MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.
Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.
Logline (provided by The Black List): “A man who possesses a time travel device uses it to go back in time to prevent an alien invasion.”
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Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line
Around 7PM on December 26, 2011, JAMES SMITH and girlfriend RILEY (who records everything on a small camcorder) speed through Washington, D.C., in an old tank of a Bonneville, chased by the police. Smith has a timer on his watch that has about an hour left on it. The Bonneville races toward the White House, using its unwieldy size and weight to smash through barricades. The car ends up flipping, allowing the police to get at Smith and Riley. They demand that the police look in the car’s trunk. Later, an angry Smith is interrogated by COLONEL BODETTE, who wants to know how Smith got an XM-97 prototype, his weapon of choice. Smith explains they’re all over the place where he comes from. Later, Bodette discovers a second James Smith — not a twin; the same person — is sitting in a D.C. jail. The bomb squad opens the trunk. What’s inside remains a mystery, but it’s surprising and impressive enough to get the attention of DEFENSE SECRETARY KRONAU and PRESIDENT MALLOY, who immediately requests the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Space Command, and NASA. Thunderstruck, they all turn to Smith for advice…just as his watch alarm beeps. Smith demands to know where Malloy was 48 hours ago. Malloy is too shaken to respond. Meanwhile, in Riley’s (empty) interrogation room, she hears an eerie sound, like metal scraping. As it grows louder, Malloy is led away without answering Smith. Meanwhile, Smith has been holding a Blackberry that abruptly powers on.
From inside the interrogation room, things outside seem to be going badly. Smith and Riley hear gunshots and screams. The shadow of something disturbing and unseen creeps into Smith’s interrogation room, but he plays dead. Riley climbs up into the ceiling to hide. Smith comes after her. Together, they move through the underground interrogation room, seeing signs of violence but no bodies. Bodette, Kronau, Malloy, and a bunch of Secret Service move through the White House. Smith tells Riley nothing matters but getting to Malloy. He tells her to tell him if she sees “him.” “Him who?” “Him, him,” which doesn’t make sense but terrifies Riley. Malloy and Kronau are the only ones to make it to a safe room, but the blast door has been torn apart and the place is drenched in blood. Smith and Riley find Malloy, who’s dying. Smith demands to know every detail of what was happening with Malloy 48 hours ago. Malloy dies as something huge — ostensibly “him” — arrives, coming after them. They rush outside, trying to get away from the White House. He kills Riley, and as Smith takes back the camcorder, he pushes some buttons on the Blackberry that suddenly wink him out of existence…
…and into 48 hours ago, December 24th. Exhausted, Smith staggers into a nearby bus station and collapses. The next morning, Smith goes to a coffee shop where Riley works. She doesn’t seem to know Smith at all. He apologizes and promises he won’t let her die again. Riley’s baffled. Smith leaves. Meanwhile, Malloy and Kronau attend a funeral for the First Lady and Malloy’s daughter, who died in an unexpected plane crash. Smith steals a taxi and hauls ass to a D.C. street. At a tenement building, he manufactures low-grade napalm and “paints” something on the side of the building. As the Presidential motorcade drifts by, they stop. Written in flames is the President’s top-secret distress code. They arrest Smith, who has come bearing gifts: a blood sample and finger belonging to Malloy, plus alien tissue samples. His camcorder is both tiny and can hold 300 terabytes of data, containing years of footage depicting a horrific alien attack. Bodette’s XM-97 prototype is accounted for, meaning whatever Smith has told them — ostensibly that he’s a time traveler warning of an impending attack — checks out.
Malloy, Kronau, and Bodette interrogate Smith. They want to know what’s going on. Smith explains that aliens will invade Earth for the first time seven years from now, but they have a keen strategy to make humans an unending food source: they gorge on humanity for 24 hours, then jump back in time 48 hours and start over again. When they arrive, Smith uses his own time-traveling Blackberry to travel back and spends 24 hours trying to warn the proper officials before they attack again, and he jumps back again. He can’t travel earlier than 48 hours because his Blackberry is actually an alien device written in an undecipherable language. If the aliens are so secure with their technology, Malloy asks how Smith got his Blackberry. Smith explains that, seven years from now, an old man randomly gave it to him, showed him the five-button sequence to press, then threw himself in front of bus. Smith demands to speak to a scientist, Dr. Constantine Oro, which Malloy approves despite Kronau’s lack of enthusiasm. Looking at the global panic situation, Malloy scrambles military throughout all the major cities. Smith explains to the military how to attempt to fight them. The White House press secretary explains that the country is at its highest alert but tells people not to panic and gives no further details. Riley is pulled out of her coffee shop by Secret Service and taken to the White House. On the ride over, she’s joined by DR. ORO, who’s effectively Brent Spiner’s character in Independence Day.
