40% off Script Notes from me! I’m only giving out two of these deals. Be the first or tenth person to e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “May Deal” and you get one!
I’ve noticed that people are talking about AI a lot in the comments section. I do think AI is going to make some big leaps in the world of writing in the next couple of years, but not in the ways many assume. It’s not going to be able to write a good script for you, unfortunately.
But I’ve been privy to some behind-the-scenes chats about word processors incorporating AI in a way where they’re constantly evaluating your story and giving you real-time options on where to take it. For example, after you write a scene on page, say, 15, it will have a little prompt you can click on that brings up three potential directions you can take your story next. Or it may give you options for how you can make your hero’s flaw more consistent with the theme of your story.
It’s gonna be your virtual writing partner, in a sense. And it will probably take a while to get good at it. That’s the thing about AI and writing right now, is that when you truly put it to the test of writing something, it’s still not very good.
I constantly test it with dialogue prompts. I give it a scenario or provide an already written scene and ask it for dialogue suggestions. It has never given me a line that I would use. It *does* prompt new ideas on your end for certain lines. But it never gives you an actual line you’re satisfied with. I think because it still doesn’t understand humanity and how we think. Because how we think is a big part of what we say. It doesn’t get that.
However, there is one area where AI has made writing 1000% better, which is that you can now literally write about ANYTHING.
Through reading thousands of scripts, what I’ve learned is that if the writer doesn’t know the world they’re writing about, the script is always bad. Like 99.9% of the time the script is bad. But when someone really truly knows their subject matter, the quality of the script goes up dramatically. Cause the story is specific and authentic and, most importantly, feels like it’s really happening.
It makes a difference when a cop writes a screenplay about a cop. It makes a difference when a club promoter writes a story about a hot club in downtown Miami. They can get to places that nobody else can, and it makes a huge difference. Which is why we’ve always had the advice: WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW. Because when you write what you know, you can write the most authentic story possible.
Well, you no longer have to write what you know. AI has made that advice obsolete.
I realized this because, for the longest time, I had this movie idea about a murder that occurs inside Area 51. I thought it would be fun to explore an investigation where the setting makes it impossible to do your job. And, also, inside a place that has so many secrets!
But I never wrote it because I knew NOTHING about that world. I don’t even know the difference between a general and a sergeant. I truly don’t! I don’t understand military hierarchy. And I definitely don’t understand what the day-to-day operations on Area 51 would be like. I would just be making things up and, trust me, when the writer is making shit up, the reader knows.
But a couple of months ago, for shits and giggles, I popped open Final Draft, opened up a tab in Firefox for Grok, and I started writing the script. Every time I had a question about how it would really be, I’d ask Grok. How do workers get into Area 51? It told me they fly over on a covert flight from Las Vegas airport every day. The movie is set in 1996, so I would ask it, “What kind of plane would they have flown into Area 51 at that time?” It told me the exact plane and what it looked like.
I asked it, “Who would greet my investigator when he arrived in Area 51?” It told me it didn’t know but based on common military protocol, it gave me its best guess. And I quickly realized how realistic I could make this all feel just by having this AI helper by my side.
And that’s when I realized, the world is wide open for writers now. You can never have engaged with an FBI agent in your life yet write a realistic FBI espionage thriller. You may have always wanted to write about The War of Scottish Independence in 1296 but were terrified that you wouldn’t be able to get the cadence or dialogue right for the time. Well, now you can just ask AI and it will tell you.
Or even something simple, like a legal show. We all know the notorious story about how the writer’s room of She-Hulk, which was a legal show, realized that none of them knew anything about the law or legal proceedings in a courtroom. If they would’ve written the series now, it would’ve been a million times easier. You can literally ask AI exactly how each step of a courtroom case would go down and it will tell you.
This is the most exciting thing to me about AI in the writing space by far. There have been so many fun ideas I’ve had over the years that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole because I knew I didn’t have the knowledge to pull them off. And now it’s like… the floodgates have opened. Anything is possible. It’s exciting.
I’m curious if anyone here has taken advantage of this. Or if you’re using AI for other writing tasks. Let me know!
The fastest way into Hollywood is to write a script like this
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A widowed woman out on her fist date in years receives a drop on her phone telling her she must kill her date.
About: Although it’s unclear if this was a script sale to Platinum Dunes or something they conceived of internally, today’s review is going to be about how this is the TYPE OF SCRIPT you want to write if you want to sell a screenplay. It was written by Chris Roach and Jillian Jacobs, who are all about high concept thrillers (Fantasy Island, Truth or Dare).
