Samarkand seemed like one very long chase scene with lots of its dialogue ending with exclamation marks!!! Everything was always on one very intense level!

I was taught by a writing instructor years ago to choose scenes carefully – not just to introduce characters, but to move the story along and gain reader’s interest as well. So if you have one fight scene after another, it all becomes very boring very quickly.

Instead, we need moments of normal, then moments of strange, then some FEAR! And then some normal again as our characters try to understand where they are and how they got there. We must also have scenes that explore who the characters are and what they want to achieve.

For a story like this, the most important question, however, is WHY the kids are there. This mystery/problem needs to be stated early so there is a direction to the story.

There are a lot of characters in Samarkand and they all seem to speak with the same “voice”. I couldn’t tell Tommy’s words from Peter’s or James’. I couldn’t tell the girls apart either. And if I covered up ALL the character’s names and just read the dialogue, I would not have been able to tell the difference between ANY of them.

Each character needs a different way of speaking and a different purpose for being in the story. Each character needs to grow and learn something (except the bad guys) by the end. So you may want to limit the number of characters you work with until you are comfortable manipulating lots of people through a story.

Some of the dialogue and action were unclear: Page 41) SARAH: “The fresco. “O-2-7”... That’s it, the first sign! “The battle of Oa” but only the O is capitalized, and take notice of the angel in the upper corner, he’s pointing at something-- a bookshelf!” What?

You obviously have a very clear mental picture of this story. At this point, it is just very, very hard to follow.

Seeking Samarkand
By: CGALEONE
Review of: Seeking Samarkand
on: 12/05/2009
I enjoyed reading this screenplay very much. The characters were distinctive and enigmatic. Evelet, Locke, Steiner, JJ and Nightmare were... [more]

Goonies meets Final Fantasy
By: RafaelSouza
Review of: Seeking Samarkand
on: 11/11/2009
Seeking Samarkand opens with a bang, with Locke and Evelet escaping an Akkadian Castle. The sequence is fast and fun,... [more]

Reveiw of Seeking Samarkand
By: howard casner
Review of: Seeking Samarkand
on: 10/29/2009
There is much to like here in this variation on such children/teenage adventure stories like The Chronicles of Narnia and... [more]

Some funny moments
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Review of: beware of strangers
on: 12/23/2009
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Fabulous! But...
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Review of: Asmodeus Jones
on: 12/03/2009
Wow, this is a difficult review to write. What an absolutely fabulous script. Hey, I read lots of SciFi, see... [more]

Hmmm...
By: Janet712
Review of: Bad Actors
on: 11/19/2009
Not very much good to say about this script, unfortunately. I had trouble figuring out what the story was about,... [more]

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