An excerpt from my script review for The Watchers (2024) which will be available 8/25/14:
2.) Plot Stability
Before I go any further, the story wasn’t bad.
In fact, I actually enjoyed it once Mina gets to the forest.
And this is my first point in this section. Mina’s intro is so fucking boring!
We open with this cool scene of John in the woods (minus the flashbacks which were purposefully misleading and thus, made them corny) and then bounce to this girl working a day job at a pet store and going out at night pretending to be someone else?
Why show us this when it never comes into play again?
“Because Hank…the story is about changelings, and Mina’s metaphorically a changeling…”
No…Mina is a self loathing teenager who just happens to be in her mid twenties.
Time to grow up Peter Pan!
I digress…
All of her intro can easily be a few quick lines in her drive up to deliver the parrot.
Open on her driving this lonely road. The parrot says something annoying from the back seat. Her response is she can’t wait to dump him at the zoo/sanctuary and be rid of him.
Little bit later…
Phone call from her sister. Internal struggle on whether to answer, but she ignores it and lets it go to voicemail.
Listens to voicemail, where sister says they missed her at her mom’s funeral.
Next, and here’s the important part, she’s feeling really shitty about missing her mom’s funeral, so she decides to pull off the road that leads to this forest that’s caught her attention.
Second important part, why carry the bird cage into the woods? Initially she won’t, but because today just happens to be a particular sunny day (great contrast to the darkness we’re about to encounter in the woods), no sensible person is going to let an animal roast to death inside a car!
Enter woods carrying the birdcage and viola.
Do you know how much money I just saved this project?!
(Not to mention giving Mina a practical reason to have her enter the woods aside from…because…plot!)
And yes my services are for hire!
Once in the woods, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that does go right for a horror thriller.
Characters get lost easy.
Shit skitters in the dark.
Mysterious characters appear in a cabin out of nowhere.
Fucking burrows!
The cabin happens to vacuum seal at sunset so the “Watchers” can’t get in.
The Watchers “watch” via this one way mirror in a way that’s just as creepy as you’d imagine short of being perverts.
All of this is good storytelling, as the characters try to escape and/or live in the woods, but are constricted by the setting sun.
(Hence all the “point of no return” stone markers.)
Oh, and the Watchers can mimic humans.
Two more minor criticisms…
As the story progresses, it seems to become a “kitchen sink” scenario.
Once the group discovers the bunker underneath the cabin it feels a bit like 10 Cloverfield Lane and you have to set aside the fact that for a forest that seems to trap people, not only did the professor manage to lure multiple groups of day laborers (literally) to build a house, where’d the fucking excavation equipment and concrete trucks go that it’d take to build a fucking bunker?
(Funny sidenote here, 3way said the book explained this, by mentioning the fact that the original guy lured these groups of workers in, and each night sacrificed them to the Watchers, as he hid. Fine, but as I asked him my question above about the bunker infrastructure, all he could do was shrug digitally.)
Watching old videos on the computer, they’re told to “follow the birds” and I was worried we were about to go Bird Box with the parrot to escape.
(I can’t remember, but I don’t think the parrot actually figured into their escape.)
And last but not least, what seems to be most people’s criticism, the unnecessary ending.
*SPOILER*
One of the folks in the cabin was a day walking changeling. (So I guess we threw Blade in there too.)
When Mina defeats he/she, she’s then approached by this guy who wants to recruit her to hunt down other changelings…setting up an elaborate sequel?
Maybe I was too ready to draw comparisons at this point, but it came off a bit like Men in Black meets League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
My overall point in this section is know when to start and stop in terms of your story.
Had we come in where I mentioned and stopped just after the group finally makes it out of the forest, this would have been a fun little lower budget horror thriller.
Instead, maybe because daddy was indulging his daughter, we got a lot of expensive nonsense in Galway, Ireland that we don’t need.
Unless you have M. Night money backing you up (parent or otherwise) it’s best to keep your horror both limited and general in location.
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