Your Stage : I just finished a 167 page script, take a read, let me know your thoughts (It a bit scientifically researched, so you might have to read it twice, lol): https://heyzine.com/flip-book/17c438612d.html by Chris Lim

uhhhh....uhhhh.... I'm speechless.

It’s a poor reader, the pages are difficult to advance. Post a PDF instead. You have 15 different scenes in the first sixty seconds. It looks interesting but I can’t read it. And obviously two to three hours could be way too long? You have crunched up the text to make it fit.

Straight up, Chris Lim....

... I was a paid reader for studios/networks/prod-cos for several years. If I was given a 167 page script, the script would already be in the PASS category. But then, if I read the first page of the script and saw it was not properly formatted like yours and difficult to read, the script would be a HARD PASS by the first page.

Adding to what David and Francisco said, if the writer says you may have to read it twice, that clearly shows the writer did not tell, or know how to tell, a story,. Readers , executives should only have to read it once to under stand the story.

167 pages? I'm sorry but that's a no. You do. know that, at roughtly a minute a page that your script is over two and a half hours? Unless you're writing a remake of "Lawrence of Arabia," I urge you to study the craft.

Chris Lim Here's what one AI platform thought of your first ten pages:

Reading through it: the "science" is dressed-up buzzword salad. The petri dish/bacterial growth curve metaphor sounds rigorous but it's a false equivalence stated as if it were insight — comparing global civilization to a closed bacterial culture is the kind of thing that sounds profound in a first draft and falls apart the second you think about it for five seconds. It's not building an idea, it's performing the aesthetic of having one. "Resource capacity," "technological capacity," "governance capacity" as three lines on a graph — that's TED-talk cosplay, not dramatized theme. None of it earns its place through story; it's delivered as lecture because the writer doesn't trust the audience to infer it from the AURORA/human-review material, which was the one place the theme was actually working.

And the war-room material underneath the jargon is thin. Strip out "Strategic Stability Index" and "confidence interval" and what's left is generic nuclear-thriller scaffolding you've seen a hundred times — "confirmed?" / "no, but consistent with" — dressed up in systems-analysis vocabulary to feel smarter than it is. Priya and Daniel aren't characters, they're mouthpieces reading off a dashboard. The tech-speak is doing the job that character and dramatic irony should be doing.

The result is a script that wants credit for being "about something" — civilizational overreach, governance lagging power — without doing the work of dramatizing that idea through people making choices. The pool scene is the one place it drops the jargon and just writes a mother and a kid, and it's dramatically the strongest thing in these ten pages by a wide margin. That's diagnostic: the writer can write, but seems to distrust plain, human writing and keeps reaching for pseudo-intellectual scaffolding instead — which, combined with padding the page count via compressed formatting, tells you something about the writer's relationship to the material's actual weaknesses. It's not a stupid script. It's a script performing intelligence instead of earning it.

Chris, I read the first 15 pages, intending only to sample it after seeing this discussion, and I ended up getting hooked.

What caught me wasn't simply the nuclear-war scenario. I saw the machinery underneath it: scientific systems, military systems, government systems and eventually civilian systems all interacting with one another. The early exchange where nobody believes they're escalating because everyone believes they're responding really landed with me. There's a kind of administrative horror in that—the machine doesn't necessarily require an evil person operating it. Rational decisions inside individual systems can collectively produce something catastrophic.

I also thought the transition from the institutional level to ordinary people worked particularly well. Once we're with the children, families, grocery shoppers and especially the mother and daughter at the swimming pool, all that systems-level escalation suddenly has a human cost.

By page 15 I understood the promise of Two Worlds: catastrophe, survival and then generations of divergence between the underground and surface populations. I wanted to keep reading.

I do understand the concerns others have raised about 167 pages for a feature. Since the story appears to cover such an enormous span of time and societal development, though, I found myself wondering whether you've ever considered it as a limited series. Not saying that's what it should be—just something the scope of those opening pages made me think about.

Anyway, those are just the impressions of another writer reading the opening. I enjoyed it.

1) There are formatting problems, and length is imposing.

2) If someone is learning, we as friendly colleagues should acknowledge those issues and move past them to help with the writing itself. That doesn’t mean reading the entire thing, but 10-20 pages should give me something I can critique. I’ll try to come back and do so.

3) For those who don’t have time to read the entire thing, a short synopsis would be helpful to see if the story structure is sound. For instance, in glancing at the first 15 pages, I didn’t see an obvious main character. But it could be that our prologue is more about setting up the world events.

Chris Lim I wrote three versions of the first chapter of my stories as prose. Then, I cut most of it to get what I eventually edited and then published. I'm finishing a script for a one-hour tv show. It's now 56 pages in standard script format. I have specific camera/scene notes for what we see and where (irl/set/cgi). Otherwise, it's action and dialog. I cut it from 87 pages because it was too long and had too many of my 'explanations' for things. That's all supposed to be in the action or dialog. My first script for the same show was 120 pages will all sorts of things that didn't need to be there and too many things that weren't.

I couldn't follow your script. I wasn't sure what was going on. Best suggestion is to work with someone on the formatting first. Once you see how that works, it will be easier for you to see what you need to cut - and what you need to add. It worked that way for me.

I can't believe you didn't know intuitively you had a dog on your hands.

Hey Chris, a lot of pages

Hey Chris, this is Leonardo from the Stage 32 team. I just wanted to let you know I moved your post from Screenwriting to Your Stage, as it fits much better there. Let me know if you have any questions, and all the best to you!