Review: GIFTED THE UNDYING

Script review for triggerstreet.com

GIFTED THE UNDYING - by Russell Edwards

In my opinion, Gifted The Undying is a intriguing but ultimately frustrating script. The concept of immortal, regenerating humans isn’t original; it’s Wolverine’s power in X-Men, and Claire the cheerleader in Heroes – but these high profile successes demonstrate that there’s fertile ground here for exploration. I was initially excited to read on.

Unfortunately the development of that promising concept is lacking any real originality – a girl who survives an accident that should have killed her, an evil research corporation kidnapping a human subject, a secret society of people with powers – these are all off-the-rack pillars of pulp sci-fi.

The characters are mostly thin and two-dimensional, Sarah, the scientists, Brias and his goons, Nathanael, Masterson and Sharpley – are all generic stereotypes. Alex has a little personality, but it’s the two FBI agents, Henderson and Martinez, who are the scripts current saving grace. They have more individuality than the rest added together and their relationship is the only chemistry on display.

The dialogue is, in many ways, very good. It’s usually short, sharp and snappy. However, characters often tell each other things the audience has already been shown, and too often dialogue is expositional, explaining aspects of the story that should have been shown instead.

There are two main issues with the story.
1) There’s no clear protagonist. Sarah should be the protagonist, she’s the character getting dragged out of her normal life and into the world of the adventure, yet she doesn’t come back into the story until halfway through and even then takes virtually no action herself, she’s simply swept up by Alex. Alex gets the most screen time and his adventure actually follows an arc – travel to the girl, rescue the girl, take her home. But this isn’t a special adventure for Alex, this is just what he does. The FBI are actually irrelevant to Alex and Sarah’s adventure; they just sweep along behind them explaining things and they have no real interaction with the adventure until the climax.
2) Not enough actually happens. Alex goes, gets in a shoot-out at the station, finds Sarah, rescues her and takes her back to The Gifted. Really, that’s the first act of a movie, maybe the half-way point at a stretch. It’s certainly not enough story for a whole movie.

Because of these two issues with the story the structure is confused, the second issue means it’s too broad, it’s should be a lot faster, a lot tighter, and the first issue means there’s no clear character arc to build the framework around.

Overall, I’ve marked this script as below average. I’ve not marked it as poor because scene to scene, the writing quality is actually quite strong. It’s easy to read, it never gets too bogged down, and there are some nice ideas and visuals in there. But I don’t think the idea has been sufficiently developed. It reads like a good writer who had an idea one morning and started writing the script immediately.

If you plan to rewrite this script, here are my three main suggestions for you next draft.
- make Sarah the real protagonist
- make things happen much faster
- give the audience more credit, don’t explain so much

Take what you’ve written as the climax of your movie, and start again with that as your opening scene. Have a girl being kidnapped and a man on a bike smashing in to rescue her, with real FBI fighting with fake FBI in the mix. That’s an opening scene that will grab the audience’s attention and introduce all the characters in one shot. You can keep the gas station shooting scene, but use it while Alex and Sarah are travelling back to the The Gifted Mansion, and boom – you’re back at the mansion and ready for Sarah to start her real adventure with The Gifted by the end of act one.

If you’d like me to explain any of my criticisms or suggestions in more detail I’m happy to do so. Good luck with future re-writes.