Writer: Chris Roach & Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Landon
Details: 90 minutes
We all wrangle over what script we should write next.
I’m hoping that today’s review helps make that choice easier.
“Drop” follows a 30-something mother, Violet, five years after she killed her abusive husband. Needless to say, it’s been hard for Violet to gain the confidence to get back on the dating scene. But she’s been talking to a photographer, Henry, online for several months and the two are finally going on their first date.
The date takes place at a restaurant on the top floor of a Chicago building. Violet’s date is a little late getting there, allowing her to meet a few other people (the hostess, the bartender, another guy on a first date) at the restaurant while she waits.
Henry finally arrives and the two grab a table by the window overlooking the city. Violet starts receiving drops on her phone, funny little memes at first. But then she gets one that says to check her Ring cameras back home. She does and sees that there’s a man in the house with her kid and babysitter.
The dropper proceeds to give her a series of tasks to accomplish, which amount to destroying information on her date’s camera, oh, and then POISONING HIM! The dropper makes it clear that if she tells Henry what’s going on or tries to call the police, her kid is dead.
This results in Violet having to excuse herself during the date approximately 6,373,872 times where she either accomplishes a task or tries to figure a way out of this. Her extremely patient date, Henry, is none the wiser, figuring she’s just having issues leaving her son at home for the first time in five years. It will be up to Violet to figure out who, in the restaurant, is sending these drops. Because if she can’t, she’ll have no choice but to kill poor Henry.
I chose to feature this movie today because this is the number 1 type of script to write if you want to break into the business. Let’s explore why. Cause there are actually two components to this.
On the movie side…
It is high concept.
It is easily marketable.
It has two locations, making it cheap to produce.
On the script side…
Tons of GSU – clear goal, stakes, and urgency
Low character count, which are the easiest scripts to read, cause you don’t have to remember much to keep track of what’s going on.
Contained location, further making things easy to follow
Real-time – which keeps the narrative exciting
But do you want to know the biggest reason to write one of these scripts?
BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE TO BE GOOD.
There. I said it.
“Drop” isn’t a very good script.
In fact, it’s borderline bad. The gimmick of these drops wears out quickly, to the point where every time we get one, we’re annoyed. Cause they’re showing up every 60 seconds. The story is never able to breathe.
Also, it doesn’t make sense. You can imagine a date sticking around after 2 to 3 interruptions. But there’s no way in a million years that your date is sticking around after 75 interruptions. That doesn’t pass real-world muster.
But guess what?
IT DOESN’T MATTER.
That’s the benefit of writing a script like this. All that matters is that the person reading it can see the movie in their head and that that movie can be produced cheaply. They’re not concerned with quality.
And the few that are concerned with quality will tell themselves that they’ll fix the script issues on the way up to production. Which they may even try to do. But this setup never quite works on paper. You can’t disrupt a date 75 times and it make sense. You just can’t. But the people making the movie can see the poster, can see the trailer, they know how to cast it, they know how to market it. That’s all that matters to them.
Sure, you can write a script like Love of Your Life and make a million dollar sale as well. But the catch with that is, you actually have to be a good writer. You’re going to have to execute the hell out of that thing to make it work. Whereas here, you don’t have to be good at all. You can be someone who just understands the basics of screenwriting. Seriously! If you read Scriptshadow a lot, you can write a script like this.
I’m not saying this movie was trash. I liked the mystery element of it. I was genuinely unsure of who the “dropper” was in the room and I really wanted to figure out who it was. That tells me the movie must’ve been working on some level. The constant interruptions just strained credulity so much that I was constantly being pulled out of the movie.
Watch this movie to learn how to sell scripts but NOT if you want to be massively entertained. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It pays to understand what Hollywood can produce for cheap these days. Because, sometimes, when you’re writing low-budget scripts, you limit yourself in order to keep the cost of the production low. But not everything is as expensive as you think in the days of green screen and AI. So, here, they could’ve easily set the centerpiece restaurant on the ground, like a normal restaurant. It’d be a very cheap easy-to-build set. But, these days, it’s super cheap to create a realistic city skyline at night. So, our writers put the restaurant on top of a building, making a 7 million dollar movie look like a 15 million dollar movie. It’s a small thing but it definitely makes a difference.
