War Junkies

Title: War Junkies
Writer: David M. O’Neill
Era:
1960s-70s

Locations:
Globetrotting

Budgets:
Blockbuster

Genre:
Action & Adventure, Action Thriller, Family Drama, Period Drama, Political Drama, Family, Political Thriller, Romance, Romantic Drama, War, War Adventure, War Drama, War Epic, War Romance, Wartime Espionage.

Logline:
An ambitious journalist leaves his loving family at home when he takes a potential career changing transfer to Asia to cover the Vietnam War and finds himself in a deadly situation that only escalates the longer he is there, threatening to take his life and those the colleagues he comes to work with.

Strengths:

One of the coolest things going for the script is just how well the jargon for the war/military, meshes with the journalist jargon and the time period at hand. There's clearly a ton of research that has been done to pull a script like this off, but it feels natural throughout in terms of the setting and worlds that we get to see. Bennett is a heroic character and from the first moment he volunteers to go get the story and Vo dies, to when he's leading his MIA group through the village, and ultimately returning home to his family we get to see this played out. There are some strong supporting characters that really help to beef the subplots up and make this story much bigger than Bennett. One of those is Sarah and her ultimate fiery attitude doesn't come off as derivative or cliche in the way her character plays out. She's a nice addition to Bennett's personality and someone that has been there longer than him so they get this bond that ends up being able to show the audience a more jaded side of things that becomes apparent once Bennett gets into the thick of things. The action is played out with a ton of vivid scenarios that would surely make this a visually beautiful script to see brought to life. The historical nature of the script pulls up the skirt on a military conflict that could definitely make for a powerful film.

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Prospects:

This is THE KILLING FIELDS and ARGO meets BLOOD DIAMOND. It's a war movie with a journalist in the protagonist role. It would take a big budget to pull this script off as is due to the war scenes that are written in to create a lot of the suspense and thrills throughout. That being said, it's a side of the war that is a unique one and Bennett's a powerful protagonist that could work for a big-time movie star. Due to the budget it would take to make this, pulling back on some of the more expositional dialogue and action, could help really strengthen the project overall. There's a happy ending, for Bennett at least, and the overall themes of the war are exposed in a unique and powerful way. At the very least, the pace of the plot and the number of things shown to us that Bennett must overcome will definitely give this script a shot at being an extremely strong writing sample.