HIBERNATION – written by?Geneva Robertson-Dworet & Will Frank
A wrongly convicted inmate volunteers for a hibernation experiment in exchange for one day of parole every five years, which he uses to prove his innocence and search for his missing daughter across an increasingly futuristic landscape.
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On the face of it – just going by the logline – this concept completely does not work.
Most critically, instead of a ticking clock, we have a time dilated one. The protagonist has only one day after every five days to prove his innocence and to try to find his daughter? Even leaving aside a host of logical problems here, this set up makes no dramatic sense within the confines of a single feature. This might (might) work as a TV series, but is too haphazard a plot to work as a feature.
A more feature-feasible set up would be either the daughter is on ice (perhaps slowly dying), or the wronged prisoner is subjected to bouts of accelerated aging (or even both).
If the writer’s original intention was to tell some cryogenic time travel story, then having the daughter living in real time is problematic as a motivational device. She can hardly hold her breath waiting for him every five years!
The closest this concept could come to a feature-feasible story is for the daughter to be alive and available while the protagonist attempts to prove his innocence before she dies of old age and/or before the world he cyclically wakes up in becomes too alien for him. Mind you, even here the reward to the hero becomes small and diminishing over time. (If the daughter is missing, she might as well be dead, given the protagonist’s one-day constraint.)
This story fundamentally appears to be seriously wrongly conceived. It’s hard to believe a quality script underpins this.
Steven Fernandez (Judge)
same ^ as the comment above, it might work for a TV series better, but plotwise, not compacted enough to work as a feature. However it does not diminish the possibility at all.
The possibility I see must revolve around the significance of the protagonist’s relationship with the family position against the ever changing society. If it was to be a feature, it only works best with few grand themes, few eras, and longer parole period only.
Hi,
Perhaps if you had him due to be executed in 12 months time and allowed 4 days of parole in total this could work – give him a deadline. Each time could result in a new variation on a familiar world – tension could evolve from his continued frustration in never being able to pick up where he left off.
It would need to be clear that the daughter is the key to his innocence.
Maybe instead of hibernation he could be the test subject in a time travel experiment – this way you could have an ever changing landscape without the need for such long stints between parole days.
Just a thought.
One more thought – to add to the action – someone would need to act as his opponent when he returns to the world each time. Maybe at some intervals he could return to the past, before he was arrested, with his opponent being the law, a man hunt running from what is his ultimate fate.
I take it on each day of parole he learns a new clue as to his daughters whereabouts.
I like this idea.