This is a big recent spec sale to Lionsgate. It is being pitched as a “negotiator” version of Source Code
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Unable to prevent a bomber from blowing up a hotel, a hostage negotiator finds himself stuck in a time loop, using the extra time to figure out who the determined bomber is and what he wants.
About: This script sold to Lionsgate last week. Here’s Deadline’s account of how it went down – “Townend’s deal is remarkable, we’re told, for a writer with no produced credits, particularly given that the script was taken out without any talent attachments. Sources described the outcome as a three-way bidding war that resulted in a mid-six-figure guaranteed fee against a low-seven-figure purchase/bonus. The script was taken out on the first Monday of April, and by Friday of that week, 20 premium production companies were chasing aggressively.” And for those long-time screenwriters who want a little bit of motivation, I have an e-mail from Mark dating all the way back to 2014! 11 years of writing to get to the sale. So, always keep writing!
Writer: Mark Townend
Details: 108 pages
Hot spec alert hot spec alert hot spec alert hot spec alert.
And a very “Carson” hot spec it is. Sci-fi? Loop? Was this written just for me?
Let’s find out!
40-something Billy Aubrey is a negotiator. He’s also a terrible family man, which is why he’s on the outs with his wife and son. One day, he gets a call from his lawyer wife, who says she wants to have a big conversation with him.
First he goes to work, then he attends a conference, then he shows up at the hotel to talk to his wife. Only to spot a man in a parka with a detonator in his hand. Billy tries to approach him, ready to use his negotiating skills, but the man presses the button and everyone in the lobby, including Billy, is blown to bits.
But then Billy wakes up at the beginning of the same day. At first he assumes he had a nightmare. But when everything in the day happens exactly as before, he comes to the shocking conclusion that he’s stuck inside a loop. He’s a little more ready for the bomber (Chris) this time. But Chris still detonates the bomb.
Billy wakes up again, this time with new information. On day 1, he woke up at 6:47 am. Day 2, 7:47 am. Today, he’s woken up at 8:47am. He’s losing an hour with each reset. And the bomb? The bomb always goes off at 12:47. Which means he only has a few more shots to figure out what’s going on here.
He ropes in his disbelieving partner, Josie, and learns that there’s a major tech titan at the hotel that day. That must be Chris’s target. But with each reset, Billy finds out more about Chris, eventually getting his address. So he visits Chris’s house in the morning, where he finds that there are men there, men who are making Chris do this.
(Spoilers follow) That’s when things get really crazy. The men are talking to someone on the phone. They’re telling the mystery phone man, “He’s here. The target is here.” Which means that Billy…. IS THE TARGET. Which means now Billy has to figure out why he’s the target. He eventually realizes that a man from his past, his old partner John Rosen, who’s about to become mayor, is trying to dispose of him. With only one loop left, Billy will have to confront him and take him down.
We all know I love myself a time loop script.
But – and this is a continuation of yesterday’s theme – what are you adding to the time loop genre that’s new?
Here, the fresh addition is that, after every loop, we start the day 1 hour later. This adds a ticking time bomb (literally) to the proceedings since, sooner or later, we’re going to start too late into the day to prevent the bomb from blowing up.
The obvious question, then, is, “Is that different enough?”
My gut instinct answer is no. Like we talked about yesterday, the objective, when creating the “different” part of the “same but different” formula Hollywood likes, isn’t to win the logic debate. The “different” aspect that you add must *feel* genuinely different. And this doesn’t feel that different to me. It feels like a lot of other time loop scripts I read.
That doesn’t mean the script doesn’t work. From a structural standpoint, I like the idea that one hour disappears each day. It creates urgency inside a genre that is all about anti-urgency (a loop is endless – that’s the obstacle the hero faces). And the writer explains a potentially complicated rule-set (the loop moves forward 1 hour every reset) effortlessly, which I can tell you does NOT always happen. Many amateur scripts I read fall apart because their writers don’t explain their rules clearly enough.
I can tell you exactly when I knew this script would be ‘worth the read.’ It happens halfway into the script when Billy is at Chris’s house, trying to figure out why he’s determined to bomb the hotel, and he overhears the men in the other room – the ones making Chris do this – on the phone with someone saying, “We don’t know why but he’s here.” In other words, the tech guy isn’t the target. Billy is the target.
Why is this such an important plot development? Because I read scripts like this a lot – not loop scripts per se, but mystery thrillers – and nine out of ten writers would’ve gone with the tech guy as the target. The tech guy as the target is an *okay* plot choice. But it’s not sexy. It’s not that interesting. What’s interesting is your hero being the target because now the mystery deepens and the story becomes more personal.
