Wait a minute hold on. Are you telling me you’re giving 2 IMPRESSIVES in a row? On Scriptshadow? Have you gone mad, Carson???!!
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: (from Blood List) At the same time every morning, Scott Treder has started jumping forward in time. First a day, then two, four, eight, etc. He struggles to keep his family together and find a cure, all as his secret spreads throughout the world.
About: This script made the recent Blood List last month. The Blood List is a list of the best horror, sci-fi, and thriller scripts of the year. MGM picked up the script which is adapted from a novel that may or may not be published yet (I can’t find any info on it online).
Writer: Austin Everett (based on the novel by Joseph Eckert)
Details: 118 pages
This premise isn’t entirely new to me. I know someone else who’s working on a similar concept. I found that person’s idea full of potential as I do this one. But we both wondered what it’d look like when executed. That’s the thing with these high-concept ideas. They all sound great in theory until you start writing them, in which case you discover all sorts of challenges. Then again, that could be said for all screenplays. Either way, I’m eager to find out how this translates to the page. Let’s check it out.
47 year old biology technician Scott Treder has a simple life. He loves his wife, Amy, and his perfect 7 year old son, Lyle. There isn’t much Scott needs to worry about other than getting to work on time and helping his son with the occasional homework problem. Until one day when he’s driving his car and it disappears from underneath him, sending his body shooting down the street. Baffled, he gets to the side of the road and calls his wife, who asks where he is. She tells him he never came home last night.
After a long talk that ends in him convincing Amy he’s not having an affair, Scott goes to sleep, gets up the next morning and goes to work at Madison University. At exactly 7:52 am while working in the labs, the world speeds up and one of his co-workers asks him where he came from. That he wasn’t there a second ago. As impossible as it sounds, Scott realizes he jumped forward in time 2 days. Which means whatever’s happening has officially become a “thing.”
Scott must now convince his skeptical wife that he’s jumping forward in time so the next morning, he shows her. Scott is in the dining room, then disappears and appears 4 days later. While Amy is freaking out, Lyle is curious. He’s one of the first to recognize that the jumps are doubling each time. Scott decides to recruit some physicists at the university to help. But when he disappears and reappears 8 days later, they think he’s pulled a trick on them.
So he does it again. And this time, when he jumps 16 days, there are dozens of students and professors and scientists and media waiting. The secret has gotten out. Scott’s not sure how to handle this, but he knows he needs to start finding safe places to be when he jumps. That gets complicated when it isn’t days he’s jumping, but months, and it isn’t months he’s jumping, but years.
Amy can’t handle it. Three years after the first jump (yet only 10 days for Scott) Amy asks for a divorce. Lyle is different, though. He’s both sympathetic to his father’s plight and curious. He wants to help his father stop this. So he builds his entire life around solving the Traveller problem. Scott sees him next when he’s 13, then 19, then 27, then 51.
As Lyle changes, so does the world around us. Society has descended into a splattering of militias on the latest jump, and Scott is famous. There are believers and disbelievers alike. It takes faith to wait 24 years to see if your belief is true. But there are those who now want to kill Scott, which means he must go on the run.
There’s another more sinister truth he must face: That he may only have one more day with his son. Indeed, he makes the next jump and Lyle, a frail old man, brings Scott to his life’s work: a giant computer lab created specifically to stop the future from snatching Scott away anymore. Will it work? Or is Scott doomed to live this curse out til death?
Man , I did not expect this.
I saw the premise and I thought it was going to be one of those goofy half-baked explorations of a high-concept like that script “Furlough” that I reviewed a few years back. But boy was I wrong. Everett and Eckert go all in on this concept, opting to explore the truth of the situation.
That’s the first thing I want to bring to the attention of aspiring writers out there. If you’re going to explore a heady concept, be prepared to bring some sophistication to the script. I’m not saying there isn’t an “Independence Day” version of this idea that couldn’t do well. But by focusing instead on a father-son relationship that’s attempting to withstand 20 year long breaks, it allows the writers to cover broader universal themes.
There’s this moment where Lyle is 27 and Scott jumps and a second later, Lyle is 51 and Lyle doesn’t flinch. He’s been waiting for this moment, preparing for it, for the last 24 years. He knows he’s only got hours both to be with his father and figure out why this is happening to him. It’s a shockingly effective way of demonstrating just how little time we have with the ones we love. As a testament to this, I teared up several times during this screenplay. Cause something told you they weren’t going to be able to stop it.
That became my next question for the script. How deep are we going to go? And Everett and Eckert go deep. They expand this concept way beyond any version of the story you can imagine. Just when you think they can’t jump him forward any more, they jump him. And you’re like, whoa, when is this going to end??
There’s a more-than-obvious nod to 2001 in the story. Maybe too much. The son builds a computer suit to help Scott in future jumps and the suit is named Hal. Here’s my thing with that. We all have the movies that made us want to become screenwriters. And those movies will never stop inspiring us. But when you literally inject pieces of them into your script, you rob yourself of creating your own independent work of art. This could’ve easily been the same movie without any mention of Hal. And we wouldn’t have been reminded at so many steps of another film.
But I’m nitpicking. I really liked this a lot. It had the two most important things that a script like this needs to have. Explore the concept to its absolute limit and give me a character based relationship to care about. When you do just the first one, you get a solid movie. When you do just the second one, you get a solid character piece. When you do both, you get greatness.
I would be shocked if this didn’t snatch up one of the biggest movie stars in the world. People said Ad Astra was the last adult sci-fi movie there will ever be made on a large scale. They’re wrong. Somebody will make this movie because as soon as this gets into the hands of a Chris Pratt or a Bradley Cooper or a Robert Downey Jr, they will sign on. In fact, I’m willing to bet that the first A-lister to read this screenplay immediately attaches himself. It’s too unique of a role. And I’m also expecting this to finish top 5 on the Black List. It’s that good.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned 1: The bigger the concept, the flashier the opening needs to be. You can’t promise someone a great concept then start your script with a lame talky scene. Show us what’s awesome about your idea! Here, we get a scene where Scott is driving his car to work at approximately 27 miles per hour… and then his car just disappears. Scott momentarily continues to shoot forward in a driving position, only for his body to unravel, scrape, and then tumble forward across the concrete. What a fun way to introduce us to this concept!
What I learned 2: Avoid parentheticals if at all possible, but one time you definitely want to use them is where there’s a strong belief that a line is going to be interpreted in the opposite manner in which it’s intended. So after the 3rd time jump, Scott’s wife Amy is freaking out, marching through the living room in denial and there’s a lot of fear in the house. Lyle says, “So next time it’s eight?” Without a parenthetical, we’re going to assume that the emotion behind this line is sticking with the main emotion in the house: fear. But that’s not how Everett means the line. So it’s important he clarify it with a parenthetical. Here’s how the line reads in the script.
LYLE
(casually)
So next time it’s eight?
