It’s Interstellar meets Unbreakable in this offbeat sci-fi tale that reunites Sam Worthington with the genre that made him so popular. Will the material allow Worthington to shine? Or is he forever cursed to be Jai Courtney’s acting twin?
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In the near future, with earth’s resources dwindling, the government approves a top-secret project that will allow humans to live on Jupiter’s moon, Titan, which they hope will lead to colonization.
About: This was penned by Max Hurwitz, who wrote a couple of episodes of AMC’s Hell on Wheels, and is based on an original idea by Arash Amel, who wrote Grace of Monaco. It will star Sam Worthington and Ruth Wilson (one of my favorite new actresses who stars in one of my favorite shows, The Affair), and is being directed by first-timer, Lennart Ruff. With Worthington having no idea when, or if, the Avatar sequels are ever coming out, he realizes he has to keep making that monnnnn-nay.
Writer: Max Hurwitz (based on an idea by Arash Amel)
Details: 112 pages
The other day I was talking to a writer about genres. Actually, not just genres, but specific kinds of movies. Like, “Revenge Thriller.” Anything where you can say the descriptor out loud and another person knows exactly what kind of movie you’re talking about (the “damaged hero biopic” aka “The Aviator,” “A Beautiful Mind”).
Where Hollywood gets worried is when you give them a script that doesn’t fall into one of these categories. Because they don’t have a blueprint for how to market the film. And if they don’t have a blueprint, they freak the fuck out. Because that means they have to make something up that hasn’t been tested. Got forbid these people actually earn their money.
A perfect example is a movie like “American Ultra.” What is that movie? Is it a pot comedy? An action film? A thriller? Nobody knows. Or the more recent Crimson Peak. Is it a gothic horror? A gothic romance? A gothic horror romance? We don’t know. So they don’t know how to market it, which leads to the marketing looking confused, which leads to potential audience members being confused, which leads to no one showing up for your movie, which leads to Max Landis going on a tweet rant about how nobody likes good movies anymore.
The Titan has a little of that going for it. Is this a “monster-in-the-box” movie, a la “Aliens?” Not really. Is it a mystery? Yeah, it’s got aspects of that I suppose. I think the best way to categorize it is a sci-fi thriller mystery. But is that a movie type? I don’t think so. And that’s the main issue The Titan’s fighting against.
We’re in Northumberland, which I believe is in England, on a secret remote base, in the year 2050. U.S. Air Force pilot Rick Janssen has brought his family (wife Abi and son Lucas) to live here while he participates in a very important experiment.
You see, our planet is going to die soon. Don’t believe me? Ask Leonardo DiCaprio. And unless we do something radical, we’re going to die along with it. That’s what this mission is about. Rick, along with six other volunteers, is going to have his body reconditioned to live on Jupiter’s moon, Titan, in the hopes of us one day being able to transport the human race there.
This sounds like a fun little adventure, right? It is. Until Rick and Abi realize Rick is being juiced up with a cocktail of drugs that would make 1978 Arnold Schwarzenegger blush. All of a sudden, Rick starts experiencing vastly improved abilities. He can hold his breath for 30 minutes. He can run twice as fast as he used to. He can survive in sub-freezing temperatures for hours on end. He’s super-human, basically the opposite of Ronda Rousey.
But with these newfound abilities come a deteriorating immune system. And while Rick’s system seems to be holding together, the other volunteers are falling apart faster than a game of drunk jenga. The Captain of their mission dies after a seizure. One of the other guys goes haywire, killing his wife. And everybody else is the equivalent of a walking zombie. Rick is the only one who seems to be able to handle the drugs.
This is when Abi starts getting suspicious, which only gets worse when she finds a bunch of hidden cameras throughout her house. And no, it does not look like a few friends simply forgot their gopros.
(spoilers) What Abi eventually learns is that these scientist ASSHOLES are injecting Rick with a serum designed to rewrite his DNA code. This essentially means that Rick is evolving into the next level of human. What the scientists didn’t account for was just how dangerous Rick would be. And when Rick escapes, they’ll have to decide whether to destroy their 300 million dollar investment, or try and take him alive, a proposition that may mean their entire base getting wiped out.
Like I said earlier, I don’t truly know what this genre is. The closest thing I could come with was a mystery. Something was happening to Rick – something that the scientists were keeping from him – and it was up to Abi to figure out what it was.
The problem is, when you build up a movie-long mystery, the reveal has to be a whopper, something we weren’t expecting. Here, we strongly suspected that the scientists were doing something bad to Rick and it turns out… they were doing something bad to Rick. I mean, they weren’t even lying about the Titan thing. So even though they didn’t fill Rick in on the finer details, an argument could be made that they were honest with him.
So I guess I was a little let down by that.
This brought attention to one of the script’s major weaknesses – that all the characters were so stupid. If someone’s pumping dozens of chemicals into you every day and you’re projectile blood-vomiting out of your eyeballs, it’s kind of on you if you don’t question what the hell is going on. Everybody here was so willing to accept this treatment that I kind of wanted to punch them. Audiences HATE dumb characters. So you want to avoid them if possible.
If there’s a saving grace here, it’s the emotional component of the script. Not to sidetrack, but I was listening to an Aaron Sorkin interview recently, and in it he talked about the two components to making a screenplay work. First you have to come up with the structure. Then you have to find the emotional center of the screenplay.
So with his script, “Jobs,” he languished over how he was going to tell the story until finally landing on the 3 major Jobs presentations. But he still couldn’t write the movie because he didn’t know what the emotional core was going to be. After speaking with Jobs’s real-life daughter for research, he realized that she and him were the emotional center. And if you’ve seen the film, you see how well that works. Without it, it’s just this cold cruel man talking about going with 256 MB worth of memory instead of 512. Audiences always need more than a nuts and bolts plot. THEY NEED TO FEEL.
And Hurwitz pulls this off with The Titan. The script keeps coming back to the deep love Abi and Rick have for each other. As he starts turning into this monster, their love carries her through. That was powerful.
This helps cover up the fact that The Titan dances through one too many genres. And hey, sometimes that can work. That’s how you come up with truly original material – stuff like Pulp Fiction or Being John Malkovich. You create stories that exist between the genre lines. I’m just not sure The Titan offers a unique enough perspective to hit the same sweet spot that those films did. At its heart, it’s a simple low-budget sci-fi film. It’s not “Pi.” I’m not saying the script is a failure. There’s some good stuff here. But I left feeling like there coulda been more.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re going to spend an entire screenplay building up a mystery, the big reveal of that mystery can’t be a moderately elevated version of what the audience already suspected (I thought the scientists in The Titan were injecting Rick with more sinister things. It turns out they were injecting Rick with more sinister things!). With these big script-long mysteries, you have to wow us with something unexpected come reveal-time. Otherwise, you’re going to see that dreaded shrug of the shoulders followed by the devastating, “That’s it???”
