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Shadow 19
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February 3, 2023
I wouldn't call myself a fan of Jon Spaihts. I've read his early drafts of Prometheus, which is a mess. I've read his original draft of Passengers, which starts great, but is tonally unethical as the choices made spiral out of control. He's great at high-concept hooks, but doesn't always take them the right direction, and the more he focuses on character, the more his reliance on one-note archetypes stands out.
I knew of Shadow 19, but had no idea what it was about, going into this read cold. True to form, it's a great high-concept premise, opening with a future Earth divided between two superpowers, who shiver in a cold war while their planetary colonies get into brutal battles over resources, all fought by gritty space marines in heavily armed mech suits. One career marine, Vance, is notorious for the amount of battles he's survived even as his fellow soldiers are left scattered on the fields of war, so the grand science magistrate thing, a branch of the government that covertly holds themselves above all others, recruits Vance to use an experimental teleporter to travel to an alien world to repair an automated terraforming tank. But there's a catch. Going with the theory that a teleporter doesn't actually transport your atoms, but rather recreates them, Vance is left on Earth wondering why he's still here, while his copy (the Shadow of the title) is killed within seconds by an ecosystem of carnivorous plants and giant monsters that have evolved blades of titanium into their bodies. As more and more Shadows are created, Vance eventually gets enough security clearance to learn what's actually going on, and starts learning from the failures of his Shadows to push each one farther and farther. In other words, he's constantly watching himself die over and over again as he keeps sending himself to an impending demise.
I'm fairly certain the reason this project stalled - despite Joel Silver producing and Keanu signed to star - is of course Edge of Tomorrow, which used a time-loop to keep respawning the hero instead of a teleporter clone, but still has the same video game mechanic of dying as many times as you need to reach the end of a level. The problem is that, after the great introduction, it stays on Earth for most of the middle, with a week between each spawning, robbing the repetition of any immediate momentum. There's also a lack of him building actual strategies as he instead focuses on getting a stronger and stronger suit, and bigger and bigger guns. They even make a point about using algorithms to learn the habits of the native life-forms, but then never actually build any strategies around this knowledge. It also gets bogged down in a flatly written romance (he's the hunky soldier, who instantly sees the pretty young woman science apprentice, and they fall madly in cryptic love scenes), plus that whole evil science organization planning to colonize a world in secret for their own machinations. Also, there's intelligent natives on the planet, which is supposed to be a big shocker, but it's hard to not see it coming.
The third act is rousing though, with the final journey of Shadow 19, coming across the fallen versions of himself while fighting through the hellscape. Then there's a sudden twist that stirs things up back on earth. And the evil scientists have brain computers that allow them to control all the machines in their building, so we get robot arms vs marines in mech suits.
It's still a fun script, and I think it works for me better than others I've read from Spaits because it's more purely driven by the situations and action, never really settling into the characters long enough for their thinness to hurt anymore than it would in a typical 90s action movie. The descriptions of the big mechsuit battles are cool. And again, it's a great hook. There's definitely enough foundation here to build something interesting out of. It's just hard to think of a way to make it feel fresh after Edge of Tomorrow sold it so incredibly well. But therein lies a challenge that would be interesting to take on.
I knew of Shadow 19, but had no idea what it was about, going into this read cold. True to form, it's a great high-concept premise, opening with a future Earth divided between two superpowers, who shiver in a cold war while their planetary colonies get into brutal battles over resources, all fought by gritty space marines in heavily armed mech suits. One career marine, Vance, is notorious for the amount of battles he's survived even as his fellow soldiers are left scattered on the fields of war, so the grand science magistrate thing, a branch of the government that covertly holds themselves above all others, recruits Vance to use an experimental teleporter to travel to an alien world to repair an automated terraforming tank. But there's a catch. Going with the theory that a teleporter doesn't actually transport your atoms, but rather recreates them, Vance is left on Earth wondering why he's still here, while his copy (the Shadow of the title) is killed within seconds by an ecosystem of carnivorous plants and giant monsters that have evolved blades of titanium into their bodies. As more and more Shadows are created, Vance eventually gets enough security clearance to learn what's actually going on, and starts learning from the failures of his Shadows to push each one farther and farther. In other words, he's constantly watching himself die over and over again as he keeps sending himself to an impending demise.
I'm fairly certain the reason this project stalled - despite Joel Silver producing and Keanu signed to star - is of course Edge of Tomorrow, which used a time-loop to keep respawning the hero instead of a teleporter clone, but still has the same video game mechanic of dying as many times as you need to reach the end of a level. The problem is that, after the great introduction, it stays on Earth for most of the middle, with a week between each spawning, robbing the repetition of any immediate momentum. There's also a lack of him building actual strategies as he instead focuses on getting a stronger and stronger suit, and bigger and bigger guns. They even make a point about using algorithms to learn the habits of the native life-forms, but then never actually build any strategies around this knowledge. It also gets bogged down in a flatly written romance (he's the hunky soldier, who instantly sees the pretty young woman science apprentice, and they fall madly in cryptic love scenes), plus that whole evil science organization planning to colonize a world in secret for their own machinations. Also, there's intelligent natives on the planet, which is supposed to be a big shocker, but it's hard to not see it coming.
The third act is rousing though, with the final journey of Shadow 19, coming across the fallen versions of himself while fighting through the hellscape. Then there's a sudden twist that stirs things up back on earth. And the evil scientists have brain computers that allow them to control all the machines in their building, so we get robot arms vs marines in mech suits.
It's still a fun script, and I think it works for me better than others I've read from Spaits because it's more purely driven by the situations and action, never really settling into the characters long enough for their thinness to hurt anymore than it would in a typical 90s action movie. The descriptions of the big mechsuit battles are cool. And again, it's a great hook. There's definitely enough foundation here to build something interesting out of. It's just hard to think of a way to make it feel fresh after Edge of Tomorrow sold it so incredibly well. But therein lies a challenge that would be interesting to take on.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review