Script review site ScriptShadow compared two versions of Mute, which Jones wrote with Mike Johnson. The first script, written in 2006, is actually set in modern day Berlin. It's only in the more recent version, set in 2046, that we get the futuristic film noir. But ScriptShadow reviewer Carson Reeves says the differences in the two versions are likely aesthetic, as the overall story remains largely the same despite the futuristic setting. Spoilers below.

We've known for some time that Mute focuses on a bartender who has lost the ability to speak and gets caught up in the Berlin underworld when his female partner goes missing. The entire script is available here, but Mute tells two parallel stories. One is about Leo, the titular mute, who falls for his fellow waiter, an Afghan woman named Naadirah. One day, Leo is unable to find Naadirah, and tears through Berlin's gangsters to find her, though he eventually learns that she is harboring a shocking secret. The other story focuses on Cactus Bill, an American stuck in Berlin who is waiting on fake passports for his wife and daughter so he can get out of dodge. Reeves notes that while Leo's story is all action, no talk (at least not from Leo), the Cactus Bill scenes are extremely verbose; Cactus Bill does little more than talk and wait around for passports.

At the moment, Mute is on hold while Jones takes on Source Code. But Reeves believes that, even with a few bumps in the script, Mute will at least look incredible, if it ever gets made.

[ScriptShadow]

Latino Review got their hands on Area 51's secrets and provided a few details. First off, there is no script. Just as he did with Paranormal Activity, director/writer Oren Peli only created scenarios.

The story starts off with the main character/geek testing out his new camera. Sigh - haven't we seen this before? This fella is Chris and he truly believes in aliens, because of all the posters on his walls and the telescope he attached to his parent's house. But that doesn't make him a super geek - he has two jock friends and one girl pal named Natalie, who swears her dad was abducted by aliens. Which I'm sure will come back into play at sometime or another.

Chris and his pals go on a trip to Vegas, and wind up taking a tour of Area 51, which Chris arranged. He's hellbent on proving that there are aliens on this base and that there are secret government experiments going on behind closed doors. With his super secret geek knowledge Chris leads the gang through all the highly guarded doors, motion detectors, thermal imaging, ammonia detectors, and ray guns. What's that you say? Yes - motherfucking ray guns.

Not much else is revealed because the script is just an outline, but to find out more check out Latino Review's exclusive recounts of what they've read. Can Peli make aliens scary again? I certainly hope so.

Afterlife centers on Daniel Hoffstetter, a workaholic government scientist who neglects his wife in favor of his DNA research, a choice that's all the more tragic when he collapses and dies in the first eight pages of the script. Naturally, since the entire screenplay is about Daniel, he doesn't stay dead very long, and soon wakes up to find himself in a younger, fresher body. His boss, the ethically-challenged Leonard, explains that Daniel's mind has been imprinted on a mind-wiped body. But Daniel's new longevity comes at a price: he is now an employee for the Tank, an ultra-secret branch of the government.

Like the Dollhouse, the Tank is an underground facility where the "employees" are kept isolated from the rest of the world. But instead of mindless, beautiful zombies, the employees are scientists who have been resurrected by the Tank to continue their work. Daniel is not allowed to leave the Tank, or even contact his wife. Eventually, the frustrated Daniel is able to escape, only to discover an added layer of security in the Tank's plans: the body he's been given is that of a notorious executed serial killer, making him unable to blend in with normal society.

Daniel enjoys a happy reunion with his wife, but is soon finds himself pursued on all sides — by the Tank, by the detective who captured the serial killer, and by the serial killer himself, whose personality is beginning to reemerge inside Daniel's mind. Whedon wrote Afterlife 1994 as a spec script and sold it; at some point Andy Tennant was onboard to rewrite and direct it, but it's never been made. Still, it's interesting to see how far back some of Whedon's ideas for Dollhouse go.

Afterlife Script
Afterlife Review [Scriptshadow]

Latino Review has a sneak peek inside Robert Rodriguez's Preadators film, and thankfully it sounds like the "shoot 'em up, chase and fight" movie that belongs in the Predator franchise. No deeper meanings, no alien discovery — just them versus us.

Here are a few highlights from their report. As we know the bulk of the film takes place on the Predator home planet, which is a giant jungle similar to Earth in the Cretaceous period. Our hero is Royce, a "Steve McQueen" type.

The film begins back on Earth, when Royce gets in a fight with another human, and kills his opponent — but some Predators are watching the whole thing from behind their camouflage screens. The Predators like what they see, so they kidnap Royce and shoot him over to their home planet.

