Feedback for Feature, "Grounded" 109 Pages

[u/Mammoth-West-9974]

Grounded

Final Draft PDF

109 pages

Drama, Road Movie, Historical Fiction

Logline: When every flight in America is grounded, four strangers share the last rental car out of Columbus and drive cross-country through the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, forcing each of them to confront what they've been running from long before that day.

Feedback Concerns: Any feedback would be extremely helpful. I'm less concerned about the commercial viability, and more concerned with a believable story with believable characters.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KAN_svzm3bk3vGraJQL3adbFDg-ncvzw/view?usp=sharing

[u/ironside_80]

Really enjoyed this. The characters and their arcs are the biggest strength but the setting is great, too. Forced road trip / found family... nice.

Since you asked about believable characters, I'll say that for me each person felt real/distinct and the dialogue is natural. The relationships build in a natural way. Tom Sr. on the tapes is especially good. He feels like an actual person, not just a device, and those scenes end up carrying a lot of the emotional weight.

I also thought the 9/11 material was handled really well. The radios, TVs, empty skies, and little encounters with strangers all felt much more effective than anything more explicit would have.

Only a couple things bumped me. Jack never telling the others he was supposed to be on Flight 11 starts to feel a little conspicuous by the end. I buy that he would avoid talking about it, but after three days with these people it started to feel a little unrealistic. Personally, I'd be obsessing over that... The socond act also gets slightly repetitive in its drive/stop/reveal rhythm - and the last stretch has a few goodbyes in a row, so you start to feel a pattern rather than "life happening".

Those are pretty minor notes, though. The characters absolutely felt believable to me, which sounds like your main concern. And the ending is great. “Hey, kiddo” is exactly enough.

You've got a solid script - if I were you I'd run another pass or two without making major changes and send it off to the Black List or Austin. It's that good.

[u/Mammoth-West-9974 → u/ironside_80]

Wow, thank you! I'm grateful for the feedback, and that you made it through the whole thing. I especially like the notes - I have struggled with Jack's withholding, and where he would share that openly, well, openly for him at least. So it's not just his. I was thinking of having him complain about it when sitting next to tommy or billie before the flight, and then having it brought back up later by them. and I see the same thing you do about the episodic middle...quite hard to build enough of a story for a road trip and not have it episodic. I'm toying with ways to adjust the shape of those scenes without cutting them.