An excerpt from my script review for The Gift which will be available 11/09/15:
2.) Plot Stability
This thriller was less than thrilling.
Did it have tense situations? Certainly, but other than the very end, not a lot happened.
There was an entire duration where we watch the term of Robyn’s pregnancy, and Gordo doesn’t show up, which seems really odd for a movie. That’s practically a year.
And the ending…talk about getting out early. It was so early, I’m confused as to what really happened. Gordo sends Simon this video of Robyn unconscious, but we don’t get to see what actually happens, because Simon shuts it off.
Assuming where it was going, I then asked myself where the incident fell into the timeline, wondering if Gordo is really the baby’s father, but after the less than thrilling script, I didn’t care enough to go back and check.
(Right there…that’s a problem. The weight isn’t on your reader to care about your characters. It’s your job to MAKE them care enough, going back to double check your thrilling twist if need be.)
There was a twist, that the Captain claimed he predicted, but I actually didn’t. I thought along the same lines as Robyn did, until of course she admitted to thinking Simon was “the other guy” Gordo was with in high school. Once she said that, it couldn’t be the twist. (In actuality, the author kind of wusses out and has Simon just make the whole thing up.)
In between the great initial setup of Gordo and the ending, there needed to be more psychological warfare. Other than a dog missing and two dead birds, there really wasn’t anything serious that fucked with our minds.
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