So, why then, doesn’t the script score higher than “worth the read?” Because nothing surprising happens after that. The writer ties up the story threads he’s set up. But that’s all that is – tying up plot threads.
This is a dangerous trap that’s easy for screenwriters to fall into. They set up the pieces of their mystery and, at a certain point in the story, once we know what’s going on, the writer just goes through the motions of wrapping up every plot beat. (Spoilers) We know Rosen is the bad guy now so it’s just a matter of getting to him and taking him down. There are no new developments.
As screenwriters, we should always be looking to stay ahead of the reader. The reader should never get too comfortable, especially in the final act. But here, everything that I expected to happen in the final act happened. We could’ve still pushed in a few areas – had one last surprise or two.
White Lotus did a great job of this in its season finale. I don’t know anybody who predicted what was going to happen in that final episode. Because Mike White knows that you have to stay ahead of the reader. You can’t just use your final episode (or act) to tie everything up. You still have to titilate and excite and throw some curveballs at us.
With all that said, this is another good example of how sexy concepts capture the attention of readers. It doesn’t always mean they’re going to sell, like Renegotiate, but it gives you a much better chance in the marketplace.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Beware of this word – INEVITABLE. If anything is inevitable in your story, we’ve lost interest. I’ll give you an example. Return of the Jedi. Everybody already knew that Luke and Leia were brother and sister. But Luke and Leia had not had that conversation yet. So it was INEVITABLE that Lucas had to write that scene. Which is why the scene is one of the most boring in all of Star Wars. Well, maybe not as boring as episodes 1-15 of Andor, but boring in the OG Star Wars universe. My point is, you should always try to give a little more than what’s expected when you’re wrapping storylines up. Cause it’s always going to be more interesting than that inevitable scene we’re all waiting for. Here, once we knew about John Rosen and we’re just waiting for the inevitable showdown, I thought more could’ve been done.
This weekend’s box office is one of the few in recent years that Hollywood can get excited about. Sinners only slipped a tiny bit in its second weekend (45 million) which is unheard of in this day and age. Outside of tiny Oscar-hopeful films in November, no movies have that kind of hold these days. So good for Ryan Coogler.
And freaking Revenge of the Sith (!!!) somehow tallied up 25 million bucks in its re-release! I celebrated by re-watching my preferred Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, and what a fun experience that was. The quality on display in that film – writing, directing, special effects, production design, score – is on another level. It still transports me to a different galaxy all these years later.
But that was pretty much the only piece of entertainment this week that I liked. Well, there was one more that I liked. I’ll tell you about it in a minute. As you know, I’m working through some eyesight issues and while I think I’m getting better, I’m still not good enough to spend endless hours on my computer. Which has left me desperately searching for content to watch on the good old TV! And boy, are the pickings slim.
How slim?
I actually tried to watch The White House Plumbers last night. A zany period piece comedy about Watergate. Yeah, it’s gotten ugly. I even spent 20 bucks renting Mickey 17, a novel that I hated and that I begged Warner Brothers not to make. But they went ahead and made it anyway. Oh my God Heavens to Mary. It is ten times worse as a movie than it was as a novel. And it was a really bad novel. I would go so far as to say that every worst creative decision that could’ve been made regarding any element in the movie was made.
It dies within 60 seconds of watching it, no pun intended. But the biggest issue – and one that no writer can recover from – was how freaking depressing it was. It was sooo soooo soooo sooooooo sad. They leaned into this sad person who sadly dies all the time and he’s always sad and his backstory is sad and his voice over is sad. Why would anyone expect anybody to enjoy that?? It was baffling. I never had to think about creating a rating less than “what the hell did I just watch.” But if I did, this would be the first movie I’d make it for.
I then tried to watch Havoc, which I was hoping would be my review today, but the movie feels like it was made by a malfunctioning AI. I started Thursday night (after midnight, when it appeared on Netflix). I barely made it through 20 minutes. Then I tried again on Friday. I made it 15 minutes. I tried again yesterday – barely made it through ten minutes.
I couldn’t tell you what the plot of that movie was if you made me watch it 100 times in a row. At one point, Tom Hardy is coming home to his apartment and he runs into a young female cop on the stairway who’s just busted someone in the building, and the two just… BECOME PARTNERS. There’s no explanation as to how they became partners or why they needed to bump into each other on a random stairway to become partners, but that was the extent of how much effort was put into the screenplay.
