Author: Maximum Z

Feels like I’ve seen this before…

Maximum Z adventure, anime, Black List, screenwriting, scriptshadow, westerns

Unfortunately, no LUCY progress today. I worked until noon today, had a parent-teacher conference, followed by some extra time with V on her homework.  But I’m working the midday shift tomorrow, so here’s hoping I can finish Act 2.

I did spend part of today reading ALL YOU NEED IS KILL, a Black List script by Dante Harper based on the Japanese novel by Hiroshi Hakurazaka.  It’s definitely an original take on what seems to be becoming a popular concept: reliving the same time period over and over again (a la GROUNDHOG DAY, DEJA VU and the forthcoming SOURCE CODE).  Only here it involves aliens, futuristic weapons and a wide variety of ways to die.

Earth has been invaded by a seemingly unbeatable alien race called the Mimic, capable of instant adaptation to a situation.  Humanity seems fated to be the losing side.

Cage, a poor excuse for a solider, is part of the latest military operation to take on the Mimic.  As he gets thrust into a particularly gruesome battlefield, he becomes hit with the oily black blood/internal fluid of a unique-looking Mimic.  And dies.

Then wakes up in his barracks, 36 hours before he died.  He’s seen all of this before, so he knows what to expect.

He soon figures out that he’s constantly repeating those 36 hours over and over again, each time ending with him dying.  As “time” progresses, he becomes more and more skilled as a warrior, eventually becoming just as good as mega-soldier Rita.

SPOILER ALERT!  As a young, awkward solider, Rita was also hit with the oily black blood, which resulted in her constantly reliving this time period until she figured a way out – kill the alien that sprayed her before it does.

Now Cage has to do the same.  But it’s not as easy as it seems, and there are some good complications thrown in to make sure there’s no happy ending.

Carson Reeves at ScriptShadow says the action scenes are some of the best he’s ever read – “visual, kinetic, unique – You really feel like you’re inside that battlefield battling those aliens.”  I’d agree with that, for the most part.  I couldn’t help while reading some of the battle scenes that either Hakurazaka or Harper might have been influenced by the battle scenes in STARSHIP TROOPERS.  Seems like all aliens really want to do to humans is tear them apart.  Whatever happened to good old-fashioned disintegration?

But I digress.

ALL YOU NEED IS KILL is definitely a visual screenplay.  It moves fast, but requires close attention due to everything that’s going on.  I had to re-read the pages where Rita explains how the Mimic always manage to be one step ahead of humans.

While there’s a lot of attention paid to the battles and effects, there’s also some good character development of not only Cage, but some of his fellow soldiers.  We get little glimpses into their personalities so we see more than just caricatures or cliches.

Also a nice touch: every time Cage starts over, he writes the number on his hand, which is the opposite approach to how it was done in the anime THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME.

This would look great on the screen, but a lot of it would have to be CGI, unless Warner Brothers plans to blow a lot of the budget on makeup and special effects.  They purchased it last year, making sure to include a clause that comes really close to guaranteeing it would start shooting within a year.  Which is around now.  It appears to be tentatively set for release next year, which seems to be the case for a lot of these Black List scripts.

Harper also wrote the script for the remake of THE BLACK HOLE, which I really enjoyed back in 4th grade.

Movie of the Moment:  Another two-fer.  We finished LET ME IN, and I have to say, I ended up being disappointed.  It was trying too hard to stick to the Swedish version that it raised questions that could/should have been answered.  What happens after the cop is killed?  Was Abby following Owen, which is why she was there when the bullies had him in the pool?  As K said, it was too European.  A little more Americanization would have worked better.

I took V and her friend to see RANGO, which I had heard was better than you would expect from an animated western about a chameleon.  While the story is clearly lifted from CHINATOWN (including a turtle resembling John Huston), there were some good laughs in it that sailed over the kids heads and some of us adults in the audience really liked.  On the way home, V asked what I was laughing at; it was too hard to explain.

It was a lot of fun, and even more so if you appreciate a good western.  One thing I couldn’t understand: this appears to be set in the present day, but this little anthropomorphized town is straight out of the Old West.  The reason why is never explained, but in the end still works for the story.

Lastly, there’s a subplot involving a hawk with a silver-tipped beak that I didn’t realize until the next day must be an homage to Lee Marvin in CAT BALLOU.  Very cool and clever, Mr Verbinski.

Working my way forward & backward

Maximum Z Let Me In, Lucy Steele, Movie of the Moment, outlines, Raiders of the Lost Ark, screenwriting

That’s how the development of the last quarter of LUCY’s Act 2 is working out.  I had the beginning and the end, and am slowly filling in the blanks from each end.  So far, so good.

Once again using RAIDERS as a template, I’m trying to ramp up the action while also making sure it ties in with the story, rather than just having it for action’s sake.

It’s also letting me test my screenwriting muscles by forcing me to find the best possible conflict in each scene.  Always a good idea.

Late hockey practice last night, so we’ll work on finishing LET ME IN tonight.

The reverse-engineering approach

Maximum Z District 9, Let Me In, Lucy Steele, Movie of the Moment, Netflix, outlines, screenwriting

I’m not calling it writer’s block, because I have a general idea of what I want to put on the page.  Problem is, I need to come up with something I like AND that works for the story.  There are blanks that need to be filled in and the challenge is finding them.

I’m thinking of starting at the end of Act 2 and figuring out what happened before that.  How did Lucy & Co get to where they are?  Since I know what happens in Act 3, I can try to piece together the events leading up to it.  Or at least try to.

