An excerpt from my script review for Die in a Gunfight which will be available 07/19/21:
2.) Plot Stability
Imagine this for your story…
You explore a world where teleportation exists, but instead of taking your body from location A to B, the “portal” at location B makes a facsimile of you, reconstructing you cell by cell.
Now, consider this with the above scenario…one of this system’s users comes out the other side, violently murdering someone they are meeting.
The argument then gets made, by the accused’s lawyer, that part of the user’s “soul” got lost during the process, leaving them without a conscience.
To me that felt like an interesting story worth exploring.
Unfortunately it’s our B story, touched on sporadically and taking a back seat to a shitty reboot of Romeo and Juliet.
This one was just fucking awful.
We don’t get the first date until about 50 pages in, of a 110 page script?
Sorry…instead watch these lame scenes of the “hero” getting the shit kicked out of him because…whiny little rich kid?
Then after they have sex for the first time, we’ll naturally get a dark moment…
“You’re the daughter of my dad’s enemy! A society I haven’t cared about until just now!”
It was a fucking stupid moment, and completely forgotten at the end because…plot beats gotta happen, even if they don’t make sense!
Lastly, the one decent twist was the creepy Tutor turns out to be the guy Mary’s dad is defending that owns the teleportation company.
Interesting maybe, until you realize that just a few years ago he was Mary’s private tutor, so how did that work exactly?
Was he already an eccentric millionaire, the Elon Musk of teleportation that just happened to want to teach some rich guy’s hot daughter?
Or was he a career tutor that happened to get lucky in a field he didn’t appear to have any prior knowledge of?
(The minimal flashback info we’re given has him discussing philosophy with Mary.)
In short, we deserved better.
My advice to you when writing your script, start with your story first and then pick a title that works.
Don’t pick a cool sounding title and then shoehorn your story into it.
In the end, yes, we did get someone shooting a gun, but calling it a gunfight is a generous stretch and at that point I stopped caring.
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