Smith tries to convince Riley that, in the future, they’re married. She doesn’t buy it. Malloy calls them both into the war room, where Riley sees the horrific footage of alien attacks and suddenly finds herself believing every word Smith says. Kronau asks Smith if he becomes President in the future. Oro examines Smith’s Blackberry, stunned that such a small device could provide the energy required to create a wormhole through time. Smith knows Oro has a particular project, so the convoy heads out to Oro Industries, an abandoned factory in a dumpy part of D.C. In Oro’s basement lab, a huge contraption built around an intricate mirror array waits for them. He built the device for the military, which would have allowed them to send brief warning messages a few minutes back in time if it had been completed (funding was cut before he could see it through). If they had the right amount of energy, the device could theoretically send anything and everything back in time at least 15 years — when he first built the prototype — so Smith offers up his Blackberry, suggesting they use its power source (the alien ships) to send something back in time, to give them more advance warning. Oro doesn’t believe he has nearly enough time. It’s already 3PM, and Smith says the aliens arrive like clockwork at 8PM — on rare occasions, they show up earlier, but it’s almost always eight. Oro is terrified about the ramifications of sending a message to the past, which will change everything. They all realize they don’t have a choice.
Oro and Bodette watch video footage of the invasion. They realize all the ships are synced somehow, so they don’t accidentally crash. Whatever one ship does, the others do — there is no leader, just a big swarm of like-minded vehicles. Oro’s also shocked to discover that these aren’t exactly spaceships — they’re designed to operate in our atmosphere. President Malloy addresses the nation, alarming them with an honest account of what’s to come (which includes video footage). Smith concocts a message to send to the past, which a lab tech converts into binary code. Later, he sees Kronau altering the message somehow. Meanwhile, Oro tears apart Smith’s trusty Blackberry in order to power his own time machine. Riley and Smith share their first real romantic moment, but it’s interrupted when the Blackberry hums to life with a shower of sparks, followed by the groan of metal heard earlier. Smith checks his timer, but there are two hours left. He announces that they’re early.
They have to adjust their schedule, so Oro tries to send the message — and trips a breaker. It’s not the time machine, powered by the ships, but the laptop that has the message in it. Somebody has to reset the breaker — and that somebody is Smith. He races through the lab, resets the breaker, and is pleasantly surprised no aliens have attempted to kill him — until one appears. Smith kills it with his XM-97. He returns to the basement, and they hide, fearing the cacophony they hear outside. Oro sends the message, he thinks, but nothing has changed. Smith orders Oro to put his Blackberry back together. They decide to flee the basement, and not a moment too soon — the “silhouetted dragon” seen earlier (a.k.a., him) arrives. It eyes the mirror array with obvious intelligence. It understands what they’ve done. Smith tries to use the Blackberry to send himself and Riley back in time, but it’s no longer working. As aliens descend on them, Smith realizes Oro put one of the components in upside-down. He flips it, the Blackberry powers on, and he and Riley go back in time, to December 23rd. (Incidentally, they leave Oro behind when he becomes overwhelmed by what’s happening.)
Smith and Riley are already surrounded by soldiers — and Kronau, who is now the President. Malloy is now a vice admiral, Bodette is a general, and Oro…is exactly the same. The world has changed significantly — D.C. is an urban war zone, glutted with military. The Pentagon has expanded exponentially. Hundreds of millions died during riots that followed the initial panic after the message was announced. Military technology has improved to the point that these people are prepared for an attack. They strap Smith into something uncomfortably similar to Farscape’s Aurora Chair, which extracts Smith’s memories and displays them on computer monitors so Kronau and the others can see what they’re up against and strategize. The memory videos are instantly processed by the computer to give vital information about the alien infrastructure. As Riley is dragged to a similar chair, she’s surprised to see a display of Smith’s memories of her — sweet, yet she dies over and over again. Later, Kronau and Malloy plan to send Smith and Riley to the front lines. They need everyone to fight if they stand a chance.
