Sample Coverage

Grade Chart:

Target Audience:  age 20-35, primarily men
Concept:  High
Film Comparison:  Hell Raiser meets Event Horizon

Recommendation:

Author: Consider
Script: Pass

Logline:

When an exhausted astronaut crew sent to repair a teleportation device orbiting Mars accidentally opens a portal to hell, they must battle ghastly beasts and race against time to close the doorway before the connection to Earth is complete.

Synopsis:

At first when CAPTAIN STURGENS and his crew arrive at the TOIN-B space station, everything seems to be as they expected.  But once gravity is restored, sending a large rumble from the off-limits TOIN-B control room, the crew discovers the reason for the teleportation devices malfunction 6 months earlier:  a large boulder knocked out the device’s power supply.  But where did the boulder come from?  How did it manifest on a space station millions of miles from Earth?

After repairing the power supply, they power up the TOIN-B again and the 10-hour countdown to connection to Earth begins.  Mission accomplished, the Captain orders some much needed R and R.

But only three hours into the countdown process, an overhead emergency system alerts the crew that the connection is complete.  They rush to the control room to find the device has indeed made a connection, but to what?

Moments later a severely injured woman emerged through the knocking out gravity controls in the process.  Once gravity is restored, they see to their visitor.  Thick, dark blood pours from her.  Deep scars have been ripped through her midsection.  One arm has been ripped off.  The ship’s DOCTOR takes her to sick bay while the Captain and the PROFESSOR (who built the TOIN-B Space Station) try to figure out where she came from.

One CREW MEMBER is put on guard at the TOIN-B portal should they receive any other visitors.  But when the woman awakens briefly, she rambles that something, a BEAST, chased her through the portal.  At that moment, a large two-headed HOUND attacks and dismembers the crew member guarding the TOIN-B.

It is then revealed that most of the crew actually belong to a special ops military unit.  The soldiers take control of the situation, much the dislike of the Captain.  They go in search of whatever killed their fellow soldier while the Captain is ordered to stay with the doctor and her patient.

Back in sick bay, the Captain and the doctor discover that the woman is not only recovering, but that her wounds are healing quickly.  Even her arm is growing back.  Meanwhile, the soldiers confront the two-headed beast, and it takes nearly all they have to bring it down.  Thinking it is dead they relax their defenses.  Two soldiers are killed before they can close the section off, imprisoning the huge hound.

Angry, the Military GENERAL confronts the patient, now awake, and demands to know what she brought on board.  The Captain intervenes.  The two nearly come to blows when the Professor is attacked in the TOIN-B control room by a horde of snakes, insects and black birds.

When they find little left of his body, the General decides to cut their losses.  He orders the TOIN-B to be turned off, thus ending the countdown to connection to Earth, and the crew pack back into their ship for another six-month trip back to Earth.  As the crew prepares for the journey, the TOIN-B comes to life again.  They discover than crewmen back on Earth have manually overridden the disconnection in an effort to open the portal to Mars.

They decide to go back into the TOIN-B chamber and destroy the power supply again, but getting to the chamber becomes impossible as hundreds of various types of evil creatures and demons begin pouring into the space station.  The Doctor is killed, sliced to pieces when small, robed creatures attack her and her patient with sharp knives.

Fearing for his own life, the cowardly military General locks himself in the docking bay and climbs into the ship alone, promising himself he’ll send help once he gets back to Earth.  But as he takes off, he is attacked by a giant beast already on board.  The ship careens out of control and smashes into the space station.

The remaining survivors, now seemingly trapped aboard the space station, realize it is up to them to save Earth.  They devise a plan to trick the computer system into overloading itself.  Then the Captain remembers there is one small emergency pod they can use to get back to Earth, although it was never meant for long distance travel.  The return trip will take 18 months instead of six, and the quarters will be much more cramped.

Realizing this is their only alternative, they cram supplies on board, planning to link into the computer system shortly before departure to override the system.  Once on board, though, they discover the system can only be overridden manually from the TOIN-B control room.

The Captain decides to sacrifice himself for the others.  Turning off the gravity controls again so that he’ll be able to make his way to the control room amid floating beast that can’t gain traction, the Captain gains access to the control room and overrides the system just as the small pod with the crew aboard takes off.  The space station explodes as the countdown to Earth ends.  But did they destroy the TOIN-B in time?  The survivors start their journey through space, not knowing what they’ll find when they get there.

Comments:

The premise of Gateway of the Damned is a good one.  The film offers many opportunities for a director to create some new fearsome creatures and beasts the audience will love.  The writer does a good job describing the creatures the protagonist and other characters have to deal with.  Visually the film would be a wonder.  And teleportation is a hot item right now in theaters and on television.

I was impressed with the arc of Captain Sturgens.  We see him go from a man in control of his crew, to losing control when the military takes command, to finally proving himself a leader and hero by the end.  The character flaw, his reluctance to accept how small he really is, is well thought out, although not entirely recognizable until a little too late into the film.

The antagonist, at first, seems to be Hell itself, which is weak to say the least.  However, halfway into the film we meet a demon from hell who seems to be in control of torture somehow, and he becomes the prime antagonist.  His entrance comes far to late for the audience to identify with him.

Another problem with the development of the major characters comes when we meet Catherine, the injured woman who comes through the portal when it first connects to Hell.  We don’t meet her until page 40.  Then the writer, in an attempt to make a half-hearted love connection between her and Sturgens (the B-story?) is forced to hurry their relationship along.  Eventually Sturgens risks everything, even the lives of the rest of the crew, to save her from the clutches of the evil torturer…and he barely even knows her.

The General’s character is well played out, but it is stereotypical of characters in other movies, which doesn’t mean that it couldn’t work here.  It was nice to see some of his soldiers move from doing anything he orders them to do, to looking to Sturgens for real leadership.

But another huge problem as far as characterization is the inclusion of two “big brain” characters.  The doctor and the professor seem to be the same character, but from different angles.  The writer would have been better off to choose one or the other.

As far as the dialogue is concerned, there were many places where it was a bit too expository.  Surely it was necessary to understand the fundamentals of the TOIN-B, teleportation and why it takes ten hours to connect to Earth, but a better writer would have found a way to distribute the information through the script without long, explanatory dialogue that would bore the audience.

Structurally there are problems. The break into two comes far too late (page 48), and the midpoint and Act III break are indistinguishable among other important scenes.  Though the Act III climax works very nicely, with the Captain sacrificing his life, soaring weightless through the ship as beasts from Hell grab and snap at him, unable to right themselves in zero gravity.  And the cliffhanger at the end makes for the possibility of an exciting sequel.

Conclusion:

At the end of the day, Gateway of the Damned, though a pretty good, refreshing idea in theory, misses too many important marks.  Saving the idea would require a major overhaul of the script, from re-organizing scenes, to canning certain characters, to restructuring and rewriting of dialogue and action sequences, and everything in between.  But the writer’s style, with his use of lively verbs and succinctness, shows that he is someone who could be molded once he learns a little something of script structure.

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