This Week's Script Cavalcade: Minority Report
I’m very enthused to write about this week’s featured script, a newly acquired draft of the 2002 science-fiction yarn MINORITY REPORT written by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen adapted from a short story written by Philip K. Dick. This is a screenplay that is masterful in its complexity and ability to lump together a variety of genres into a compelling plot that delivers a devastating one-two of emotional oomph. It’s a most palatable soufflé peppered with leitmotifs of suspense, tech noir, and murder-mystery all slapped together and packaged as a traditional chase-thriller. It’s many plates spinning in the air. And it takes some narrative nimbleness not to let a single one wobble.
The screenplay lassos all the right stuff in a hundred and sixty-five pages. The pacing of the script is downright Hitchcockian. The heady existential interludes of determinism, the illusion of human agency, and the increasingly questionable role of technology and its encroachment upon a free society alludes to the very best of Orwell or Vonnegut. This is a script that swings for the fences in terms of imposing a thematic resoluteness and is in no short supply of ambition when it comes to delivering a message. It’s a writerly haymaker to the grey matter and gets the noodle percolating long after you flip past the last page.
An example of some of the ostentatious ontological rhetoric:
From a structural perspective, MINORITY REPORT has much to impart to aspiring writers in terms of action beats and goading the reader along to a rollicking and well-crafted knuckle-biting climax. Come in and thumb through this stand-out script.
And these other new scripts in the library should also surely satiate your science-fiction fix:
- Season one scripts for the SyFy series THE EXPANSE.
- The 2004 neo-noir dystopian thriller I, ROBOT written by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman.
- 2004’s climate sci-fi global-disaster script THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW penned by Roland Emmerich.
Please feel free to mosey through our online catalog for the other latest and greatest additions to our collection.