And then you had these weird city scenes where the entire city and the cars seem to be generated in a computer. And then, even though they shot digital, they added this lazy “film” filter over the footage so it would look like it was shot on film. It’s really hard to watch. If both your script and your production are sloppy, you’ve got no shot at making a good movie.
At that point, I was so desperate that I was willing to try anything. Which is why I made the fatal error of watching the first episode of the second season of Andor. If there is a more boring space show ever made than Andor, please tell me what it is. Cause I don’t think it exists. There is a 10 minute scene in the first episode where people sit around a table and watch a documentary about mining. It’s bad, folks. It’s insanely boring. They spent three-quarters of a billion dollars on this show and I would literally rather watch paint dry.
For those lucky enough to say they haven’t watched it, let me give you a window into the latest Star Wars controversy. Gilroy adds a sexual assault scene to the show. This has gotten the Star Wars fandom up in a tizzy, something that, admittedly, isn’t difficult to do and the argument *for* the scene seems to be that, this is the Empire. They’ve killed children before. Of course there’s going to be sexual assault. Yeah, but, there are probably orgies in the Star Wars universe as well. That doesn’t mean you have to show them. As the writer, you get to choose what you show and don’t show and just because you *can* show something, doesn’t mean you should. So, no more Andor for me.
The lone surprise for me this week was Babygirl, the Nicole Kidman sex movie. I thought it was just going to be mommy porn, a la 50 Shades of Gray. But it’s actually an interesting character study. Nicole Kidman’s character has a serious sex addiction and, unlike movies from the past, where you’d never show a married woman with children having an all-out affair, this movie isn’t afraid to go there. And it’s an A24 film, so it’s got some artsiness to it. It caught me by surprise. I still have a little bit left but I’ll definitely finish it tonight.
The box office is going to try and up its game next weekend when Thunderbolts shows up. I’ve been thinking a lot about Marvel movies because they face the same issue your average screenwriter faces – which is that we’re all tasked with finding new ways into old ideas. That’s the big trick. If you find a new way into a Western or a new way into a slasher flick, and it’s fresh and exciting, that’s a meal ticket you can ride all the way to a produced film.
And I’m realizing that while Marvel is trying to do that, they’re not doing it enough. Because if you asked Kevin Feige, “What’s new and different about Thunderbolts?” He would have an answer for you. He would say, this is the first Marvel movie where the superhero team are the underdogs. And if you really think about that answer, you’d have to agree with him.
But that’s the funny thing about the “fresh but different” formula. You can logically make the argument why your take on a genre is fresh, but unless it FEELS fresh to the audience, the logic won’t matter. I don’t think anyone is looking at Thunderbolts and thinking, “This looks different from other superhero movies.” And that’s the problem.
With Marvel, and superhero movies in general, the amount of “different” that needs to be applied must be bigger than the typical “different” that you apply to an average genre. We have to truly feel like we haven’t seen something before to come to a superhero movie.
I’m on the fence about whether to go. If it’s above 90% Rotten Tomatoes, I’ll definitely go. But I just don’t think it has enough firepower. I love Florence Pugh. And I love David Harbour’s Red Guardian character. But everyone else on that team – both actors and superheroes – sucks.
How bout you? Are you going?
I couldn’t ignore all the buzz that Sinners was getting. It’s not easy to achieve both 90+ percent in critics and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes. So, over to the local movie theater I went and strapped in for two hours of… well, I didn’t know what. I’d seen the fist trailer, which was vague, and nothing else. This is how I prefer to see movies if possible. I want to know as little as I can.
The story takes place in a 1932 Mississippi town – and yes, I was, as always, excited to be able to type out “Mississippi.” Identical twins Smoke and Stack, who used to work for Al Capone in Chicago, have returned home to start a new business venture. They’re going to open a dance hall.
For whatever reason, they’re adamant about starting their dance hall TONIGHT. You’d think maybe they’d spend a month putting the place together. But no, it must be tonight. By the way, it’s never explained why the urgency but maybe Ryan Coogler reads Scriptshadow and knows that the tighter the timeframe, the better.
Smoke and Stack put together their team throughout the day – getting their guitar man, their harmonica man, their door man, their food people, their liquor guys. And, as the sun sets, people start showing up.
Little do they know, just down the road, a vampire has crashed a couple’s home and immediately turns them into vampires as well. The three of them, who now are, also, an Irish folk band, show up at Smoke-Stack’s party and want to join. A little issue, though. They’re white and everyone here is black. So Smoke and Stack tell them to get lost.
