Classical Earth by MG Flack - Sci Fi - An epic story about a clone soldier who is forced to question his existence and decide to fight for what he truly believes in. Deciding not to take sides with either the humans or a droid known as the Antichrist he finds himself in a losing battle to defend a peaceful nation living on the Classical Earth. - html** format.

MG:

There is a complete script there.  It ends with:

              Chilton starts the TFC-2 and it lifts up into the sky.

              Vaneliza and Dakimin watch as the craft flies into the
              sunset.

              The End.

Seems complete to me.

Sorry about that Don ( I always feel like adressing you like a mafia boss ... the Don).

So 26 hits and no thoughts?

I really liked it.  I thought that if this were to hit the bigscreen, George Lucas would be ducking for cover.  However, some of the names were hard to pronounce, and you went into a little too much detail in some parts, especially towards the middle of your second act.  I also thought that the ending was a little expected, maybe you could change one thing.  I'm not asking you to make it tragic, but sometimes a surprise twist or maybe an unexpected ending, while still satisfying us, is better.  There you go, I'm so excited to be the first to review this.  You did a good job.

Thanks for having a read of it.

It's funny about the ending but I did want to go the tragic way then I thought that would be too cliche.

Ah, it's okay, i don't mean tragic, i mean don't make everything happy, like the end of The Matrix when they didn't entirely wipe out the machines.

"I really liked it.  I thought that if this were to hit the bigscreen, George Lucas would be ducking for cover." 

You've got to be kidding me, right? I suppose he'll duck behind his mountains of billions....I mean, too bad Lucas didn't come out with the Clone Wars idea about..30 years ago?

Hi, everybody! It's my first time posting, but I have read a few of the screenplays, and done some general lingering around this site. I just thought I would join to contribute my two cents, and we all know what that is worth.

Anyways, I just finished reading "Classical Earth", but before I go on, I thought I would say that I probably wouldn't know a marketable script if it slapped me across the face. However, I do recognize good and bad writing and what lies in between.

Now for harsh realities and the plundering of egos.

Classical Earth. It would be hard to discuss every little detail ,  but I'll point out some of what I feel could use some work. Keep in mind, this is constructive criticism, and I'm in no way trying to assinate your screenplay.

This is in no particular order...

Static character arcs.

Lack of action.

Your hero isn't challenged enough, nor is he thoroughly motivated enough. He simply needs more obstacles to overcome.

You try to reveal too much, and leave little room for cliffhangers. In other words, too much exposition. No plot twists, with the exception of Deacon there at the end.

Sluglines. A little too well broken up. In fact, there were so many spaces in your sluglines, ( I don't know how many pages your SP ran) that it may of well been very much out of synch with the traditional 1page=1 minute of silver screen time. Tighten it up, and I don't mean using your spacing in your Final Draft format options. That's a no-no in competitions. Your screenplay should run 110-115 now days.

Lack of visual descriptions. Not exposition, but tell your story by being visually defining. 'You' the writer, create this world in your mind, so let us live in it. At times you were being just too vague, and it got downright confusing on what I was reading.

Details. I'll give you an example of too much. Your hero wacks a soldier over the head, drags him to an apartment. Fine. Did you really need to tell us that he was moaning? We didn't need you to tell us that. All you did is waste space. Keep this in mind - to let the director fill in the blanks. This happened alot throughout your script.

Your transitions from one scene to the next were confusing at times. It was rushed, in my opinion.

Lots of talking heads. The "Contact" script was notorious for this, but hey, it made lots of money, but it's still a good example.

The "antichrist" (I'm still chuckliing on this) just wasn't the best of adversaries, but most importantly, your hero never clashed with him til the end.

Damn those character names are a bitch to remember.

I would have to read it a couple times more, but there's lots of other things that need work.

Now it wouldn't be fair of me, NOT  tell you what you're doing right.

Final Draft or a similar writing program is a must! Great investment on your part!

Variety of characters. Some just kind of disaapeared into the Bermuda Triangle, but at least there was variation.

Readers love white space, and not huge blocks of running text. Kudos to you, but keep in mind what I said about breaking up your sluglines. Four lines of text is acceptable. This makes for an easier read.

