In order to defeat a plot to suppress technology that will save millions of lives, a surveillance expert must play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with an evil multinational and the shadowy private intelligence agency that employs him.

6 reviews

TullyArcher Samurai · 1,313 pts

Try writing it again without using clich?s.

play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse =?clich?
an evil multinational?=? multinational what? also clich?
the shadowy private intelligence agency = clich?

Good goal, but what are the personal stakes?

Valentin Samurai · 2,423 pts

When a pharmaceutical conglomerate suppress the drug that could save his daughter, a geeky surveillance expert must retrieve the information from their remote secure digital data vault.

Nicholas Andrew Halls Samurai · 1,742 pts

Your logline is vague.

You state a goal, which is the right instinct - "to defeat a plot to suppress technology". But 'defeating a plot' is so vague it's hard to know what kind of story and conflict the screenplay is likely to contain. Likewise, you miss an opportunity here to convey tone and genre through specificity. We want to know what actually must be DONE to defeat the plot. Does the protagonist have to assassinate the head of the multinational, or win a court case against them, or get the evidence to a news broadcaster. Because it's so vague, the possibilities are infinite right now, and it means that we actually have no real idea what your screenplay is about.

You go on to clarify that your protagonist "must play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse". Aside from being cliche, again playing cat-and-mouse doesn't actually tell us anything about the content of your screenplay. He will need to not get caught by the bad guy, a complication implicit in every screenplay essentially.

You've stated that the villains are both his own company and the company suppressing the technology. Whilst I think it's common to have multiple sources of antagonism, for the sake of brevity it's probably worth on communication in the main antagonist in your logline. This means picking a character (probably the head of one of those companies) and describe the conflict in terms of your protagonist versus your (singular) antagonist).

Your protagonist is 'a surveillance expert' -- who seems totally qualified to manage playing a game of cat-and-mouse, and also getting the information he might need to beat the bad guys. What is it about this character in this situation that would provide the conflict to sustain a feature length screenplay? Where is the irony, or the hook? Perhaps it is in the protagonist's flaw, which is unstated in your logline? I would include a flaw in future iterations of your logline. Likewise, I would sit and think on "why this character"? What is going to be hard about a surveillance expert exposing information the bad guys don't want him to know? If the story is that a guy finds out something he's not supposed to know, and that puts his life at risk, and that character is already surveillance expert ... how is the special world of your screenplay special?