Inside a military chopper, Riley is pissed. Among other things, she’s noticed Smith doesn’t have a wedding ring. Smith makes excuses. He notices Riley nervously fingering something — the laser mirror array. She explains the silhouetted dragon dropped it just before they left. Smith panics and demands they turn the chopper around. They refuse, so Smith and Riley fight back — resulting in the chopper inadvertently spinning out of control. Riley falls out of the helicopter and onto the roof of a building where Oro awaits the end of the world. Smith is also thrown out of the helicopter, landing on another roof, before the chopper crashes. Smith rushes toward Bodette and convinces him that one of the aliens has uncovered their plan, and the only logical thing to do in that scenario is attack sooner, to gain what little surprise element they can. Kronau and Malloy gripe about this hitch in their plans — their strategy was based around a coordinated surprise attack, to catch them off guard. They can’t just change the strategy. Outside, the groaning metal sound starts again. Ships and dragon aliens appear. This time, they’re even more heavily armored than usual — they know what to expect and have prepared for it. The streets of D.C. are instantly filled with carnage. The silhouetted dragon, no longer in silhouette (and revealed as a one-eyed dragon), appears, sniffing around for something. Reports come in that major cities have fallen or are falling.
Riley drags Oro into the building. Smith, injured, meets her in the same building. Smith operates under the assumption that when Kronau confiscated his Blackberry, he destroyed it. Dr. Oro knows he didn’t. Kronau is at Oro’s lab, using the Blackberry to send yet another message back, feeding him more information he can use for political gain. Smith, Riley, and Oro try to sneak through the streets of D.C. They come upon a fire station and steal a truck. Oro flips the siren on, drawing the dragons’ attention. One climbs on the roof. Riley shoots it, and it falls, pulling the roof off with it. As more dragons approach, it looks like they’re done for — when they all suddenly stop. They’re suddenly deferential — because 60-foot dragon queens have descended from something resembling a mothership. Smith, Riley, and Oro get down to the basement lab, but the one-eyed dragon is on to them. Threatening Riley, the one-eyed dragon orders them to “undo” the messages they’ve sent back. Oro sends a message back to himself to disregard all the other messages, which will revert the timeline. Despite complying with his order, the one-eyed dragon still squeezes Riley’s neck and begins shooting blades at the others. General Bodette suddenly appears, worse for wear, and shoots the one-eyed dragon. This knocks him away from Riley but doesn’t kill him — so Riley grabs some live wires and jams them into a puddle of water, which fries the one-eyed dragon’s electronic brain implant.
Smith takes the Blackberry, and they flee. Rather than simply going back another two days to warn the others, Smith and Oro hatch a scheme. Realizing a low voltage overloads their brain implant, they wonder what would happen if they overloaded the computers in one of the ships. Since all the ships operate together, if one goes down, they all go down. Bodette leads them to a blood-spattered lab filled with high-tech equipment, which allows them to analyze the ships. They map the ship and find the location of its control computer. Oro points out that it’s a suicide mission — if they go into a ship 2000 feet in the air, overload the computer, and then jump back in time, there will be no ship, which means they’ll fall to their deaths. They decide to go with it. As Smith, Oro, and Bodette prepare to leave, Riley is angry — she’s finally found him, and now he’s going to kill himself. Smith doesn’t care. He hugs her, secretly duct-taping his Blackberry to her back, which he activates. She shoves him away and disappears through time, pissed when she realizes what is happening.
Smith, Oro, and Bodette hitchhike on floating bodies to get inside the ship. They’re forced to walk through a “scary dark corridor” in order to get to the computer control area. Several times, they’re almost spotted, but they manage to hide long enough. They get the drop on one, which they kill, but not before it kills Bodette. They finally get to the computer, which Oro realizes is protected by a rudimentary containment field — all they need to do is turn it off, and the electrical energy will overload the computer’s circuits. Only — they can’t figure out how to turn off the containment field. Finally, Smith is forced to punch a hole in the floor, which he tosses Bodette’s body through. Bodette’s body, in turn, punches a hole in the containment field, overloading the ship. As energy amasses, threatening to destroy them, another one-eyed dragon appears, ready to kill them. He does kill Oro, but Smith flees. In his attempts to escape, Smith tumbles right out of the ship, followed by the one-eyed dragon. Smith clings to a floating person, a soldier. Smith grabs his pistol, shoots the one-eyed dragon in his one eye, and grabs his Blackberry as he falls. Smith does a swan dive, entering the sequence as he goes, disappearing through time four feet from the ground.
Two days earlier, Riley runs through D.C. to Oro Industries, where she finds Smith in a pool of his own blood. Smith admits she never married him, that he couldn’t even get her to go out with him, but he fell in love with her and forced himself to continually save her, whether she loved him back or not. She cradles Smith as he dies. On Christmas, Riley sits at the café, watching a news report about the First Lady and Malloy’s daughter skipping their helicopter flight, avoiding catastrophic failure. Another report shows Oro getting arrested for charging a Presidential podium and demanding he allocate a grant for SETI. Smith arrives at the café, surprised that this total stranger bailed him out of jail. He asks if he knows her. Riley says, “Not yet.” She asks him to go on a walk with her. Arm in arm, they stroll into a D.C. Christmas portrait. All the while, Riley’s Blackberry lies in a trash can. It powers on.