Typos are an instant script killer, competition or submission. You did very good, but don't  rely on Final Draft to pick up everything.

There was love, however brief it may have been. But still.

The concept is interesting, and I keep thinking Final Fantasy meets Independance Day meets Bladerunner.

That's it! I don't know how serious you are about writing, but you wrote a script! For that, give yourself lots and lots of credit, because writing is no easy task.

I hope this helped. I remember my first coverage. Good thing I don't keep firearms around!

Slugline

Oh Oh, Slugline, can you rip apart my script Sanctify? Sorry, jk. That was some good constructive criticism (which is always negative, no matter what the situation) but I haven't read the entire script yet so I'm not entirely sure if its true or not. But, I was seriously wondering if you could take a crack at my script, I liked your critique there, figured you could do the same for mine. Mind you my script is still a rough first draft, so cohesiveness etc. isn't exactly set at the time. But if you take that into account and go headlong into the script, I'd love to hear what you think about my terrible Pilot.

Oh, and Classical Earth is cool so far. Great Job.

I don't know anything about script marketing and have no formal understanding of what makes good or bad writing.  Reading screen plays is, for me, a cheap way to see movies.  I have a very active movie generater in my little brain. 

So,  the first important thing for me is whether or not I can 'see' the film, when I read the play. 

At the end of this, I felt that I had just watched a movie and liked it.

I'm still confused about the the three 'worlds'.  The classical Earth, the human world, and where the clone soldiers live..  Is classical Earth just a zone on the planet and the humans live on other parts or do humans live on other planets or in space colonies near the tops of the Miharas?  Where do the clone soldiers live when not in the virtual net?

I had no trouble with character names.  I found them easy to pronounce even if I'm hearing them differently than the writer.

I did like the twist re the relationship between Deacon IV and CLS 00.  I felt that the relationship between the hero and his big love interest should have been better motivated. 

Personally, I don't like the name of the cheif villian.  The Anti-Christ is an odd choice of names in what seems to be an advanced non christian culture..  It has overtures of meaning that don't seem to fit the reality you've created.

The ending fight between the hero and the Antichrist  seemed alright, from my perspective.  I wouldn't expect a mere human to destroy such a monster with a sword and a pistol.  So, damaging it enough to allow Deacon IV's ship to blast it, seemed a good win.
The puny human not only survived the battle but struck the blow that was the begining of the end of the beasty.

I don't get all of Sluglines' critique but much of it made sense to me and i want to reread it again, with his/her post in mind.  Merely for my own edification.

I liked it.  I didn't mind the ending.  I think this kind of comic book action flick should have a happy ending but I see an easy way to set up a sequel.  Just by showing the monsters final death agony beneath the water.  Some small part breaks away, buries itself in the ocean bottom then goes dormant.
Cliche' eh?

Oh yeah.  I too would like to see more character development in Dakimin so that I care more about him and whether he wins the day or not.

I would assume this would be an expensive film to make.  The special effects and cgi hours alone should be big bucks.

I'm just a film loving know nothing responding because I liked it.  My opinions are not greatly valued in the real world. 

First up thanks for the comments to everyone. This is an old story but it's good to see some interest in it.

I'd like to point out I'm certainly not anti christian or anti any religion, and I know no-one has stated that I was, but in regards to the name of this robot  being ANTICHRIST, was supposed to be about the robot originally being named Chris, standing for Computer Human Robotic etc etc. But I thought it sounded tacky so I left it out and just had the robot decide it would become anti- everything it once stood for. That was the idea, didn't quite work out that way but that's cool.

Any re-writes will be done A LONG TIME  from now, as I have other things on my adgenda.

Cheers Matt

I wouldnt say it was bad.....because it really wasnt.  It started and it ended, which is good....you always want that.  It had a good guy and a bad guy (that being the antichrist! Pretty funny), which is good. Huh.  My only real problem is that it seemed a bit too over-the-top at points, and well, crazy. This is kind of wierd because withe the exception of the ending scenes, its just slow and random.

Hey, but maybe I'm wrong........(I really dont know if I'm wrong or not)