Royce, along with seven other abducted humans, all wake up after parachuting into the Predator home planet. This surly bunch of brutes were all collected because they are the best of the worst on Earth. And the Predators will be hunting these supposed baddest humans on Earth — or Earth's answer to Predators, if you will.

The seven include:

• Cuchillo A Mexican enforcer from the drug cartel, who is Danny Trejo's character.
• A Russian named Nikolai with a four barrel gas powered rotary machine gun....close to The Body's weapon.
• The token female role goes to Isabelle, a "tough as nails" lady who can speak French and carries a sniper rifle.
• A possible skin head convict, who is armed only with a prison made knife, is also in the group.
• Plus a Japanese enforcer who appears to be carrying a samurai sword,
• a member of the Sierra Leone death squad,
• and a small "unassuming" man named Edwin who was on the FBI's most wanted list.

They figure out relatively quickly that this is a "kill or be killed" game. So they make haste in this massive jungle, while being hunted by two Super Predators and their leader, the Black Super Predator. LR describes these baddes as "the regular Predator on steroids." Excellent.

Eventually the super Predators raise the stakes on the gang, including one human they pick up along the way in the jungle, and force all the madness to an accelerated climax. LR claims that there may be a Predator cameo, and drops a hint about who it could be. (Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be Danny Glover.) To learn more about the script and the rest of the team, watch the Latino Review video which contains additional details.

Script review site Scriptshadow got a hold of the Shadow 19 script, which was purchased by Warner Bros. with Keanu Reeves set to star. (A grain of salt is indicated, of course: We're assuming Scriptshadow read the real script, and this isn't a hoax.) The project eventually fell apart, and Spahits ended up successfully pitching his idea for the Alien prequel to Fox and Ridley Scott. Spoilers for Shadow 19 below.

Shadow 19 may have fallen by the wayside, but its blood-pumping, hard sci-fi, action flick plotline promises great things for the Alien prequel. The script introduces us to space marine Conrad Vance, already outfitted in his mecha suit and about to be launched into an off-world battle. Vance is a warrior, but also a survivor, the brilliant strategist who always comes back from battle. It's just our introduction to Vance and the sorts of military technology that exist in this future, but Scriptshadow assures us it's perfectly thrilling in its own right:

And in a battle that made me cum in my pants, Vance takes the offensive. He rips a turret off the thing, enters the Colossus, and starts to kill every living thing inside like a goddamn bull in a China shop. Of course, the look on all of the officer's faces is pretty fucking priceless when Vance uses his jump-jets to blast through a ladder-well, collide into the ceiling of the bridge, fall, land, and proceed to slaughter the Hegemony scum ED-209 style. Kudos to you, Mr. Spaihts. I never had multiple orgasms while reading the first ten pages of a screenplay until Shadow 19 (and I've read a lot of scripts).

After this successful battle, Vance is quickly whisked off to a top secret mission that brings him to the State Science Agency, an organization of cyberpunk Scientists who are completely loyal to the Agency, not just by contract, but by design. The most advanced Scientists are fitted with a cybernetic crown, one that enhances their cognitive abilities and renders them capable of operating the Agency's technology with their minds, but also plugs them into the Agency permanently and irreparably, so that treason means death.

The Agency has created a secret sentient terraforming ship called Prometheus, and Prometheus has been sent to transform the planet Erix into a habitable world. One of Prometheus' submachines, known as a Crawler, has broken down, and Vance has to brave the hostile planet in order to repair it. The Agency also has a device that sends a projection of Vance to Erix rather than Vance himself, so that when he dies (something that happens repeatedly), he has an endless videogame supply of "extra lives." So, Vance is sent to Erix over and over again until he can figure out how to survive long enough to repair the Crawler. Meanwhile, he develops a relationship with a mid-level Scientist, forcing them both to question their loyalties to their respective organizations. And there may be evidence of intelligent life on Erix, but the Agency is determined no Scientist will live long enough to discover it. Eventually, the movie culminates in an enormous battle for which Vance has requisitioned Earth's most powerful weapons, a scene designed to please lovers of first-person shooter games.

Although Scriptshadow's review indicates some flaws in the script (Vance's repeated attempts to survive Erix are, apparently, at points repetitive), they claim it's an impressive piece of work, even just on paper:

Shadow 19 is a gunmetal paean to id Software and cyberpunk. A hymn to boys (and girls, are you out there?) who spent many a night playing Doom, or any videogame, really, and you were so engrossed in the virtual world the next time you looked out the window it was already dawn. It is a love letter to fans of smart and ambitious science fiction.

It's a movie we might never see, but at least we might get shades of Shadow 19 in the Alien prequel.