In writing, time travel is a bloodsport. If it isn’t played exactly right, it can turn a decent story idea into a complete fucking disaster.
The Days Before isn’t played exactly right.
Let me describe the problem with the time travel logic. It’s pretty convoluted, so bear with me. Okay, so you have the aliens. They have these Blackberry devices that are preprogrammed to travel 48 hours into the past. They eat and pillage for 24 hours, then jump 48 hours in the past. Then, there’s Smith. He travels 48 hours in the past the instant they arrive. So let’s say 12/26 at 8PM is the first-ever time Smith traveled. He goes back to 12/24 at 8PM. The aliens eat and pillage until 12/27 at 8PM, then jump back to 12/25 at 8PM. Smith immediately jumps back, to 12/23 at 8PM. The aliens eat and pillage until 12/26 at 8PM, then jump back to 12/24 at 8PM. Smith immediately jumps back, to 12/22 at 8PM. The aliens eat and pillage until 12/25 at 8PM, then jump back to 12/23 at 8PM. So there’s a pattern, and believe it or not, the pattern pretty much works if you’re going for the “free will” interpretation of time travel. I.e., that time travel is not a predetermined course of action, meaning if you travel back in time and step on a butterfly, it will have dire ramifications on the future; whereas, in the “predetermined” variation on time travel that makes things a lot less messy, you go back and step on a butterfly and it has no effect, because it was always supposed to happen, because you were always there. Did I just blow your mind?
The cracks in the façade start to appear right around the time they decide to send the message 15 years into the past. The aliens travel back 48 hours for every 24 hours of slaughter, which means the men of the past lose 48 hours for every 24 hours they spend planning a counterattack…right? This where things get complicated and started to lose logical traction with me. Because, yes, in a free universe, sending a message to the past saying, “The world will end on December 23, 2011 — here’s how to prepare,” seems like it would make sense. It’s more complicated than that, though. If they have all the information — nobody really ever says what’s in the message, other than Kronau tampering with its content, but it seems strongly hinted that they know enough to be prepared — wouldn’t a smart person draw the conclusion that the end of the world could actually occur anywhere between 7.5 and 15 years from the date the message was received? Because the aliens are barreling at them twice as fast as time is occurring, right? I know a tangent universe is supposed to be an instantaneous change to the timeline, but time isn’t completely fluid, either… Is it?
Whether it is or isn’t, doesn’t the new world fragment everything, creating that universe-destroying paradox Doc Brown warned about in Back to the Future Part II? Because if the entire universe changes, that means Smith changes. It means what will happen seven years in the future changes. If hundreds of millions died in riots, how do we know Smith, the old man, or someone integrally related to the most important moment in the script (Smith receiving the Blackberry) isn’t affected? How do we know the new circumstances of Smith’s military-dictatorship lifestyle won’t change the way he reacts to receiving the Blackberry? Maybe he won’t be the type of person who’s interested in saving the world. This, then, is the problem with the “free will” time travel story: if one moment has permanent ramifications on the universe, those ramifications continue through the present and into the future. Smith and Riley should not be isolated from it, because that just doesn’t make sense. (And yes, it’s a super-cheat to not show any “effect” of the message until Smith and Riley jump again, thus sticking “our” unaffected Smith and Riley into a totally separate tangent universe.)
Even if this, in and of itself, didn’t at least call this plot point into question, here’s something that may: ultimately, the script comes down to overloading the ship fleet’s computers. In the second act, Dr. Oro and Smith decide based on no concrete evidence that they have an “unlimited” power supply — obviously it’s limited by the amount of power the ship needs for propulsion, human-snatching, etc. — to tap into in order to get Oro’s machine working. Oro says that, theoretically, if they can harness the power of the Blackberry, he can send “anything” through time… So why is it that they’re hellbent on sending nothing more than binary code messages? Why not send a person through time, just as Smith himself came back prepared with fingers and tissue samples and video? Not just for the sake of that being a little more dramatically interesting than sending what amounts to a telegram, but for the sake of their own preparedness. They’re relying on a little too much the assumption that they can nab Smith on a particular day, analyze everything he has with him, and magically be able to fight back within 24 hours, despite their plan resting on a coordinated attack among billions.