Eventually, Smoke’s (or Stack’s) side piece girlfriend ventures out to ask the folk band why they’re still hanging around and she gets bitten. Therefore, when she comes back inside, she lures Stack into a back room and, during hanky-panky time, she bites him. Smoke catches wind of what’s going on and orders everyone but the staff to leave. And now, the games begin.
The folk band vampires immediately turn all of the leaving partygoers into vampires, which means there are a good 200 vampires outside eager to devour the staff. So they wait, and they taunt, and they tempt, and they trick, all in an attempt to lure the rest of the crew out and turn them into vampires. Eventually, it becomes an all-out war and nearly everyone dies.
So, how was it??
Was it as good as everyone’s saying?
Well, you know how I see things at this point. The first thing I’m looking at is not the acting, not the directing, not the visuals or the music. I’m looking at the script. And the script has problems.
I’ve seen these types of scripts before and they have a very significant issue that’s hard to overcome. That issue is that the main event – in this case, the party – is too small to get to right away but too big to get to too late. In other words, you can’t start the party at the beginning of the second act (pages 26-31). You’ll run out of steam before the climax.
However, the later the party starts, the more script you have to cover in the meantime. And what do you do with that time? The first act (pages 1-30) sets everything up. In this case, it sets up the brothers’ return. It sets up the purchase of the party building. It sets up all the characters who are going to be involved.
But, traditionally, when the second act begins, that’s when your characters need to go out on their journey. For example, that’s when Deadpool and Wolverine begin their journey to escape the world they’ve been banished to. In Sinners, the “journey” is the party.
But like I said, you can’t start the party too early. So this leaves this “No Man’s Land” between the end of the first act and the beginning of the party, where Sinners is clearly lost. Coogler’s solution is to extend his setup from 30 pages, to a full 45 pages, and so we get lost in this ENDLESS setup where, quite frankly, we’re bored out of our minds.
Now, in fairness, the reason I don’t think it bothered critics as much, is because they know what’s coming. They know Insane Vampire Party is coming. And when you know something big and flashy and sexy is coming, you’re more willing to suffer through an elongated setup. But there’s no question that this setup section is a disaster. It’s way too long.
Still in need to cover time before the real movie begins, Coogler then gets us to the party, but gives us this sort of “half party” where people are lingering about and chilling and not really into it yet. Again, we’re stuck in Screenplay No Man’s Land here. And it’s giving this movie all sorts of pacing issues.
In fact, the inciting incident, when the vampire folk band shows up at the party, doesn’t happen until 60-70 pages into the script! Which is insane. But, at least now the movie has begun.
So, once the movie truly begins, was it worth the wait? I would say…. Almost. Things get so crazy that there’s definitely entertainment value to be had here. And the music stuff is really good. There’s sort of like this music battle going on between the people inside the building and outside the building. It’s funky, a little bit different. And that was cool to watch.
Also, Coogler was a genius to cast Michael B. Jordan in the brother roles. Because, traditionally, if you had cast a movie star and a character actor in those roles, you wouldn’t make your movie star a brain dead vampire halfway through the film. The movie star wouldn’t go for it. They’d want to be the star, the guy who leads the charge til the very end. But because Jordan is playing two roles, it allowed Coogler to do that, which was cool.
And I was into the final battle. I was curious what was going to happen. Unlike traditional Hollywood movies, you got the sense that nobody was safe and that’s when endings are most exciting. I’m not sure I understood why we continued the movie after the night was over. But, otherwise, I thought the climax was good.
So, it’s a mixed bag, this film. It’s messy. In addition to the early script issues, I don’t really understand what the movie was about. I’m guessing some sort of social commentary was being made here but I didn’t pick up on what that was. I’m sure people will get on their high horses and confidently claim it was about “this” or “that,” but I’m betting every one of them got those theories from a quick post-movie internet search.
In the end, I have to ask the question, “Would I be confident in telling someone it was worth 30 bucks (ticket plus parking) to go out and see this movie?” And the answer is, “No.” I think whoever I told to go see this movie would be upset with me afterwards. But is it worth checking out when it hits streaming? Sure. There’s enough good here to, at the very least, have a nice passive viewing experience.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Beware story setups that have a “Screenplay No Man’s Land.” This is where there’s a gulf in between the end of the first act and the beginning of the official “adventure.” You’ll be pulling your hair out trying to figure out how to make pages 30-60 entertaining.