Shadow 19 [Scriptshadow]

CC2K previewed the Tron 2 script and praises Steven Lisberger's original work for having innovated new ways of representing the "lives" of computer programs and the ways in which hacking alters the reality of the cyber-world. The review comes down on the new script for not quite following suit. Specifically, the new screenplay doesn't repesent hacking quite the same way, from the Space Paranoids nod to original creator Flynn's video game work, to speedy racing inside the mainframe programs versus Tron. In particular, they have a problem that the fake war scenario of hacking has been turned into a fake race, where in the original it was represented as fighting.

I say the rule of Tron should be: if it looks good, just do it. The race is going to look slick as hell (remember the Comic Con footage). There doesn't have to be much real reasoning as to why the computer would interpret a hack program into a physical race any more than it has to justify digitizing a human being into a computer, and then keeping them there... what do they eat? Where do they go the restroom for that matter?

But if you want to hear more on this fact, check out the article they really go into it. Me, well, I just want to know where Jeff Bridges is and if he'll have that crazy beard (I've heard mixed reviews about the beard's existence). In the new script, the Dude himself is now trapped inside the Encom's main frame, and has been for years, unbeknownst to his son (yes he has a son now in the real world). The real Flynn has been leading a light cycle resistance against evil viral forces from inside the main frame — oh, and he's not crazy or a god...nuts.

So it's into the computer we go with Sean Flynn (Flynn's son), either on purpose to find his dad or by accident (it's not explained). One inside they'll have to prevent the new evil CEO (there's another one) from infecting the world or something.

Here's the stuff that's new that I'm most excited about, these two characters:

D-Rezz and I-Beem. D-Rezz is a, " powerful deletion utility that helps out the heroes. Has the potential to be pretty cute. He growls menacingly at various bad guys while clobbering them and dies in a scene sure to distress the kiddies." I is described as a "A frazzled denizen of the cyber-world. I'm not sure what kind of app he is, but he can teleport from one place to another." Both sound like cute little additions to the sparsely built mainframe of yesteryear.

There is actual data surfing, like surfing. So that's going to be horrendous to watch, I'm sure, but funny for all of us who stopped using "surfing the web" terms years ago. A memory leak is represented as green goo, and in the real world Flynn is a cautionary urban legend, told amongst nerds, about a man who went into the computer.

Thanks to IESB, we've got additional details as to how the movie version of Nemo becomes the angry underwater sea captain. And I have to say that if my life was filled with as many montages as this screenplay, I too would be an angry and bitter old sea dog. Or Rocky.

The movie starts with a young Nemo who is returning to Mumbai Harbor in the 1850s. After awaking from a naked dream where he floats, stranded and surrounded by fish, we learn that his mother is passed, and the young man is on his way back to visit her grave. But his wishes are cast aside when the General (who is also Nemo's Papa) demands Nemo's presence in his office.

Like all good movie dads, the General is none too pleased with Nemo's lackadaisical attitude towards the crown and his title, because he's not in appropriate uniform (gasp). But no time for pleasantries, because Nemo is thrown back into service for Her Majesty, his mother's grave be damned.

Nemo grudgingly goes back to training the troops but not for long, because Indian rebels are attacking. A bloody fight ensues — with elephants — and Nemo comes face to sexy face with Rami. The hottie rebel who "rides like a warrior and heads down the hall full speed with the reins in her teeth, a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other," fights Nemo with Kama Sutra books and sexy head butts.

Their fighting leads to love, and the next thing you know, the two are thrust into a montage of secret meetings and love-making. There are love and babies and escape plans, and the next thing you know Nemo and his bride are on a steamboat, with a little baby in tow.

This is where the movie gets crazy confusing. The crew of the steam boat uncovers the secret Vulcania Island, that is full of dead people and mystery. Apparently this island holds the key to eternal power. What is this power? No idea. But everyone wants it.

Then more betrayal and fighting, as Nemo's old army buddies catch up with him and demand knowledge of the new power source. But noble Nemo won't give it to them, and they end up framing him for the murder of his Papa.

There's more fighting and long winded speeches about courage, and Nemo is eventually kidnapped while his lady and baby are on the lam.

Things don't go so well for his tiny family, and Nemo is thrown into anger and depression. But he recoups with the aide of montages and the building of the Nautilus. Which leads to an all out warship battle and lots of destroyed lives and boats.

All in all, all that torturing and messed-up family stuff lends credence to Nemo's crappy state of mind afterwards. But as for the actual story itself? Well it sounds like the writers may need to fill in some submarine-sized holes.

