Genre: War/Thriller/Horror
Premise: A female U.S. Army Special Agent is sent to a remote, all-male outpost in Afghanistan to investigate accusations of war crimes. But when a series of mysterious events jeopardize her mission and the unit’s sanity, she must find the courage to survive something far more sinister.
About: This script finished on the lower half of last year’s Black List. I may be a little salty in this review considering Lafortune stole my Kinetic creative duo, Ric Waugh and Gerard Butler, for their next movie, Kandahar, about a CIA operative and his translator who flee from special forces in Afghanistan after exposing a covert mission. Grrrrrrr…
Writer: Mitchell Lafortune
Details: 97 pages
I really like this setup for a movie.
You’ve got someone going into a remote, potentially dangerous, situation, and they’ve a job to do. They have to solve a mystery.
The reason I like it is that it keeps the main character active. I’ve read the “bad version” of this setup numerous times, which is the same thing but without the mystery. A new person comes to a remote location and just has to… hang out or whatever.
Since these movies are about the shit eventually hitting the fan, you need enough meat beforehand so that you don’t start the “shits hits the fan” section too soon. Because if the shit hits the fan on page 40, it’s really hard to come up with pure chaos for 60 straight pages. You want to delay that as long as you can. And this setup allows you to do so while keeping the story interesting. If there’s a murder to solve, every scene leading up to the “shit hitting the fan” moment contains dramatic tension.
Amelia Yates is a CID officer for the army. That stands for Criminal Investigation Division. She’s out in Afghanistan in 2008, trying to get by, when she’s chosen for a mission in Afghanistan’s valley of death, the Korengal. The U.S. has a remote outpost there and a soldier named Ismail’s gone missing.
Amelia’s a little concerned since this is an all-male unit. Normally, they’d send a male CID out there. But the only male CID they’ve got is on leave. So Amelia will have to substitute. She heads out to the Korengal, which people have dubbed “the most dangerous place on earth,” a tiny little valley in between huge mountains.
There, she meets the team, a bunch of dudes who are mostly good guys with a couple of bad apples. A youngster soldier named Grady is particularly scary as he seems to have left the laws of America back in his country. You get the sense he’s ready to pounce the second he sees Amelia alone.
Which, of course, makes Amelia’s job a lot tougher. She’ll be responsible for talking to all these men, one by one, to try and figure out how Israel disappeared. Everything goes swimmingly at first, or at least as swimmingly as you can imagine in the remote Afghanistan mountains, but Amelia starts learning some unsettling things. Such as that it wasn’t just Ismail who went missing, but his entire unit.
Also, everybody seems to be on edge here. They’re all going a little cuckoo in the head. For example, they keep telling Amelia that they’ve been attacked by monsters. Amelia assumes they’re suffering from some collective mental disorder until she starts seeing some strange things herself. Like one day she sees Ismail walking around, perfectly fine. Then the next day, he’s gone.
Things come to a head when attacks ramp up on the base and Amelia sees giant alien spider monsters attacking them from all sides. They end up winning that firefight and then, the next day, Amelia wonders if what she saw was real. Good news comes down the pipe as home base closes her mission. She can come back now. But she’ll have to wait for a helicopter to come and get her. And maybe, just maybe, that helicopter’s never coming.
Most bad scripts you can tell are bad right away because the signs are obvious. But, every once in a while, you run into a good writer who’s not the best storyteller and, for those scripts, it takes longer before you realize the script is in trouble.
But the writer usually provides you with a few signs ahead of time if you’re paying attention, which was the case with War Face. There’s a scene early on, right before Amelia is about to go to Korengal, where she’s walking through the barracks at night and she hears someone behind her, possibly dangerous, spins around, stabs him in the neck, kills him, only to realize it’s another officer. She freaks out, runs to a friend, tells him what she’s done, and he says, “don’t worry about it. I’ll cover it up for you.” And then Amelia just leaves.
You can’t have your main character murder someone and resolve that murder within a page. You just can’t. Just the logistics of covering up the murder take time. But the mental repercussions are something you have to deal with in writing. You have to take us through a few scenes to show the transition from that mistake to being able to move forward. To try and get away with your hero killing someone then leaving for her mission a page later does’t ring true at all.
