this plot-heavy premise, which inevitably leads to them making both mistakes. The narrowness of the plot means it’s going to be predictable. And because it’s so plot-focused, the characters are going to be underdeveloped.
In that way, an idea like Resurface is fool’s gold. It seems so movie-friendly. And yet it has so many traps it can fall through. And I don’t even fault the writers of these movies for falling into these traps. While I was reading this, I thought, “You know, I probably would’ve made a lot of these same choices.”
The difference is, I know after reading a lot of these scripts how dangerous they are, so I know not even to attempt them.
This goes back to yesterday’s post where you’re always looking to find that angle into an idea that’s fresh. Because fresh angles create fresh scenarios. You’re not burdened with going through the “been there done that” checklist.
For example, with Resurface, you know you’re going to have a “losing air” situation. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But when the audience already knows your dramatic scenarios before your film has begun, you’re at a disadvantage. The writer should always be ahead of the viewer, unless he wants them to be ahead of him.
Resurface follows Josh Strand and Hannah Bradford, co-workers with way too much sexual tension, working in a submersible in one of the deepest parts of the ocean. They’re joined by several other submersibles, finishing up a project they’ve been hired for, when there’s an underwater tectonic shift. We’re talking the sea-bed shifts an entire mile.
Everybody’s sub is damaged in the quake and, after the subs succumb to the damage one by one, Josh and Hannah find themselves the only ones left. And it’s not looking good. Their sub doesn’t even have power. They’re able to use a backup battery to get their sub to the nearby supply sub, and transfer everything into there.
The problem is, the supply sub wasn’t made for people, requiring Josh and Hannah to hack the system and turn this puppy into something that can take them to the surface. As you can imagine, that journey is fraught with a dwindling air supply and an unreliable GUI.
Meanwhile, Josh and Hannah try to make the best of the situation, slowly transforming from sarcastic jokes to expressing their true feelings for one another, which, it turns out, are love. Let’s just hope that love has the chance to last a lifetime.
I give credit to Bridges for doing the best with what he had. But I was so ahead of this story. Which is what I was afraid of to begin with. That the logline was the movie. The logline needs to convey the main conflict in the movie. But you then add twists and turns to keep things unexpected. There was nothing unexpected here. They encountered technical obstacles to getting to the surface and they talked to each other. That was it.
A good movie to compare this to is The Martian, as that script had a similar setup. Here’s what The Martian did that Resurface didn’t, though. IT GOT SPECIFIC. When you have a limited premise, specificity can become your best friend. Find things or research things that you know about that the audience doesn’t. That way, you’re feeding them new information. New information FEELS FRESH.
The perfect example of this is the potato growing sequence in The Martian. We don’t know anything about growing potatoes. It’s actually a pretty weird concept in the context of a movie about a guy stranded on Mars. But that’s exactly why it worked. It was UNEXPECTED, unique, different. And I know I keep harping on that word lately. But it’s so important as a screenwriter. If you’re not giving us unexpected things, then we know what’s going to happen in your story long before you show us.
On the character front, a screenplay like this is a huge challenge. Lots of screenwriters see the beginning of this idea, imagine two people in a sub, and think, “I’ll just come up with things for them to say to each other.” But them talking to each other is the whole movie. It will take up 100 minutes of the running time. It can’t just be “people talking.” It’s got to be a compelling situation between the two that evolves, that reveals, that changes, that’s UNEXPECTED.
And while I didn’t think Josh and Hannah’s situation was very compelling, I don’t pretend to know what would’ve worked better. You could’ve had two people that hated each other. But that’s kind of cliche. You could’ve had them be a married couple on the outs, but that’s cliche. You could have had them be divorced, forced into this sub by their boss. But that’s cliche.
This is the stuff that drives me crazy about screenwriting, is that there are a lot situations that have limited answers. I mean I’ll kick the question down to you guys. What would you have done with Josh and Hannah to make their storyline compelling? Because I learned early on that putting two people in a small trapped space for 100 minutes is a lot harder than it looks. What the f&*% are they going to say to each other for 2 hours?
And for that reason, I couldn’t get into Resurface. With that said, the writing is solid. The plot moves quickly. And there’s a bigger story here. With this script, Bridges got noticed. Once you get noticed, you’re in the game, and your odds of selling something increase tremendously. Bridges used the heat he got from Resurface to later sell The Fall to Steven Spielberg’s company. So it’s safe to say, everything worked out for the best.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Remember to add ticking time bombs to not just the entire plot, but to individual scenarios. There’s a scene early on in the script where they’re moving from the broken sub into the supply sub, and a battery is leaking so badly, that the whole thing could blow up in an instant. It added a nice bit of tension on top of what was already a tense scene. That’s good writing.
