Premise: An American flight controller in Australia begins to see patterns in his day to day life, stemming from a strange vision he had on the job.
About: I confess not to know much about Todd Stein, but his lone produced credit is as an executive producer on the Meg Ryan picture, Serious Moonlight. As a writer, he has two films in development. This one and the remake of the 2004 Hong Kong film, “Gin Gwai 2,” titled “In-Utero.” Nathan Parker, of Moon fame, came in and did some rewrites on 2:22, although Stein did the final revisions. The story seems to have changed drastically from its original vision, as an earlier logline focused on a female protagonist (presumably the girl on the plane – now the script focuses on the male flight controller). 2:22 sold during Cannes, and is in pre-production, with Winklevoss Social Network twin, Armie Hammer, in the lead.
Writer: Todd Stein (Revisions by Nathan Parker) (Further Revisions by Todd Stein)
Details: 101 pages – April 29, 2011 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
Okay, so I want you to imagine “Black Swan” meets the Sofia Coppola directed “Somewhere” meets “12 Monkeys” meets “I Heart Huckabees” meets “The Adjustment Bureau” meets “Donnie Darko.” There. Have you mashed all those up in your head? Good. Now you’ve got about 60% of an understanding of “2:22,” a strange contemplative mood piece that takes it cues from Terrance Mallick before Steven Spielberg. I suppose, when it’s all said and done, it comes together. And that this is the kind of thing that plays way better on the screen than it does on the page. But man, this was one frustrating reading experience.
25 year old former Airforce pilot Dylan Boyd is an air traffic controller in Sydney, Australia, one of the biggest airports in the world. He’s good at what he does, but maybe too good. Dylan doesn’t have a life outside of work, and it’s clearly left a void in his life.
During a routine day of landing hundreds of planes, Dylan’s clock gets stuck on 2:22, creating some sort of time stagnation paradox. In that moment, all the runways light up in a strange prophetic pattern. When time snaps back into place, it’s too late. There are two Airbus a380s (those big puppies that can hold 600 people) barreling towards each other, one trying to land, the other trying to take-off. All he and the rest of the controllers can do is watch as the planes scramble to avoid each other, which they do but by the tiniest of margins (actually scraping against each other).
Afterwards, Dylan runs to the arrival gate of the landing plane to watch the passengers depart. It’s here that he first sees Sarah, a young, beautiful strangely familiar woman, who looks at Dylan as if, she too, has seen him before.
After getting a leave of absence (he did almost kill 1200 people), Dylan starts seeing strange patterns in his everyday life. He’ll hear a car crashing in the distance at exactly 11:14 each morning. He’ll keep ending up at Central Station for no reason. He keeps seeing the same people over and over again. But perhaps the spookiest thing of all, is when he comes across a map of the stars, only to find that they are lit up in the exact same pattern as the lights on the runway that day.
Eventually, Dylan runs into Sarah again, and they start spending time together. The more time they spend, the more Dylan suspects they know each other from somewhere else, and he starts to believe that their fates are tied to Central Station (that place he keeps ending up at). Sarah starts to get freaked out, as she (along with us) are wondering if the devastating near killing of 1200 people has left Dylan insane. 2:22 keeps us guessing on that and many other question til the very end.
I’ve read scripts like this before and I’ve written scripts like this before. I’m not sure how to categorize them exactly. All I know is that they’re built on a dangerous foundation. Nothing is solid. Nothing is real. It’s just a bunch of murky ideas, which individually, are mysterious and fascinating, but added together, rarely equal the sum of their parts.
For example, taken on its own, the air traffic control sequence is pretty neat. But once it’s over, that’s it. What was seemingly the hook of the film is discarded like the last unclaimed piece of luggage at the baggage claim. In particular, this whole star map thing. It’s brought up as a really big deal, then never mentioned again (no map, no stars, no nothing). Am I the only one who finds this strange?
The screenplay is more focused on Central Station and the myriad of mysteries that happened there, which had me asking the question: If the air traffic stuff is limited to the first 15 pages only, and Central Station is the real story, why not just have Dylan work at Central Station? I'm hoping the answer isn't what I think it is, which is that they only included it for the big airplane crash set piece. If you're including entire sequences only because they lead to a cool scene or moment, you're playing with screenwriting fire.
Next we have a strange sequence where the sound of crickets are slowed down to the point where you can hear some sort of music in their chants, eventually leading Dylan to hear people talk inside the crickets’ chirping. Again, on its own it’s kind of neat. But when it was over, I struggled to figure out why it was included. It essentially has no bearing on the story.
I guess my biggest issue coming out of this is that I don’t know if the storyline is vague in order to leave things up to interpretation, or vague because the writer got lazy. I mean, while I was able to follow along with the whole Central Station murder, I wouldn’t say it was the tidiest execution of a mystery I’d ever read before.
The character work also left me unsatisfied. I didn’t know anything about these people other than what I was seeing right here and now. Dylan’s Air Force past is alluded to, and it’s mentioned that he ran away from America for some reason, but unless it was discussed quickly and I missed it, his reason for running away never came up. It’s not that I want a huge exposition-based scene about his past. But teasing a juicy backstory and then never paying it off is not the quickest way into a reader's good graces.
In the end, I never felt any confidence in this story. I never thought, “This writer knows exactly where he’s taking me.” It was more like a scientist trying out a bunch of small experiments. Some worked, some didn’t. But I never knew what the ultimate goal of them was.
On the plus front, as I already mentioned, 2:22 is much more geared to be a film than a screenplay. The images, the sounds, the sequences, all have a haunting “filmic” quality to them. Last year, I read a script that felt a lot like this one, in that it was more interested in burrowing inside of you than it was telling a straight forward story. That script was Black Swan. People always asks me if I’ve ever read a bad script that became a good movie. The answer is no. But I’ve seen films that elevated scripts before, and Black Swan did this better than all of them combined. And while 2:22 isn’t as good as that script, there are a lot of similarities. Let’s hope they pull it off, cause it’s definitely an intriguing premise.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Although 2:22 didn’t come through on this front, one of the more effective ways to keep an audience’s interest, is to hint at an interesting/mysterious backstory for a character, and then hold off on giving them that backstory until a later point in the story. If you do it right, we’ll be dying to find out that history. The Brigands of Rattleborge did this masterfully with the character of Abraham, who starts off as a mysterious drifter with a handmade gun and bullets who tortures himself every night. Who doesn’t want to find out what that guy’s story is? I would like to have seen 2:22 take advantage of this with Dylan and his own mysterious past.