That’s when I first said, “Something tells me this is going to get sloppy.”
Which is exactly what happens. After a couple of strong interrogation scenes when Amelia first gets to Korengal, the weirdness begins. They’re attacked but it’s not clear by who. Soldiers start having nightmares galore which we don’t realize are nightmares until after the fact (one of the number one ways to identify amateur writing), Amelia sees Ismail alive, but wait, maybe it was just her imagination, Amelia buries a group of child-aliens, more attacks, some giant-aliens attack the base, they barely survive, then Amelia finds Ismail again, he now says I’m a translator for a parallel world, we cut to another world that has giants.
If ever there was a script that embodied the phrase, “everything and the kitchen sink,” this would be it. It’s a jambalaya of cheap tricks, anything the writer could think of to keep the story scary. You can only use cheap tricks for so long. Audiences will give you one scary moment that turns out to be a nightmare. They won’t give you five.
Also, it’s not a good idea to build a story around everybody going insane. It encourages the writer to be sloppy. If you know you never have to explain anything cause you can always depend on the “it may have been a hallucination” explanation, you’re likely to keep going back to the well even though each subsequent use of it results in diminishing returns.
I mean, if all of this wackiness wasn’t enough, we finish off the script with a time machine. That’s not clever writing. That’s lazy writing. You want the rules of your world to be clear and easy to understand. If we’re still learning about the rules on the second to last page (now we can time jump!), your rules are not clear nor easy to understand.
Which is too bad because the script had potential. Like I said at the outset, this is a strong setup for a movie. I could even imagine War Face without the supernatural angle. Just the idea of a woman going into an all-male unit where someone’s missing and everyone’s been stuck there for 18 months is an exciting setup for a film. It’s still cool with the supernatural stuff, but this is exactly what I was complaining about in my Thursday article. Where so many writers go wrong is that they overcomplicate things. If you would’ve had a simpler story here, this could’ve been so much better.
Let’s finish off with some positives though. I loved the choice to use Korengal for a couple of reasons. One, it’s really hard to come up with places that audiences haven’t been to in movies. Movies have covered EVERYTHING. So I always applaud writers who can find a location that is both new and interesting.
Two, you want to come up with ideas that support superlatives. I love that Korengal is considered “the most dangerous place on earth.” That’s the kind of thing that makes a logline pop. Imagine if this story instead took place in “an extremely inhospitable place.” Doesn’t have nearly the same level of gravity to it does it? You want words like “most,” “worst,” “biggest,” “most devastating.” Movies are about extremes. Play to that.
Finally, I liked the choice to focus this around a female lead. Writers have been changing their leads to females over the last three years for no other reason than they hope it improves their chances of selling the script. Here, going with a female lead actually makes the script better. If this is a male soldier going into an all-male outpost, it’s a completely different movie, and not as interesting, in my opinion.
So there’s still stuff to celebrate about War Face. But once you get into that place where every scene could be a character’s imagination, all the stakes go out the window.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m going to teach you a trick. Writers like to use phone calls to family members early in a script to establish exposition or create sympathy. For example, if you want to show that your character loves his kid but the conditions of the story don’t allow you to write a scene where they’re together, you might have him call and talk to his kid briefly. Here’s my tip. ALWAYS PUT A TIME LIMIT ON THESE PHONE CONVERSATIONS. It takes what is, essentially, an unimportant scene that doesn’t move the story forward, and gives it some dramatic tension in order to make it a little more entertaining. Wanting to talk to your kid but not having enough time is always more entertaining than giving your characters as much time as they want. There’s a scene early on in War Face where Amelia calls her dad right before she leaves for her mission and it was the perfect opportunity to create a time-sensitive phone call. “Come on Amelia, chopper leaves in two minutes. Gotta move.” That would’ve juiced up this phone call quite a bit. Instead, it’s a normal phone call with all the time in the world. Therefore, it’s boring. And it outs itself as a scene only meant to create sympathy for the protagonist.
