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Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A convicted felon at the top-secret facility of Spiderhead subjects himself to a dangerous mood-enhancement experiment in order to lessen his sentence.
About: Almost every newly minted professional screenwriter ditches the spec script in favor of the big money assignment. So it’s nice to see guys like Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick still betting on themselves. The Zombieland writers got hot again after Deadpool became the biggest box office surprise of the year. They quickly parlayed that into another Ryan Reynolds project, the Alien-like “Life.” Today’s script is purported to be their directing debut.
Writers: Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (based on the short story by George Saunders)
Details: 102 pages – July 12, 2013 draft
In the newsletter I’m sending out today, I pose the question, “Where are all the new ideas?” We keep getting the same ideas repackaged again and again and because the booming Chinese box office has helped mask the lack of interest Americans have in these carbon copy catastrophes (a Huntsman sequel????), the options don’t look to get better any time soon.
Leave it to screenwriting superheroes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, then, to be two of the only writers unafraid to try different shit. And yet, their newest script forces Originality Proponents to ask some tough questions. Such as, is being different enough? Don’t forget that the reason we keep seeing the same stories over and over again isn’t ONLY because Hollywood is creatively bankrupt. It’s because those stories (the hero’s journey, buddy-cop, stop the villain with a plan, heist films, contained thriller) work.
If there were a boatload of great new story types out there, chances are, someone would’ve found them by now. It’s a reminder that whenever you go down this dimly lit path of originality, prepare for successful ideas to be tough to find.
30-something Jeff is a resident at Spiderhead (so named because it’s shaped like a spider), a giant facility in the middle of nowhere. Though we’ll later find out that Jeff is a felon, he’s treated more like a patient in a science experiment.
Jeff (along with the other residents) has something called a “mobipak” embedded in his back that contains various vials of liquid which, once administered, affect your mood. Our administration team, led by the snake-like Steve Abnesti, have control over these vials, and remotely inject doses into the residents to see how they react.
For example, they will bring a woman into Jeff’s room. Neither Jeff will be attracted to the woman or she to him. But Abnesti will release some happy juice into their system, and all of a sudden they want to fuck each other’s brains out.
On the flip side, Abnesti will release something called “Darkenfloxx” into their system. Darkenfloxx makes the patients sad, angry, even violent. Where things start to get really messed up is when Abnesti forces the patients to choose who he should administer the Darknefloxx to.
Jeff is tricked into choosing a young woman, who then stabs her face in with a giant wooden stake until she dies. The only person Jeff can talk to about any of this is fellow patient, Lizzie, a trouble-maker who Jeff is secretly in love with. As the intensity of the experiments increase, Jeff and Lizzy must decide if enough is enough, and do something about Spiderhead.
Reese and Wernick seem to be interested in something beyond mere entertainment with Spiderhead. This is a movie about depression first, story second. Here’s my problem with that. Movies always need to be about story first. Unless it’s story first, the audience won’t care about your message. Name me one good movie that’s ignored this rule.
The whole time I was reading Spiderhead, I kept thinking to myself, “What’s the point?” I mean, we’re watching these people walk around in this cage, get experimented on, talk about it, get upset, then continue to be experimented on, then talk some more about it, then walk around some more. There’s no actual story. There’s no problem that the characters have to solve.
Even the obvious problem and solution – Jeff and Lizzie realizing they need to do something about this place – is something they don’t even consider until 10 pages left in the screenplay.
There are two movies I believe could’ve served Wernick and Rheese well here for research. The first is one that hasn’t come out yet: The Story of Us, about an alien arrival where a famous linguist is brought in to try and communicate with the aliens.
That movie could’ve been set up just like Spiderhead, where we watch this woman try and find commonalities in language with the aliens until they finally break through and can communicate.
Instead, it added a subplot by which all the big nations were talking to the aliens and also trying to decode their language. It became clear that if one of them beat out the U.S., they would have access to alien knowledge and technology that could potentially put the U.S. in danger.
This urgency gave the story a bigger (and more entertaining) engine. Figure out the language fast or our country was fucked. In Spiderhead, there’s no impending reason for these experiments to matter. It’s all very, “Eh, hopefully this mobipak will improve lives at some point in the future. Thanks, patients, for doing your job.”
The other film is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In that movie, which also followed a group of patients in an institution, we had a DISRUPTIVE main character who was MIXING SHIT UP. So even though we didn’t have an impeding big problem that needed to be solved, there was constant drama. The main character was so active that something was always happening in the movie.
Jeff is a nice guy. He does what he’s told, even if he doesn’t like it. But that’s the extent of his character. He’s not very interesting. So both on a story and character front, Spiderhead didn’t go anywhere.
And it’s frustrating because it’s clear that Rheese and Wernick are trying to tackle something important here and I LOVE that they’re doing something different. But as much as I was pushing myself to like this, the story never went anywhere. A simple problem that our main character needed to solve which would’ve made him more active (and therefore more compelling) could’ve done wonders. I don’t think this is the kind of story you can just watch play out and hope the audience will care because it’s multi-layered. You need to entertain first. At this moment, in this draft, Spiderhead isn’t entertaining.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The famous Samuel Goldwyn saying, “If you’re trying to send a message, use Western Union,” isn’t exactly accurate. You can send a message in your script. It just can’t be the only thing you send. Send a gift, send money, send pictures. But if all you care about is your message, expect the audience to respond in kind.
