dpg, I always appreciate what you have to say even when I disagree but I suspect your love for screenwriting dogma might be stifling your creativity.

To address your question: not every protagonist needs a character arc or a hero’s journey. And not every story needs a theme or a message. Far more essential is good strong conflict involving interesting characters.

There’s nothing that stifles genuine creativity more than rules. Artists learn rules and build careers disregarding them.

I’m not thinking about building a franchise. This project was conceived as a Lo-fi Sci-Fi movie. Creativity is channelled by practical production considerations i.e. one main location and three minor, no FX, no production design, no big name actors, etc. So we’re talking about a less than $200k production budget. A lot of effort is going into working out compensatory mechanisms to overcome issues such as the absence of a relationship storyline, no character arc, etc.

Talking about similar movies I’d say it’s along the lines of ‘Run Lola, run’ in terms of Time manipulation and ‘Total Recall’ in terms of it being about illusion and reality.

I’d say the main subject of the project is Time Manipulation – as in temporal loops, flashbacks, flash-forwards, time travel, temporal expansion, compression, etc.

The big idea here is how to make a film that relies on time manipulation when you can’t afford to hire more than one or two locations.