Slip/Through
Dan, you helped me a lot with my stuff here on simplyscripts, so I want to return with some hopefully useful feedback on your script.
It's an early draft. Always good to see a writer sat down for a feature script, starting from zero, only white paper on screen. It's a quality, and an ability to accomplish that.
Ok. Don't know how to start here... think about...
You have a lot of scattered parts here with which you could develop an interesting original feature screenplay.
As I pointed out with that sentence, the story needs a line. The world you show, where your characters live in, has to be drawn out to an understandable precision. Actually, you should end up in a "perfect" precision at your later drafts.
Therefore, IN MY OPINION, you have to keep the focus, and make us keep the focus, on only a few main themes. Concrete, stable, recurring points of identification.
What you show up here – is all new to us – and while we explore this world there are masses of erratic stuff which "I" couldn't easily follow.
So many subthemes come passive into the script, unfortunately, but typically for first drafts, within dialogues.
I felt like that I have to imagine what I DON'T SEE all the time. I had to listen to what the characters say, and then follow the context of their words, three steps away, into a world THEY HAVE SEEN, OR WANT TO SEE, and then return with those informations to the actual happenings. Just in my eyes – Every piece of that kind of storytelling should be transformed into pictures we explore (with them) or those parts don't belong to your script.
I don't want to go through all the things and themes concerning this point from above; because for me, it's here and there all over the script's pages. Except of the first ten.
So, I better spend my feedback for clearing up I strongly believe you need to find the line how you could tell your fanciful story on the screen.
That said: I liked most of the characters. Syn, especially Dash. Saul could be a great fun factor too. Grace etc...no doubt
Just give them the best possible playing field.
The villains: Chan and before Sugarman are bad established.
There was an action scene on a roof top. That was the part I enjoyed much. That atmosphere and setting of a synthetic plant's garden was awesome. Saul's appearance of course. Big show.The intercut with the introduction of Dash and Wilder read fine too. The love scene was very fresh presented. There I felt you know the genre very well. "I thought that's what you came HERE for. To prick ME." LoL. Not to forget that I liked the hook, the beginning of the investigations, the door which they can look through because of the futuristic technique.
A small point of the hook was wrong. Syn has a lot of dialogue – you didn't describe her face, the mask. So, do we look over her shoulder all the time, from the side? That's not good. I remembered you first told us about her face and mask at 30 or sth.
But that's not what it's really about here:
I didn't understand the wonder, till the end I didn't. I also didn't see a slip/through which the script is actually titled. Man, but they talk about all that a lot, you know. They talk about the fog and virus, Genies, and travel industry, coins, and stock markets, whores systems.
There's also a lot of your worldview in it, political understatements where you compare their world with ours. That didn't work for me too.
If I were you, I would sit down and reflect the whole draft again. The possibilities for a story which is consistent in itself are given; the ideas seem to be endless. You have brought so many stuff on the table. I would decide now which story I really want to tell and go deeper inside. Then I would reduce the whole script on those things. The first pattern is there.
SCI-FI. A future world, on a dark planet with two moons, every human has more or less futuristic robot abilities. Sounds fine.
The question is:
Is this really the story where an (passive), from the script's side, "undeveloped" leader, Chan, wants to bring up the rich with a slip/through tourism to his Vegas strip and make money, while he hinders the population of the planet to leave and be part of the lottery again to see the Wonder like it was before, when capitalism wasn't established, and where there were just a fair sharing of recourses. Not to forget the fog, we never saw how Chan does this virus stuff and so on...
Maybe I was distracted of all the stuff and subthemes, but I really didn't see the wonder (was it just those colors, what is it?). I've not seen the slip/through, neither the lottery or the better system from before... IMO the main plot should be LIVE on STAGE
The action scenes you're good in. The style with the swords and everything's fine. The part robot stuff is interesting. You don't have to worry of that whole stuff.
Analyze how often your story is explained and forced by dialogue. A list can help. Reduce the themes and subthemes heavily. Find the storyline without anybody saying anything first. You have great ability in dialogue if you use it between clear connected plots. Like cream atop of a cake.
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It might look like a lot of negative stuff from my side here. It ain't. Things "how" you could make it great became visible. I think, you should see them with having some distance. So, that's what we mainly expect from an early draft?
Could be a huge clash of half humans on Minerva
after a huuuuge rewrite and rethinking of the whole story's focus.
I'm curious about if you do so and if you take the excavator or the shovel.
There is a great stuff anywhere within, I'm sure about that. We could further exchange on your script if you like.