When a dangerous CME is earthbound, and a satellite reflector won’t work, NASA, learning they have four days till impact, release a female hacker from prison, to find the problem and save the planet.
hhustedPenpusher
When a dangerous CME is earthbound, and a satellite reflector won’t work, NASA, learning they have four days till impact, release a female hacker from prison, to find the problem and save the planet.
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CME? What’s a CME?
I know it’s a Coronal Mass Ejection but my point is that other people might not and if a reader doesn’t understand your logline, they’re never gonna read your screenplay. Dumb it down. Can’t it be solar flare??I have minimal knowledge of CMEs and how they affect the world but what would actually happen if the reflector didn’t work? Is one reflector enough? If the CME is big enough to put the entire planet at risk surely one reflector wouldn’t cut it.
My biggest problem with this story is that there is nothing particularly visual going on. The main story is going to involve a girl sitting at a computer for four days until she finds the problem. There’s no action there. In films like Deep Impact and Armageddon there’s a reason why they send a crew into space to deal with the comet/asteroid. Because otherwise it’s just a load of people waiting for something to happen. The characters need to be doing something visually interesting to try and reach their goal. Why can’t the hacker have to connect directly into the satellite? Woohoo space trip!
Also, this is kind of a minor point, but there a lot of stories where the protagonist is released from prison to save the day – it’s becoming a clich?! Why can’t she be a hacker on the run and they have to catch her so she can help. It’s more visual, immediately suggests action (rather than just taking someone from sitting in a cell to sitting at a computer) and is something a little different.
Hope this helps. Definitely think there’s a story here!
When. plasma ejected by the sun toward Earth threaten an Extinction Level Event, a young imprisoned hacker is tasked by NASA to fix the satellite reflector that her late father created.
I have added the fact that the satellite reflector had been created by her father as that give credence of why NASA would task her instead of relying on their own army of computer super genius geeks.
Also if you employ acronym, make sure sure that everybody is familiar with them. I don’t know about others, but I had to google what CME stood for.
i would second Mike’s comment that the premise is not very visual. So I would change from having to hack a satellite to having to retrieve clues that lead to the satellite reactivation. Maybe her late father foresaw the problem and created a CME freezing array. When the military tried to use it as a weapon, he locked them away and disappeared. The expected twist is that he is still alive, but suffer from Alzheimer’s. Now NASA needs somebody familiar with him to retrieve from his mind clues on how to reactivate the array.
I, too, had to? google the acronym, something a logline should not make a reader have to do.
And, as the others, said, the visual aspect in terms of the action of the protagonist? are weak.
There are also technical issues which, in my mind, elevate the story to the genre of sci-fi, not mere drama.
This has great potential! I’d like to vest immediately in your protagonist and why this is uniquely her story.? By way of an over the top, wacky example: Wrongfully convicted of hacking NASA, a pregnant scientist is released from prison to stop an extinction level event from destroying Earth in four days time. Keep working on it!
I really like this!
My one gripe would be that I feel the female hacker should be more notorious or something, otherwise, I just don’t buy that NASA would turn to her. She’d really must have a greater background to make her more essential to the plot (perhaps she worked for NASA designing the system before she was jailed in disgrace for hacking.)
Yes, it’s true that the whole ‘bad guy called in to save the earth’ has been done a lot, but no reason you can’t do a fresh take on it. The concept oozes with possible conflict. Does she have a scorned ex-lover at NASA? Does she have a secret criminal agenda she’s covertly trying to pull? All these things and more make me intrigued. I’d see this movie.