This concludes the super-nerd dissection portion of the screenplay. On to the normal shit, like story and character…
Strip away the time travel element, and this is just a gorier Independence Day. Not much wrong with that, except for the part where Independence Day already exists and isn’t the terrible movie certain people allege. Maybe this script asks headier questions than ID4 — most of them related to the partially broken time travel concept — but it’s asking the wrong questions. Here’s the #1 question I asked: why are these aliens here? “To eat people” isn’t good enough. What kind of civilization needs to feed so much that they raze a civilization not once, not twice, but in perpetuity until, as far as we know, they get so far back in time that the human race diminishes from billions to a few million? What happens when Earth no longer provides a sustainable level of food? Granted, we never find out why the aliens in Independence Day showed up, but guess what? Those aliens didn’t have a diabolical scheme in place to (a) eat everyone and (b) travel back in time to eat them again. The only thing we learn about The Days Before’s aliens is that they’re apparently feeding enormous queens. Why do they need so much? Is this the preparation for some sort of extended hibernation? Do they need to eat constantly like sharks? Who the fuck knows? St. John doesn’t take the time addressing questions like this.
In fact, he spends a little too much time being coy. That whole “Him, him” style of writing drove me slightly insane, because it smacks of a writer being clever for the sake of cleverness, and frankly, it’s not clever. It’s just coy, which is like an annoying version of clever. Examples of this abound: hiding the aliens the audience knows are aliens, hiding what Malloy initially tells Smith (or even the fact that he tells him anything) from the audience — most of this stuff hinders the story rather than helping it. When it doesn’t hinder the story, it feels more like St. John is being saucy by pointing out things he assumes the audience is thinking about without addressing them with any real substance. Movies are inherently about manipulating audiences, but audiences don’t generally want a movie to manipulate them into feeling frustration. When The Days Before isn’t reveling in the flawed execution of its convoluted time travel mechanics, it’s offering up annoying moments like these.
As an unfortunate result of this tendency toward adorable coyness, the relationship between Smith and Riley is basically one huge macrocosm of why the coyness doesn’t work. The script tries so hard to be edgy and ironic and post-post that it forgets the audience is supposed to get somewhat invested in them. It just backs away from real emotion, opting instead for pithy dialogue that violates one of the central tenets of comedy writing: it’s always funnier when the characters don’t know they’re in a comedy. Smith and Riley both know it, and so does St. John, so he tries so hard to subvert clichés that the relationship isn’t interesting, which makes it hard to care when one of the characters ends up in jeopardy and the other either dashes off to help or preemptively mourns them. Worse than that, St. John doubles back into creepy sincerity with Smith’s disconcerting declaration that Riley wouldn’t give him the time of day and only fell in love with him — multiple times — because he convinced her she would someday marry him. How does that make him, or the relationship, in any way likable? It’s the sort of weird explanation that sheltered men believe makes women melt, when in reality any female with a shred of sanity and/or fewer than three cats would file a restraining order. As opposed to, say, finding the still-alive version of Smith and forcing the relationship to blossom.
Throughout the script, I kept waiting for something unexpected to happen. The first act presents itself as a theoretically inventive script, so why is it that the best it has to offer is a warmed-over Independence Day with a variation on the familiar “time-loop” sci-fi plot and, even better, the “I’ve changed history so we’re all sinister pseudo-Nazis” sci-fi plot? Simply tossing familiar ideas into a blender doesn’t make a story unique. And I wouldn’t care much if it were unique or not if it had something else to sell (like strong characters and/or compelling, if familiar, relationships).
And there are still more crazy sci-fi questions, because I am that much of a nerd:
Look, The Days Before moves like a motherfucker, but it’s another one of those scripts that keeps hurling shiny objects so the audience won’t notice the total lack of substance. What the hell do you do with that? You can either love it because all the distractions make your eyes boggle at its invention (because you’ve apparently never seen a sci-fi movie and, as a result, convince yourself that this script actually is inventive), or you can take a minute to think about what you’re reading and realize it doesn’t add up to anything substantial.
Well, you can’t get rid of the time travel without turning this into a remake of Independence Day. The easiest ways to make this script work is to drop the coquettish attempts at cleverness, make Smith’s relationship with Riley more believable and interesting, and (obviously) shore up the holes in the time travel logic. Based on the numerous explanations, St. John seems to think the complexities are airtight, but they’re just not. This project would be a lot better off if audience members didn’t go to some dumpy diner afterward to discuss it and realize it doesn’t make any actual sense. But it has some fun moments and St. John keeps the pace flying, so the fixes are honestly a bit more minor than they seem. They just require a great deal of thought.
Posted by Stan on December 25, 2009 7:16 PM