Genre: Action-Thriller
Premise: When her family is abducted, a disgraced submariner must pilot a narco submarine to its destination in less than eight hours or her husband and daughter will be killed.
About: Today’s writer is from Kansas City. He studied film at the University of Kansas. This script got him on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Andrew Ferguson
Details: 117 pages
Cobie Smulders for Cora?
In my newsletter I said, “Someone needs to write a new sub spec.”
Well guess what? Someone has!
Let’s see what it’s all about.
27 year old Cora Cameron was training to be a submarine captain when she contributed to killing her partner in an underwater military training exercise. Ever since, she’s been a heavy alcoholic who desperately is trying to have a relationship with her young daughter, Penny, and her estranged husband, Nolan.
One day she’s kidnapped and taken down to Baja, Mexico, where she’s plopped down into the biggest private narco sub in the world. This thing is gigantic. But it’s also brand new and still has some kinks to be worked out. Cora receives a call from a mysterious voice that tells her this is his sub and she has exactly eight hours to deliver it up north to California. Or else her husband and daughter are dead meat.
Cora is joined by a Mexican crew of thugs. Only one of them speaks English. And none of them trust her. To make things worse, the DEA is onto them immediately. So they start flying in planes, floating in boats, all to track this sub. Gamble, the nice government guy, is looking for any way he can help Cora survive this. Huxley, the bad government guy, wants to blow the sub out of the water and end this immediately. Because Cora has to surface her cheaply-made sub every couple of hours, Huxley keeps getting Hulk-smash opportunities.
But then something happens that truly throws everything off (spoiler). It turns out it’s not drugs that they’re hauling, but rather, explosives! And not just small explosives. Collectively, these explosives can take out a pretty big target. The question is, what is that target? And was this always going to be a suicide mission regardless of whether Cora followed the rules? One thing’s for sure. Cora must rely on every trick of her failed submarining career to get out of this mess!
The other day I was watching Shark Tank, a show where people stand in front of a panel of billionaire businessmen and try to get them to invest in their small companies. In the first segment, some woman was pitching her ice cream business. As soon as she was finished, the sharks started asking all these business questions with elaborate acronyms like, “What’s your ROIBMC?” Or, “What’s your bottom top out reverse expectation level for 2022?” The poor woman had no idea what they were talking about and quickly crashed and burned.
Cut to the next team, two flashy tech guys selling something for your car that lowers emissions. The sharks asked them the same questions. But this time, the guys not only had answers, but threw back unique financial terms about the emissions market even the Sharks didn’t know. They ended up getting a deal.
Why do I tell you this?
Because, in screenwriting, you gotta be able to sell us on the fact that YOU ARE AN EXPERT ON YOUR SCRIPT. If you’re writing about submarines, you have to convince me that you are Mr. Submarine Man. I say this as someone who’s read around 75 submarine screenplays. Cause I can PROMISE YOU there’s a big difference between the ones where the writer knows submarines, and the ones where they don’t.
The ignorant writer ignores the details about subs because THEY DON’T KNOW THE DETAILS. And when you ignore the details, you are, by definition, writing a generic story. Have have ever heard of a generic script that has taken the world by storm? Cause I haven’t.
Everything about the submarine stuff here is top notch. We’re repeatedly getting specialized info that only a sub expert would know.
For that reason, I BELIEVED in the story. And believing is critical. Cause it’s what suspends disbelief. But it’s only half of the game. The other half is writing an entertaining story.
One of the best ways to write an entertaining story is to KEEP YOUR READER OFF-BALANCE. The more your reader feels like they’re standing on solid ground, the more you’re losing them. You want the reader to feel off-balance and unsure. That’s when you have them. Think of movies like Memento and I Care a Lot and Parasite and Missing and even Emily the Criminal. Those movies never allow you to stand on solid ground. You’re always a little unbalanced. And that’s great.
Can you get away with not doing this?
Sure.
If you’ve set up characters who we love and a situation we’re emotionally invested in, you don’t need to keep us as off-balance. This is what Taken did so well. We liked her. We liked him. So we wanted him to save her. That’s all we needed!
The problem with storytelling is that even when you set up your characters perfectly, there’s this weird x-factor that you have no control over where, sometimes the characters don’t click with the reader. Even if you’ve done a “good job” with them. Which is why I encourage writers to do your best in the character department and then GIVE YOURSELF INSURANCE with some fun unexpected plot developments along the way.
I’ll give you a great example from the show Hijack, on Apple, about a guy trying to get home but he ends up on a flight that gets hijacked. (Spoilers) The first episode is a relatively straight-forward hijacking. Nothing happens that we don’t expect to happen. As the episode goes on, the main character is watching all of the hijackers carefully.
At the end of the episode, as we’re cutting back and forth between the plane and our hero’s family in the UK, who have been made aware that he’s on a hijacked plane, a cop asks the wife, “What does your husband do?” Then back on the plane, we see our hero stand up in the aisle and brazenly approach the hijackers. Cut back to the family where the wife and son say, “It’s complicated what he does.” “Well, what is it?” “Basically,” they say, “He’s a negotiator.”
We then cut back to the plane where the hijackers see our hero approaching, point a gun at him and ask him what he’s doing. He tells them that as the people on this plane get more rowdy and as they deal with more on more issues on the ground, that it’s going to get harder and harder to accomplish their mission. “So,” he says, “I’m going to help you hijack this plane.”
BOOM.
This is what I mean by a twist that unsettles the narrative. It puts the reader on edge. They’re no longer sure what happens next.
That’s how I judge a lot scripts like Subversion. Do they keep me off-balance? Subversion has one big twist. Which is that they’re not delivering cocaine like they originally assumed. They’re delivering a bomb. Which is a pretty good twist. But is it as good as Hijack? No. Which is a reminder that there is a SCALE to these choices. Not any old unexpected choice will do. You have to be creative. The more imaginative you are than the next writer, the better you’re going to do in this business.
So, for Subversion, I thought it was a solid script. There were a lot of interesting ideas in here, such as the fact that they had to keep surfacing throughout the journey, which put them in danger. Half the movie is about the government people who are trying to neutralize the sub and I liked that some of them wanted to kill Cora and others were trying to pull this off without any causalities. It made for a lot of suspenseful moments.
You wouldn’t be wrong to call this “Die Hard on a sub.” In fact, if the lead character was a 40 year old man and this spec was written in 1994 as opposed to 2023, I have no doubt it would’ve sold for 1.5 million dollars. But, times they have a changed. It’s still a decent script. It could even be a movie. We’ll have to see. I just wanted it to be a little more off-balance.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The better you are as a writer at manipulating emotions – creating characters that make readers *FEEL* things, the less flashy sh— you have to do in your script. If you’ve been told more than once by readers that they’ve teared up reading your scripts, then you can write scripts like Taken and not have to add a lot of flashy plot developments. But if you’re weak with character? You’re more of a concept guy? Or plotting is your thing? Then you definitely need to add more twists and turns. You’ve got to shock the reader more because, the reality is, they’re probably not all that invested in your character’s journey.