Time to break out the idea list again and see what my brain can come up with.  That seems to always trigger something.  Hope it can do it again.

Movie of the Moment: a 2-for-1 day!

While my computer was being stubborn again earlier today, DISTRICT 9 was playing.  I saw it on the tail end of its theatre run about a year and a half ago.  What a great movie.  An intelligent original alternate take on a sci-fi staple.  See it if you haven’t already.

I remembered parts of it, but what was pleasantly surprising was the filmed footage portion of the beginning.  I didn’t realize these were taking place after the main portion of the story.  It was also great to see how the stakes kept getting raised in each scene, and for the most part, how every scene led into the one following it.

I really hope they don’t make a sequel.  It doesn’t need one.

The second movie is LET ME IN, the US remake of the Swedish vampire flick LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.  K and I liked the latter and we’re still working on the former, but so far it’s not too bad. It’s hard to not keep going back to the original while watching this.

Some of the scenes are a little slow, but it’s that kind of movie. And because I know what’s going to happen, that heart-quickening sense of anticipation isn’t as strong as during the original.

Put both on your Netflix queue, but watch the Swedish one first.  With subtitles.  It’s better that way.

Streamlined and ready for action

Maximum Z Lucy Steele, outlines, screenwriting

Nice progress on LUCY over the past few days.  First and foremost, I’ve reached the page 75 twist, so all that remains is the rest of Act 2 and all of Act 3.  Not surprisingly, the former is more daunting than the latter.  I know what to put into Act 3; it’s what comes between where I am now and there.  But I’ve made it through seemingly impassable impasses before, so I’ll keep reminding myself to be patient and sally forth.

I also decided I had too much going on, so I took what I had and started hacking and slashing what wasn’t absolutely necessary to the story.  I took out more than I expected, including a sequence I really liked, but went against everything Lucy herself represents.  I think that section is a little stronger for it.

It also helped reduce the number of scenes per quarter in Act 2, so now it doesn’t seem as cluttered or drawn-out.

What’s really great about this kind of rewriting process is that while I may get rid of something I thought fit perfectly, I try to figure out what would also work, possibly even better, in that same spot.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  As long as the script is better for it.

Movie of the Moment:  Western fan that I am, I was hoping to take V to see RANGO this past weekend.  She wanted to stay home, so we ended up renting DIARY OF A WIMPY KID.  V really liked the books, and the commercials upon its theatrical release were all over our TV at the time, plus she had a 6am hockey game earlier that morning, so I figured I would sleep during the show.

No such luck.  The movie was fun, especially the younger you are.  It adhered to the general tone of the books, which is basically that the main character is a selfish but well-meaning jerk during his first year of middle school.

If you have pre- or tween-aged kids, or want to relive the hell that was junior high, then you should probably give this a try.

Double, double, toil and trouble!

Maximum Z adventure, Black List, screenwriting

I didn’t get to do any work on LUCY because I was busy reading another Black List script: THE LAST WITCH HUNTER by Cory Goodman.

I admit that part of the reason I wanted to read this was because it sounds kinda-sorta like a future script of mine, the difference that mine is about a monster hunter.  And mine is more comedy-adventure, whereas this is fantasy-adventure.  With a vengeance.

The story starts 400-some years ago in Europe.  Witches are a horrific plague on mankind.  Brave warrior Kaulder seeks venegance for the death of his wife and child by leading a fearless band into a witch’s nest to kill as many witches as they can.  A thrilling battles ensues, ending with Kaulder being cursed with immortality.

Jump ahead to the present day.  Witches still exist, but are secretly part of everyday life.  They hide in plain sight.  But one witch in particular, Belial, thinks it’s once again time for witches to reign supreme over humanity.  But Kaulder, now working in conjunction with the Church, has basically become a living weapon and relentlessly seeks to stop him.

If my prose seems a little overly purple,  that should give you an idea of what Goodman’s writing is like.  He takes a sentence and wrings as much out of it as humanly possible.  Somebody doesn’t run down the stairs; they THUNDER as they CHARGE into the fray!  I bet his CAPS LOCK key really got a workout while this was being written.

Goodman also seems to subscribe to the Shane Black School of Screenwriting in that the wide margins are almost a character unto themselves, full of comments directed at the reader.  This continues throughout the whole thing.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it gives off a “too cool for the room” kind of vibe, and becomes a little distracting.

In an effort to really create the world of this script, Goodman includes objects and artifacts relevant to the story, like Kaulder’s witch-killing gun, a certain type of knife, or a ghost warrior (comparable to Harry Potter’s Dementors).  All of these have inventive names WHICH ARE NEVER IDENTIFIED BY THE CHARACTERS.  So if you were watching this, you’d never know Kaulder’s gun is called the Purifier, because while it’s constantly mentioned in the wide margins, HE NEVER CALLS IT THAT.  You’d probably just call it his big-ass gun.

While I enjoyed reading it, it was hard to ignore the unfilmables peppered throughout, including the description of what something smelled like (!), or how ‘the camera slingshots’ around during a fight scene.  Fortunately, there weren’t a lot of moments like that, but it would still work without them.

The whole time I was reading this, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it seemed really familiar, including plot points and characters.  Then it hit me.  This is HELLBOY without the makeup.  Sure, there are a few differences here and there, but for the most part – same story.  Don’t be surprised if they to get Ron Perlman.

The script was picked up just under a year ago by Summit Entertainment with the apparent intent to start a franchise.  Timur Bekmambetov (again?) slated to produce and direct.  IMDB lists it as having a tentative 2012 release date, but that seems a little optimistic.