When the Sheriff of Sweetwater, Mars stumbles on a plan to destroy the town to make room for an illegal worm farm, he and his friends have to defend the town from destruction by a megalomaniac Soybean Magnate.
IrishFilmGuyPenpusher
When the Sheriff of Sweetwater, Mars stumbles on a plan to destroy the town to make room for an illegal worm farm, he and his friends have to defend the town from destruction by a megalomaniac Soybean Magnate.
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>>>an illegal worm farm
So what? It may be illegal but how does a mere worm farm pose an existential threat? (Most people reading this logline assume worms are beneficial.)
In the world of the film, any transport of animals to any colony is forbidden. While not said explicitly in the script, it’s to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
The structure works: we know who, what’s at stake, who’s against him, and what he has to do. Where it gets clunky: “destroy” and “destruction” come back three times in close range, and “destruction by a megalomaniac Soybean Magnate” is a passive construction; flipping it to “from a megalomaniac Soybean Magnate” picks up the pace.
The character description tells us his job but nothing about who he is as a person (“languid sheriff” or “self-centred weather man” would tell us how he behaves before the story even starts.)
The place names don’t earn their space either; a descriptor of the town and its world would tell us more than “Sweetwater, Mars” does. But the story is fun: an off-world Western with an illegal worm farm and a Soybean Magnate as antagonist places this on a sci-fi comedy shelf you can already see.
What’s missing is the sheriff’s personal stake. Defending a town reads generic until we know what he has to lose. And “megalomaniac” is the lazy version of the villain; a specific quirk on the Soybean Magnate would make him memorable.