Synoptic Treatment - Death3

Death³ is a Sci-fi Thriller that will hit close to home with an audience of teenagers or young adults, we feel it will attract this audience because of the growing interest with the 2012/Mayan Calendar conspiracy theories, films such as ‘2012’ which is due to be released in cinemas in 2009 only show the natural disaster side of the genre with no character story to follow, Death³ changes that by making the film revolve around three teenage friends who have to make life changing choices throughout the film. This will make the audience realise the threat and how close to home it actually is as we are changing the conventions of the normal disaster film by giving a face to the survivors and putting them in a real life situation, which poses the question, where would you be and what would you do if this happened to you?

The film starts with the President of the US giving a televised speech on the current global resource race. During this the image will almost lose signal and in between losing and regaining signal the title sequence will begin. The idea of the signal breaking is there to represent the loss of signal between the audience and the rest of the world, and the friendship between the three characters who are introduced later in the film.

Our story starts with the three friends at school who bare witness to an array of nuclear attacks. This plunges the US into a post apocalyptic environment. Other television shows such as ‘Jericho’ already have similar storylines which predominantly revolve around the survival of humanity. Death³ takes this theme to a whole new level with unlikely twists and choices shown through a microcosm of the three characters.

The school is then evacuated; however, the classroom the trio are located in is not notified of the evacuation. This is where the theme of the film comes into action. The idea of the breakdown of society comes into play. The three main characters must work together to survive and come across an antidote for the toxic fumes of which the characters started inhaling after they stepped outside the classroom. While this may seem like the easy way out there is only enough antidote for one of the three, creating the problem of the film, and creating choices.

The first half of the film will not be shot in real time; this is because this time is only needed to set the back-story of the film. The last hour will be shot in real time to show how long it could take before greed sets in between the trio and on a whole how society can breakdown in just a few hours, no matter how large or small the scale.

The trio eventually end up fighting over who is able to use the antidote, killing each other in the process. Of course, every good film needs a moral. Towards the ending of the film the vial containing the antidote falls over revealing a note with the location of more vaccines. This shows that if the trio had worked together they would have all survived. This can also be interpreted to humanity as a whole, as the vast majority would try to save themselves first, which again could hit close to home with the audience.