Sunday Script Review

Hello,

This week my Sunday Script review is for the scripts Die In A Gun Fight and Contagion.

Die In A Gun Fight - writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari.

The two writers sold this script while still in NYU film school. An impressive start to what is hopefully to be a long and profitable career.

What it is about is two young people from rival families fall in love. The two kids, Ben Gibbons and Mary Rathcart, from well to do families never seemed to grow out of their rebellious youth stage which leads to conflict with their families. Conflict is something that every script needs.

It had good pace to the script and the dialogue was good. The only weakness to it at this stage was that the main characters did not yet have (at this stage in the script's development) clearly defined goals.

One of the fathers seemed to. Ben's father is in a lawsuit against a corporation that developed a teletransport device. The reason is simply that a man went through the device ended up committing a murder and then claimed that the device destroyed his soul which caused him to commit murder.

So Ben's father is trying to prove the existence of the human soul. I won't spoil the ending for those who haven't read the script in case it doesn't change much when it reaches the theater.

But the only weakness, which can be fixed, is that a script needs to have characters that have goals and flaws which are challenged by the story. That's the lesson learned there as throughout I didn't seem to care much about the characters.

CONTAGION

Contagion written by Scott Z. Burns is another script/movie about a virus that gets unleashed onto people and the race against time to prevent a catastrophe ensues.

The difference here is that with most of the movies of this type they only show that one part of a city or country (usually the USA) is effected and it must be contained quickly.

Here it's a little more realistic in that there are places all over the world, China, USA the main ones that get hit with a deadly disease. The reality here is that this is what would most likely happen today with our high speed travel there will be a high death toll before people realize that something's amiss.

That and the fact that the corporations trying to find a cure will undoubtedly be trying to figure out who gets what percentage of the profits before while people die.

The only flaw is that with this script there doesn't seem to be any main characters who have flaws and have conflict with each other. It could potentially use something similar to The African Queen in which the characters played by Bogart and Hepburn started out as rivals and were brought together by fighting the Germans. This could potentially strengthen the script.