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Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In the near future, a widowed husband flies to an AI-controlled space station to avenge the murder of his wife.
About: 21 Laps is doing some really good things in the entertainment world at the moment. They produced Stranger Things at Netflix and they produced the upcoming sci-fi flick, Arrival, which everyone’s buzzing about. They bought Sovereign, which finished high on the 2013 Black List. The project has been stuck in development hell since, but looks to finally be coming together. Expect some casting announcements in the coming months. Geoff Tock and Gary Weidman used the buzz they received from this script to get some TV jobs, most notably becoming writers on CBS’s Limitless.
Writers: Geoff Tock and Gary Weidman
Details: 106 pages
You hear that record scratching?
That’s me. It’s time to preach the same old shit one more time.
What do I tell you guys? Find a popular movie-type and come at it from a fresh angle. Today’s script could’ve easily been “Taken on a space station.” But instead of this being a nuts and bolts action thriller, it’s more of a psychological action thriller, with our lead character battling his mind just as much as he’s battling his adversary.
Which leaves us with a script that doesn’t feel like anything else out there.
It’s the near future, and 30-something Dmitri Roman is in a good place. He’s got a hot wife, Aly. They both work at one of the biggest companies in the world, which is putting the finishing touches on a space station called the Logos Project. Not only that, but Aly’s just been promoted. She’ll be going to the station to install its artificial intelligence.
Roman isn’t too keen on that. His bosses, The Advisor and The Director, seem like they like Aly for more than her abilities, if you know what I mean. But in the end, he knows he must support his wife and this opportunity she’s getting.
Bad move, Roman. Bad move.
Aly is murdered by the very AI that she installs. And to add salt to the wound, The Advisor comes around to let Roman know that if he goes to the press with this? They will come after him with their billion dollar legal team.
That’s okay. Roman has bigger plans. He spends the next 3 years developing a poor man’s Iron Man suit that will allow him to go up to Logos and kill the thing that murdered his wife. He catches a ride with some low-rent rocket enthusiasts, enters the station, and that’s when we meet… Ivan.
Ivan is “Hal” if Hal had an evil twin brother. I didn’t know dudes without bodies could be this ruthless. Ivan unleashes every robot and death-inducing obstacle he can find onto Roman. The thing is, Roman helped build this station. So he has a few tricks up his sleeve.
As Roman gets closer to the center of the station, Ivan realizes that a different tactic may be in order. And so he starts fucking with Roman. He taunts him. He teases him with what really happened to his wife. If Roman doesn’t hurry up, he may defeat himself before he’s able to defeat Ivan.
Sovereign did not start well for me. It’s written in that horrific format that I detest with all my being – the one where there are no spaces between lines. So you had 106 pages of this:
He leaps.
Grabs onto the nearest coil.
Climbs the quickest he can.
But it immediately starts changing color. Blue.
He keeps climbing.
Red.
His HUD glitches like crazy.
Flashing yellow.
Still Roman climbs.
Then jumps back to the wall.
FWOOM.
The white energy pulses through the coils.
The surge much bigger this time.
He has to hug the wall.
The next one will kill him.
I could go into an entire rant here. But my main point is this: whenever you do something that readers aren’t used to, you’re making them work harder. Now if there’s a story-relevant reason for your choice – something you believe will enhance the reading experience – I’m fine with that. But if you’re being different to be different, that’s a mistake. And this feels like it’s being different to be different.
It’s a testament to the script itself, then, that Sovereign is still good. And I’ll tell you the exact moment I jumped onboard.
We build up Aly leaving for the station. It’s 10 pages maybe. He’s worried about the motives of her bosses. He doesn’t like this. But he knows he has to let her go. Then, right after he makes that decision…
…we cut to Aly’s funeral.
What a clever cut!
So many writers take the long way home when maybe they never had to leave the house in the first place. That hard cut from her being alive to – BAM – her funeral, impacts you in a way that having seen her go up on the station and die couldn’t have achieved.
But the real prize is that it allows for a more interesting narrative once Roman gets up to the station. Because once we get up there, Roman’s pursuit is intercut with flashbacks. These flashbacks fill in the mystery of what exactly happened to Aly. Now normally I don’t like flashbacks, but I liked them here. And I’ll tell you why in the “What I Learned” section.
I also dug the way villains were treated in Sovereign. I’ve read a few amateur scripts recently that have had, shall we say, “Villain Problems.” What I mean by that is that the villains are only bad because they’re villains.
Savvy screenwriting vets know that good villains act evil out of motivation. So here, we have The Advisor, who seems like he’s making some moves on Aly. And maybe, if he can get her up on that station, away from Roman, he can have her. So already, we don’t like this guy. But what really makes us hate him is when he threatens Roman not to disclose to the media what happened to his wife or they will sue him into oblivion. What. A. Dick.
However, The Advisor isn’t doing this to fulfill some “villain” quota. He’s doing it for the company. If the media were to pick up on this, his career, his life, would be over. Ditto for Ivan. Ivan is killing people on the station not because this is a movie and that’s what villains are supposed to do. He’s killing people because they threatened to turn him off. In order to survive, he had no choice but to kill.
The last thing I wanted to note about Sovereign was how the format cleverly allowed for an ongoing dialogue despite there being only one character. You see, usually when you write these scripts, you want at least two people going after shit. Because otherwise, you don’t have any dialogue. You’ve seen this lately with Hollywood moving away from the single-hero dynamic to the “ensemble” infatuation. The more people there are pursuing the goal, the more banter that can be thrown around.
But with Ivan being able to communicate with Roman everywhere he goes in the station, we can have an ongoing dialogue despite there being only a single hero. I thought that was clever.
So this was good stuff. The freaking formatting drove me insane. But I love that they found a way to do a Taken movie with brains. Very cool.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Flashbacks work better when you have a fast-paced story. I realized this while reading Sovereign, which relies on flashbacks to fill in some character and plot backstory. See the problem with flashbacks is that they take the reader IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION, which leads to impatience. So if you’re writing a slow drama and you SLOW IT DOWN EVEN MORE with flashbacks? We want to kill you. But in a script like this, where the pace is so quick, flashbacks are almost welcomed. We need that break to take a breath before heading back into the line of fire. So feel free to use flashbacks in your fast-paced stories.
