Freddie's back.
The trailer doesn't wow me. That's a missed opportunity for a great first impression. It's Ashly Burch, so that puts some sizzle on the steak. It's weird how this trailer skips much of the meat in Freddie's logline on his
IMDB page. Freddie included two loglines, actually:
In near future, everyone's gotten used to the 10,000-mile alien tentacle that materialized in the sky, and a struggling beekeeper and a grieving wanderer must join together and take a dangerous roadtrip to get their teleported stuff back.
In the near future, a towering alien "spike" materializes in Earth's atmosphere, wreaking havoc. Years later, it's still around. A struggling beekeeper is forced to team up with an emotionally raw EMT on a roadtrip to retrieve her bees (and his car) after their stuff is suddenly teleported across the country by the alien spike.
What bugs me most about both is the very tenuous link between the Spike and teleportation. You have to wait until the end of the logline to understand the connection.
Combining the two, and ignoring the trailer, we learn:
- Everyone has adapted to the 10,000-mile alien tentacle (the Spike) that appeared in the sky years ago.
- Stuff it touches gets teleported vast distances.
- Our two-hander is (1) a struggling beekeeper, and (2) a grieving EMT. When the Spike sends her bees and his car across the country, they take a forced roadtrip to get their stuff back.
That is one crazy long tentacle. Ten thousand miles is about 16,000 km. The Karman line is roughly 100 km above earth. A tentacle 160 times that distance suggests to me an alien creature so big it blots out the sun for the whole planet. But I digress...
Bullet point 1 is kind of there with the male lead's casual acceptance. But we see this nowhere else. The general tone suggests pre-Spike and post-Spike are not hugely different. A couple other quick examples of this indifference from others characters would help.
Bullet 2 is... nowhere to be found. Not shown, not mentioned. Keeping those gags under wraps, maybe. The consequence is us having no clue what danger the Spike poses. We see vague hints of destruction, with none of those directly tied to the Spike. There is no cause and effect.
The final bullet point is another mixed bag. "Struggling beekeeper" We understand she's stressed out and uptight, but over what? The Spike? Her teleported bees? -- wait, we don't know the Spike teleports things because it's never shown or discussed, so how would we know it's that?
"Grieving EMT" -- again, how would we know? No part of this trailer shows him grieving.
"... sends her bees and his car across the country..." -- SCENE OMITTED. We have NO idea why these two are forced to roadtrip together. In the trailer it just happens. In the logline it's clear: "to get my car/bees back."
The trailer makes the mistake of opening with them already together. A later scene makes it clear they are "total strangers", but we've already connected them from that first shot, so it doesn't feel like their lives abrupty and forcefully intersect to kick off the roadtrip.
Freddie's first logline mentions a "dangerous roadtrip." Again, we kinda see that in the trailer with the rifle-toting lady confronting our couple. But there's nothing remarkable about her reaction. It's commonplace in our contempory world, never mind a future with a giant alien tentacle wandering across the sky.
Okay. I'm done complaining about that trailer. Back to the logline. Let's blend Freddie's two loglines into a better one, and we'll use our three bullet points to do it.
The trailer gives nothing away about the nature of the alien tentacle aka the Spike. Is it a permanent slowly roaming thing? Does it appear and disappear? In the trailer we see it pulse and slowly feather like lightning, so perhaps it randomly appears and disappears, leaving a trail of unavoidable destruction. Anyway, we can ignore this. No need to clutter the logline. It's already a lot to take in.
"Everyone's use to the giant sky tentacle probing earth and teleporting things. When "the Spike" zaps a beekeeper's hives and an EMT's car across country, they go on a dangerous roadtrip to fetch their stuff."Thirty-five crisp, easy to digest words. First we set up the Spike and what it does. Then we use it to set the story in motion. We jettison "struggling" and "grieving" because we don't need that fine detail in this logline. "The Spike" is the star, the secret sauce, the draw card. That's what hooks 'em, then you put 'em under your spell by layering the emotional journey on top of the roadtrip.
