The 34th Battalion
jamesmichaelPenpusher
Australia. 1916. After the death toll at Gallipoli, a group of friends are forced to choose between their lives at home or the call of duty in France. They soon find themselves in some of the worst battles the world had ever seen.
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This doesnt seem to be a LOGLINE so much as a promotional ad or the beginning of your synopsis. As an idea it’s likely to end up being quite a high budget film?? If so this is something you need to also consider, in terms of its viability. The Australian element could add an interesting twist to some already very done stories in cinema. You need to condense it a lot more, choose a main protagonist with a vital flaw and give some idea of a key point of the story- at the moment, all we are getting from this is that well be watching a lot of battles ( external conflict is obvious but currently this idea seems without a key characters internal conflict which satisfies our need as humans to see a primal goal being accomplished)
“After the death toll at Gallipoli”
I may be wrong (I’m not a native English speaker) but it seems to me that ‘death toll’ doesn’t refer to an event, or a point in time but rather a number, an amount. In that case the phrase would be grammatically incorrect. If I am right, it would be embarrassing as this type of mistake should not make it onto the web site of the federal funding agency, reporting on the projects they have funded.
“a group of friends are forced to choose between their lives at home or the call of duty in France.”
This is dramatically a powerful moment, but it is only a moment. A decision never carries more than a sequence in a movie.
So the only other thing this logline really gives us is “a group of friends go to war”.
My question: what makes this movie different from every other war movie? What is interesting about the characters? If there is no central character – God help me, I cannot remember a local film that managed this satisfactorily since Lantana – then why does it need to be a group? Will their friendship be torn apart? And what value(s) or theme(s) are at stake?
Another example of lots of words but really not much of a selling point.