Oh, no apologies necessary. It’s helpful to know what’s clear in the logline and what isn’t. I’m still not sure which direction to take in revising it, but this is all going to end up helping. Thanks! I spent a few months writing and publishing the book, and now it’s taking just as long to even conceive the movie script, let alone write it. 🙂

I think the idea is that the moon is often seen as a powerful symbol?usually of femininity (Luna) and menstruation, and thus life, but sometimes there is an aspect of masculinity involved (http://www.fullmoon.info/en/blog/moon-feminine-masculine.html). The moon’s destruction (actually, it splits in two) is a death knell to announce that hope is lost for humanity; women are gone, and eventually the men will be too, hence the descent into insanity for many of the men. They can’t accept that they are alone as a sex, so their psyches rebel.

On the flip side, there’s also the idea that the moon has had masculine ties as well (e.g., in some languages, the moon is masculine rather than feminine, and some moon gods have been male), so it’s essentially a moot point. The destruction of the moon doesn’t really signal the death of one sex or the other; or maybe it’s signaling both.

The point is not to DWELL. The point is to carry on.

Of all the characters, the two main characters are the ones who have the best capacity to maintain their sanity. They don’t freak out about the moon’s break, and they deal as well as can be expected with the loss of their mothers and other women. The mere fact that they are attracted to each other and not women helps them to see that although everything is different and not ideal, it doesn’t have to signal the end of the world. They’ll be okay. They’ll even have love.

But as for the magical realism/sci-fi aspect, there’s more: another part of the story features a civilization living on the moon, plagued by a civil war that ends when a bomb splits the moon in two. So when the moon breaks in the A story, there’s actually a reason, but no one on Earth knows it. It has nothing to do with anything that has happened on Earth. God isn’t punishing anyone, etc. It’s just a fact of war.

Yikes. I feel like I’m writing an academic paper on my book. Sorry. Does that help? Do you see why I had a hard time distilling the essence of the story, as you put it? It’s actually two stories from my book, but they’re so intricately connected that I wanted them to be “one” story in the screenplay.