Genre: Zombie Thriller
Premise: When a zombie disaster overtakes the city out of nowhere, a family is trapped in their high-rise Miami hotel. With danger closing in fast, they’re left with only one way to go: Up.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer, Aaron Sala, wrote a spec sale script called “Beast” years ago that I really liked. But it’s not anywhere online cause it was a newsletter review. Yes, Beast (The lone survivor of a plane crash finds her way to a small island where a monstrous beast lives and becomes intent on killing her) is similar to that other script that got made about a beast on an island. But this was the good version. It wasn’t the bad one that got made.
Writer: Aaron W. Sala
Details: 106 pages
Yesterday’s post had more plot in it than Arlington National Cemetery. Yes, I just made a cemetery plot joke. Welcome to Wednesday on Scriptshadow.
Wait, what is that you have under you, Carson? Is that a… soap box? Indeed it is fellow readers. And it’s here to allow me to say a little something about the nature of screenwriting. Make sure your tray tables are up and your belongings are stashed away because I’m mixing metaphors and this landing is going to get bumpy.
You see, the scripts that do best on the spec market – and when I say spec market, I’m not talking about selling so much as I am getting managers and agents or producers interested in you – are the ones that have easy-to-follow plots. Like today’s script! You read today’s logline and you say, “I understand that. That sounds fun. I’m in.” It’s very simple.
If you want to add complexity, do so on the character end. Make your characters weird or unconventional or wild or deep or have an odd relationship with another character.
If you still have a TON of plot, consider writing a TV show. Cause a TV show will allow you to expand that plot out over 10 to 20 to even 40 hours. That way, all those plot points won’t be crammed up against each other. You might only deal with one of them per episode.
After yesterday’s disaster of over-information, I need some script detox. I need something I can easily follow. I need something to thrill my a-s-s off. Will The Last Tower be that thing? Grab your hotel key cards and hold the elevator for me so we can find out!
Harold, Angela, and daughter Zelda (13) are flying into Miami for a rare vacation. It’s rare because Mommy Angela is always working. Her job is that of a corporate fixer. When the excrement hits the fan, she’s the one who stays calm, grabs a spoon and some paper towels, and meticulously picks said excrement out of the fan.
The fam gets to their snazzy Die Hard-like hotel, which is a whopping 70 stories, and no sooner do they settle in than they see a giant cruise ship crash into the beach right in front of their hotel. Not long after, people with yellow-green gunk on their faces stumble out of the cruise ship and, news flash, they ain’t walking normally.
Barely any time passes before giant swarms of people are attacking everyone in Miami. Angela and Zelda, who are down by the pool, recognize that they need to get away from here ASAP. Before they know it, a swarm of crazed people are attacking others in the lobby. The two run for the nearest elevator and get in it after only a few stories.
They maneuver off the stuck elevator by manually opening the doors and get up a few floors where they find some people giving shelter in their room. Once inside, Angela realizes the truth she cannot yet tell her daughter – that her father is likely dead.
Staying cool as a cucumber per her training, Angela starts figuring out her next move. She realizes that downstairs = death and upstairs = a chance at life. She has no idea if help is ever coming. She just knows that the further she and her daughter are from the insanity of downstairs, the better.
They’re able to get a room a few floors higher with another group waiting things out. But when the zombie hoard start banging on that door, they need to find another way up. The only other way up is outside. Xavier, a bellhop, is three stories up and they’re able to communicate with him the old tied-together-sheets-rope move. One by one, they have to climb up the makeshift rope.
The next challenge is the fact that the upper floors of the building, where the private residences are, can only be accessed via a special elevator with a special key. Xavier has to find that key so they can create some real distance between themselves and the zombie hoard. Naturally, things go wrong. And it becomes clear that, no matter what they do, they’re probably not getting out of this alive.
Unpopular opinion: Starting a script in Antarctica always works.
Try it. Start your script in Antarctica and I guarantee it begins better than if you didn’t start in Antarctica. In The Last Tower, a bunch of richies took a cruise to Antarctica and a kid ate some tainted snow. Snow laced with an alien microbe!!!! Hence the craziness. Let this be a lesson to kids everywhere. Stay away from alien microbe-laced Antarctic snow. I feel like this should be obvious but, apparently, idiot children are still making the mistake.
The Last Tower is one of those concepts that’s going to work no matter what. No matter how loose and soggy the execution is. It’s the special power that a good concept gives you. It creates an imaginative state in the reader where, even when the writing stinks, they can IMAGINE the good version of that scene. Or that another writer is going to come in and fix the scene once it’s officially slated for production.
The Last Tower only messes up in a couple of places. The first is that the set pieces are too expected. A stopped elevator scene where they open the door and they’re split between two floors and people have to jump out hoping to god that the elevator doesn’t decide to start up again all of a sudden, slicing your body in half.
Remember, you always want to envision the “average” screenwriter writing your script and ask yourself, “Would Average Screenwriter write this set piece?” If Average Screenwriter would, that’s a good indication you need to do better. Average Screenwriter would definitely write a stopped elevator split between two floors escape scene. So it’s not the best way to go.
The sheet-rope one is better because, even though it’s familiar, it creates a genuinely tension-filled sequence. But it still felt like a top-tier screenwriter – one of these studs hired by the studios to come in and knock out a final better draft 3 weeks before shooting – would come up with something more original than this. Or at least add something new to the set piece to make it unique.
Since we dinged our Logline Showdown winner on the site a few weeks ago with his island zombies, how do I feel about the zombies in The Last Tower? Well, the zombies were not original. They’re basically the same type of zombies used in 28 Hours Later. They seem to be stronger, which allows them to knock down doors that protect our heroes. So that was good. They also swarm together, which was kind of a twist. But they weren’t special.
However, it didn’t matter that much because the ascent up the hotel to escape them created a “combo” strange attractor. Sure, I would’ve been mad about the familiar zombies if our characters were running around on the streets of Miami. But because we’re doing something more specific and interesting – painstakingly moving up this skyscraper – it does feel different from your average zombie movie.
The bigger mistake the writer made was not executing this in real-time. That was a really poor creative choice. When we’re at the midpoint and, already, 24 hours has passed?… that’s screenwriting malpractice right there.
Think about it. What is your script’s most valuable asset? It’s these relentless zombies that don’t stop coming up after you. If they stop? If our protagonists have time to catch their breath? You’ve just killed ALL THE MOMENTUM in your story. You can’t do that, man. This concept is screaming for a real-time story, giving you a capital “U” (for Urgency) in your GSU.
Despite this, the concept’s fun-factor overrides the negatives. This is definitely a movie. And, unlike yesterday’s script, it’s actually enjoyable to read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A “fear flaw” doesn’t work when the situation overwhelms that flaw. In this movie, Zelda is afraid of heights. It’s established heavily throughout the first act. Now, on a basic writing level, this seems like a good idea. You have characters who are going to be up high. Why not give one of them a fear of heights? Well, here’s the thing. If this movie was about a serial killer chasing Zelda and her mom through the building, placing Zelda in a situation where she would need to traverse over something when she was way up in the air, that would work well. But when you have a zombie swarm that has just killed 3 million people, who the f$%# cares about your fear of heights? You’ve got way bigger fish to fry. Nobody’s looking at the 20-story high metal beam they have to tightrope-walk across to get to safety, then looking back at the vicious zombie hoard who you just saw rip up 70 people in less than 30 seconds and saying, “You know what? Fear of heights wins today. I’d rather just let the zombies turn me into cornmeal mush.”
