Omega :: SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board

Chism is right. That quote might look good on a poster, but as for enticing readers, it’s not so good. My review on this one is kind of harsh, but I am just being honest and telling you what I took from this script, and that’s what you are here for, right? I’m afraid that I did not care for this story, despite the fact that -- generally -- it is well-written.

Technically, you need to work on the descriptive aspects of your script. It’s not that the writing is bad, but you give lots of information to the reader that a viewer would never see (things like, “this is a photo of his parents”).

You also tend to lump lots of actions into one or two sentences -- things that would take a lot of screen time if actually played out. Things like somebody pulling up to a hospital, parking, getting another person out of the car, and then walking up to the hospital and through the sliding doors. Just have your guy spot the sign through his windshield, and then, cut to him carrying the girl through the doors. We do not need all those intervening details. We can figure out what happened in between.

Here is another one, out of many: “He drives a little while and parks in an apartment building, and gets out of the car. Takes the staircase up a couple of floors and reaches a door, 312.” See what I mean? All of this would take a good five or ten minutes! Just show us the minimum that we need to follow the story.

I am also kind of annoyed by several of the minor characters, particularly Terry and Douglas’ boss. I mean, what the heck was their story? You populate this world with people when they are convenient to drive the story (bartenders and innkeepers and such), but with no real rhyme or reason otherwise for their being there. It kind of feels like cheating.

In the end, I have to say that this doesn’t work as a feature. It is too repetitive, for starters. Endless vignettes where people wake up and realize they are running late. It got tedious after a while. Also, you must have given us the time of day 50 times during the course of this script, and virtually every slug line tells us what day it is. If there was some reason for all of this, I must have missed it. There is also the problem that it doesn’t take too long to figure out where you are going, and once we know, we’ve still got about 70 pages left to go. You might consider reworking this as a short script, though.

I hope this doesn’t discourage you too much. There were parts (with Jessica and her grandmother in the hospital, for example) that worked, and your writing is not too bad. It’s just this particular story that isn’t working for me.