SCREENWRITING: THE LOCK-IN MOMENT and SLOW BURNS

All good working loglines have 4 key elements:

An empathetic HERO

A compelling GOAL

A formidable OBSTACLE

And a life-or-death reason to complete the goal, aka STAKES.

The moment an audience member/reader can grock all these elements is THE LOCK-IN.

It’s usually right after the setup is done and we settle in for the movie we were promised.

Indiana Jones is racing Nazis to find the Lost Ark.

The Avengers are out to stop Thanos from getting the last Infinity Stone.

The family in US is battling for survival against their Dopplegangers.

9 times out of 10 — and in all the above examples — the LOCK-IN moment happens at the end of Act 1. Right around the 25-minute mark of a 100-minute movie.

It sets up what the SAVE THE CAT folks call The Promise of the Premise or Fun & Games. The ‘tension engine’ of the premise is in place. A hero battling against the central conflict(villain or obstacle) so the horrible thing won’t happen.

Stories that have a Break Into 2 “lock-in” moment are the simplest and most clear-cut stories to tell. They’re also the most common. And you’d be well-advised to hold this as a …ahem…’rule’.

But there are some stories that don’t lock-in the GOAL/CONFLICT until a bit later…or a lot later…or not at all.

You’ll know if you’re in a late lock-in if your working logline is including the midpoint or other stuff to make it seem more active. Or if you’re struggling with your hero’s goal in the logline because you’re hiding a second-act reveal.

If so, proceed with caution…late lock-ins are harder to pull off.

Determining where you place the lock-in is almost akin to determining the type of story you’re going to tell. Stories with no lock-in tend to be character studies/profiles — less plot and more about characters who either aren’t goal-driven or are just plan reactive. They tend to feel more like real life which can risk boring the audience.

On the other hand, late lock-ins (mid-point or later) could be movies where characters are reactive early in the story but then change when they either settle into a new normal (superhero origin stories) or realize what’s going on (ghost stories or mysteries).

Let's look at a few quick examples…

Jurassic Park — the hero/goal/obstacle/stakes doesn’t really ‘lock-in’ until there are dinosaurs on the loose and it becomes a battle for survival. This doesn’t happen until about the 60-minute mark…around the ‘midpoint’. In some ways, you could look at this as a long act 1.

Jurassic Park really has a double premise — ‘imagine a theme park with cloned dinosaurs’ and ‘what if people were trapped in a theme park with cloned dinosaurs’. The movie takes the time to enjoy the wish-fulfillment aspects. It still has to find tension and does it with a lot of talk about Chaos Theory and Nedry performing some sneakiness. But ultimately it lets us enjoy this ‘new world’.

The Matrix is a bit like this. After Neo takes the pill and enters the new world — we’re treated to lots of fun world-building. Neo sees the ship, meets the team, gets some expo, learns kung-fu, gets some more expo, goes to see the Oracle, more expo…this goes on for quite a while before he gets a goal with an obstacle…The late lock-in occurs when Morpheus is captured and Neo is forced to go on a suicide mission to save him. Until then, Neo really doesn’t have a specific goal he’s chasing.

The Matrix is really a superhero origin story. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, The Ghostbusters all have sort of episodic ‘fun & games’ sections before a midpoint which really kicks the story into gear and gives us a late lock-in. It’s almost like episodes in a TV show…where the origin happens then the first big mission begins.

GET OUT also has a late lock-in. The hero’s situation is filled with weirdness and dread and tension…but there’s no real goal (not even solving the mystery of what’s going on is that compelling to the hero) until around the midpoint when he sees someone from the past who went missing. Only then does his titular goal of “GETTING OUT” kick in.

You see this in a lot of ‘slow burn’ horror movies. Often times the monster is operating behind the scenes. The ‘slow burn’ is filled with dread and mystery and a basic winding tension that you know is just going to snap eventually.

Movies like Alien and creepy Haunted House movies tease the terror but nothing overtly life-threatening happens until around the midpoint. Even many slasher films have the monster killing people in the shadows…but ‘game on’ doesn’t start until about halfway through.

It’s all in the eye of the beholder — all of these movies could be seen as having a long Act 1 — or not. And if the execution isn’t up to snuff and readers are getting bored — the answer is usually something like ‘Your midpoint should be your break into 2’ or ‘you need to find a more economical way to do the setup’.

But sometimes…like in the above examples…the late lock-in is just part of the story your telling. The key is knowing you’re doing it and why.

If you’re setting out to write a slow-burn horror story or a superhero origin story or world-building fish-out-of-water story…the late-lock in might be appropriate.

BUT PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

Probably the number one newbie mistakes is to have a hero with no goal.

Conflict is what usually hooks the audience. The standard source of tension in a script is a hero with a goal encountering an obstacle — if you hold off on this fundamental driver of tension — other methods of tension need to go on overdrive (mystery, dread, internal conflicts) or substitute ‘goals’ need to be put into place (almost temp stories till the real life-or-death stuff kicks in).