Check out IESB for the entire run down, and let's all hope that they give the rewrite a little more thought. Also I'm going to have to STRONGLY agree with IESB that Will Smith would be a terrible casting decision for this origins tale. I'm hoping for a younger actor with less one-liner delivery.

Bradbury’s script outline for The Day the Earth Stood Still II: The Evening of the Second Day opens on Christmas Eve, thirty years after the events of the original film. Chris Atkins, an employee at the Vehicle Assembly Building for the Apollo Mission, witnesses the landing of an alien spacecraft, a sight he half-remembers from his childhood. It is revealed that someone left the spacecraft, and NASA officials are on the lookout for him, her, or it. But Atkins has a vague feeling about the ship, a feeling he describes with a vague bit of dialogue:

ATKINS

Maybe we don't search. Maybe we wait for it to find us.

DIRECTOR

Why should it do that?

ATKINS

Because — it knows one of us.

DIRECTOR

Who?

ATKINS

Me. I think. I have a hunch.

DIRECTOR

I hope your hunch is scientific.

ATKINS

And how will your search pay off?

DIRECTOR

It won't. Get home. It's Christmas Eve.

So Atkins returns to his boarding house, where he suspects one of his fellow boarders of being the alien visitor. First he suspects the cockney reporter, but while he’s trimming the house’s Christmas tree, a young woman hands him the star for the top. She is radiant and beautiful and Atkins falls instantly in love with her. So naturally she’s the alien.

The alien woman takes off and Atkins pursues her. He eventually catches up with her (after opening her ship with the words “Klaatu barada nikto”) and learns that she is Klaata, Klaatu’s daughter. Klaatu has died, but Klaata has traveled to Earth with his body to continue his work.

At first, Atkins is excited by her arrival, and the prospect of a messianic arrival on Christmas Eve turns him poetic:

ATKINS
Time for a Second Annunciation?

She knows what he is speaking about. The knowledge of the Biblical Annunciation is in her glowing face as she turns back to him.

YOUNG WOMAN [Klaata]

What would you like to have announced?

ATKINS looks from her to the world far across the land, past the silent gantries.

ATKINS

That this Christmas morn, we get the grandest gift that man ever got. That something incredible and wonderful is about to happen, that will change us forever and be only for the good!

The mood turns sour when Atkins realizes Klaata has come to judge humanity, as he is sure that humans have failed to carry out Klaatu’s edict to change their ways. But Klaata assures him it isn’t so dire:

KLAATA

You've behaved better than you think. That's why we delayed. You're strange people. You've actually done some things right!

ATKINS
Like what?

KLAATA

Don’t you know? Must I, from some other world tell you? Thirty years ago people still died from polio, malaria, scarlet fever. You've stopped all that. Your country invented new kinds of wheat and corn. You send food to 90 countries. Immigrants pour into your land, 500 thousand a year. Why are they coming here if you're as bad as you say?

It appears that by judging humanity, Klaata means she’s judging the US. Do the people dying of malaria in Africa not count?

But Klaata tells Atkins that she has come to Earth not as Santa Claus, but as an extraterrestrial Grinch. After demonstrating her awesome ability to unmake matter, she reveals to him her plan:

KLAATA then explains in some detail what their plan, her plan, KLAATU's plan, is. To let the panic grow in little starts and stops, little vanishings, little disappearances, at first unnoticed. Who cares, for instance, if a11 the tiddlewinks in the world vanish on the same day? Or all the collar-stays? Or all the pennies which now burden us and are almost worthless?

Somewhere down the line – OIL.

Where Klaatu warned humanity to abandon its violent ways, Klaata mostly wants us to end our dependence on oil. Before she leaves, she gathers military officials and world leaders to witness a demonstration of solar power, implying that Atkins should help lead them all into an era of alternative energy.

But Klaata isn’t taking any chances. She gives Atkins a list of problems humanity must solve within the next twenty years, or else face certain destruction. She gives him a small cube into which he must feed data from their assignments. Atkins apparently contemplates gaming the cube, but Klaata isn’t having any of it:

KLAATA

No. Don't even think it. You can't fool Gort.

ATKINS
Gort?!

That’s what everyone in the theater would have been thinking had this ever managed to get made. Did they dismantle Gort? Did he have an accident with a trash compactor? Klaata says this is Gort’s heart, but never says whether the rest of his body is lying in wait to enact humanity’s destruction.

Klaata promises her that if Atkins is a good boy and fulfills all of the duties on the list, humanity will be saved and the two of them will be rejoined:

KLAATA

If you have done as you say you will do, grown to fit your promise, given yourselves back to yourselves as a gift, then place this cube, still lit, in your space machine. You wi11 travel faster than Death can follow. This will take you to our world.

