When a superhero is infected with his engineered plague, her ex-boyfriend escapes from prison to steal from a military lab and create a cure before the woman he loves dies in three days.
Dkpough1Uberwriter
When a superhero is infected with his engineered plague, her ex-boyfriend escapes from prison to steal from a military lab and create a cure before the woman he loves dies in three days.
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This is confusing, who is infected with who’s plague and why?
It reads as if there was a grammar error by use of the word ‘his’ in the first clause and immediately after that describing a character as female.
I don’t understand the logic in the premise, maybe I missed something, why does the boyfriend infect the woman he loves in the first place? And who’s story is it, the super-hero’s or the boyfriend’s?
Oh, yes I see. I suppose I was just trying to establish her gender in the first half.
The boyfriend doesn’t infect her, she’s infected with a version of his plague by someone else.(Or maybe accidentally). But the boyfriend created it, thus making him feel guilty and compelled to create a cure for the woman whom he loves.
Maybe adding that it was modified will help to alleviate some confusion.
Revison:?When a superhero is infected with a tampered version of his engineered plague,?her ex-boyfriend escapes from prison to steal from a government lab and create a cure before the woman he loves dies in three days.
I will keep thinking on how to fix the other concerns.?
Let’s cut to the chase– or rather the cure: ?the guy’s objective goal is to brew a cure for the plague he engineered before a his ex-squeeze, a female superhero, ?dies.
All the rest is detail –breaking out jail, breaking into a military lab– that ?are part of the story but need not be part of the logline.
For me the premise raises questions about the backstory that diverts my attention away from the story in the logline. ?Why did he engineer a plague in the first place? Why is he in prison?? Is the plague afflicting normal people or only supers like his ex?
It’s of course interesting that it would be some normal guy rather than the superhero who’s in focus here, but that may just be a false interpretation of the logline. Maybe it would help to clarify if the ex-boyfriend is an evil mastermind or just a normal person. Could you get rid of the ex-boyfriend part? I mean, right now it doesn’t seem essential to me to know that he’s the ex-boyfriend.
I am confused by the original and the revised logline – it’s unclear who created the plague (dpg’s comments clarified that for me, though 🙂
Is the “three days” essential? It’s probably there to create a sense of urgency, but isn’t that implied in “before the woman he loves dies”?
And where is the problem? If he engineered the plague, it shouldn’t be hard for him to find a cure (I know in real life that is not the case, but we are talking superhero movie here…), so I would assume the breaking out of jail and breaking into the military lab is the “hard part/conflict” which most of the movie will be about.
I agree with everybody.
Also, we’re going to know if he rescues her, he still cares. We’re going to know there’s an urgency because it’s a plague. Maybe you could save those words and give more about who he has to go up against like CMathias suggested.
I tried to boil it down but all I got was:
When an engineered plague infects a superhero, her human ex-boyfriend must escape prison and infiltrate military-secure facilities to obtain the antidote.
Have you thought about reversing roles, make the superhero in need of a rescue a guy, the ex who comes to his rescue a girl?
You guys have given me some great feedback. Some of the points you bring up are things that I question to remove, though.
Ex-boyfriend: I feel the MC needs some connection to the superhero, and establishing it this way gives him a plausible reason to still be in love with her, rather than possibly being some convict obsessed with a superhero, which could create other implications for the story.
3 days: This gives him a reason that he needs to break out of prison right now, rather than next week or a year from now or waiting to be released. It puts him up a against a clock, since there is no real antagonist mentioned.
For now, to me it makes more sense to keep those in rather than remove them. I have no new revision yet.
>>but if the premise raises those questions, wouldn?t that be what makes you want to watch it in the first place?
It makes me wonder how much exposition in the form of dialogue and/or flashbacks it’s going to take to fill in the backstory to explain how/why he engineered a plague germ. And how/why she’s infected. (but not normals?) ?And ended up in jail. Oh, and he’s her ex.
?I get the sense there are really two stories, maybe even 2 films: ?1] how he engineered the plague, ended up in jail all the while — the “B” story — having a relationship w/ the superhero that failed. 2] How he redeemed himself from the mistakes he made, the problems he created in 1].
Right now, I’m thinking the back story is a stronger candidate for a movie.
There are too many moving parts to this one machine.
The complexity of the concept is being reflected in the logline, as most of the people on this thread found it confusing.?The fact that he invented?the plague in the first place, as a means of making it more personal, is redundant seeing as she is his ex and the woman he still loves. Him producing a plague is a complication the story could do without, what if he is a genius that was wrongly put in jail and also the only one who can save the woman he loves? This would simplify the concept and add credibility to his motivations.
In essence the big problem is the question of which?story is going to be the focus of the script.??I think DPG’s suggestion is the best one, consider separating the back story from the main plot and engineer either the back story or the main plot to work on their own.