ATKINS

Where the angels of the Lord will sing and dance and shout our welcome?

KLAATA
Where I will be waiting.

They share a bittersweet kiss before Klaata departs, leaving Atkins to ponder whether humanity’s salvation or the promise of future alien nookie is a better incentive for solving the energy crisis.

[Scifi Scripts]

Agentorange writes:

If this is the script that gets filmed, then The Road will not only be the most important post-apocalyptic film ever made but it will profoundly affect the cinema going world. But I can't help but wonder; is the world ready for a film this dark? . . . That's not to say there aren't some changes and surprises along the way. However, I'd say most if not all the changes are for the better. In some cases, scenes have been extended to create even more tension. If you've read the book you'll know what I'm talking about when I mention "the house" scene. It is one of the tensest scenes in the screenplay and it has been extended to the point that it is almost unbearably suspenseful.

Agentorange says viewers will be immediately drawn into character studies so bleak they seem like they would have to end up on the cutting-room floor. Page 8 treats us to a scene where the father and son find a family of suicides strung up in a barn, and stand next to them debating whether they might have left any food behind. After they leave without food, the father shows his son how to kill himself "properly," with a gun in his mouth. This is definitely a father-son relationship of the post-apocalypse.

Apparently little is added to the script that wasn't in the book, save for a few short scenes giving the father's backstory and a few moments where his wife behaves in a way that doesn't quite make sense given her character.

Given that they got their hands on the whole script, however, I really wish they'd given us a bit more detail about what to expect. When I clamored for more, Don Neumann (Mr. Quiet Earth himself) assured me by email, "Suffice to say with our post apocalyptic expertise, we give it a ringing endorsement." But he added that if enough people clamor for more, he might be willing to post a few more details of the script.

So check out what Quiet Earth has, and email them asking for MORE.

THE ROAD Script Review [Quiet Earth]

In the script for the Buck Rogers reboot, it's a Ukrainian strategic defense initiative satellite that's failing, although it's also carving huge swaths across the planet with its mega-laser weapon. Sort of like the Borg did in Enterprise when they chopped up Florida. Buck Rogers, superhero to millions and ace of the space skies is sent off to shoot the thing down, although it's partially sentient and dodges his superbomb. Buck, ever the hero, decides to go after the satellite with the only weapon he has left... himself.

He crashes into it, but is apparently obliterated in the process. But little known to those left behind, he's blasted into deep space as debris. On Earth, he's celebrated as a hero with statues and meals named after him, but the resulting nuclear explosion is seen in space and alien species start visiting the planet. This leads to problems later, the kind that only Buck can solve when he thaws out 100 years later. Although we'll never really know, because the script died in development, but we're patiently waiting his return, perhaps in 2108.

With the strike going on, even rewrites can't be made to the film during shooting, so that nixes any possible fixes to the script, which is probably the main reason the studio is slowly turning around and saying, "Hmmm." That's also given them some time to consider the fan reaction to the cast of mostly unknowns and minor leaguers, and possibly to even consider the fact that they don't really want to alienate or piss off Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, especially if there's now a possible third new Batman movie in the works.

We hope this means there's still hope for movies like Terminator 4, which even the producers have mentioned needs a bit of script work. When asked about the script for the movie yesterday, producer James Middleton had said they would have liked to do a rewrite on it but, "We have a very strong script going into production, and it's absolutely viable to shoot." However, given the news about the JLA film, they may reconsider and press pause on this film in order to get the script they want.

Justice League Movie has been delayed! [IESB]

Just because there's going to be a drought of entertainment doesn't mean we want lame crud rushed to the screen for our benefit. Take your time, smell the roses, and give those scripts another read. If they suck, toss 'em. We'll be paying especially close attention to Neuromancer, Ender's Game, The Diamond Age and all the other upcoming sci fi movies. You have been warned!

The on-line script writing challenge will allow others to be inspired by John's initial chapter and decide for themselves how the story should unfold. Having submitted their chapter to the www.vaio-john.com website, both John and visitors to the site can vote for their favourite entry before it is linked to the master script. Over a period of 4 months one scene will be selected each month from entries all over Europe. VAIO with John hope to create a seamless story-line, albeit one we will not know the final conclusion to until the last chapter is added.

The project is something John is excited by; "Conventional wisdom says you can't do science fiction with say...period drama. Or maybe you can?"

Sony creates an opportunity like no other with John Malkovich [Design Taxi]

Be Like. No. Other. [Vaio-John.com]