Space Pirates and Rule Of Cool

In 6 days, I'll be going back to school for my final year. I'm doing Multimedia, which means I'll have to do something big. For this, I have decided to shoot a movie. It's going to have space pirates, that much is for sure.

The basic plot outline: The main character is a resourceful kid stranded on an uninhabited planet by himself. He's there because his solar system's leader decided to completely outlaw space travel, and he was from a long line of space-ship engineers. One day, a small ship crashlands on his planet and a woman jumps out, saying she's from La Résistance and that they need him in order to overthrow the corrupt government. He agrees, and after fixing her ship they go to the resistance HQ.

The resistance mainly consists of pirates, who attack supply ships and the such directed at the leader's base-planet. So far, this has only caused the leader to tighten patrols and station much more devastating ships on said patrols. The kid is mainly stationed to repair damaged ships, but after a massive attack on the compound he's forced to take up piloting and accompanies some ships on a raid. The operation was said to be easy, but there are more ships guarding the target than the pirate leader let on. One of the ships, the kid notices, actually falls apart before it gets attacked, causing him to become suspicious of the pirate leader's motivations. He manages to get back to base in one piece, and threatens the pirate leader with an ultrasonic progressive knife. The pirate leader breaks his arm, takes the knife and (this is a pivotal scene) cuts the kid's left eye out. It turns out he'd been working for the government all along, and that the resistance HQ was set to explode in roughly 5 minutes. Both the leader and the kid escape, the latter with his original rescuer's help.

The kid manages to sear his eyehole shut (there's that Rule of Cool) and splints his arm, and almost immediately begins to mount an assault. Over the space of a month, he manages to amass a large army of spaceships and even liberates a planet. His ships, mostly hand-built and given away to those interested in his rebellion, are quickly shown to be very effective against the government's aged ships, and the resistance begins to go somewhere. But the former pirate leader has a large fleet fixed up and goes to war with the rebellion in a large, half-mile high cruiser.

This is where everything gets a bit messed up. I haven't fleshed this out much, but the basic event goes:

• Cruiser launches missiles, wipes out a couple waves of ships
• Kid's ship badly damaged
• Kid says "fuck it" and dives out of his ship at the cruiser with no air supply, clinging to the side and cutting one of the doors open
• Kid's original savior flies damaged ship into the cruiser's main turret, destroying it and getting away on a jetpack
• Kid ends up killing former pirate leader and sets the cruiser to collide with the governmet's base planet

There are a few concepts which bare mentioning: The ships run off a hard crystal substance which stores solar energy and gives it off as a light which is good for spaceship fuel but not much else. Ships all have a predetermined space around them which is fully "oxygenated", so people can breathe outside the ship for a little while. The progressive knife uses ultrasonic vibrations to cut through stuff.

There are a few developments that are mainly for Rule of Cool, such as the cauterization of the kid's eye and the "dive through space" thing. The eye scene would be done with the kid breaking a part of the ship's fuelling crystal off and using that, while the dive would be through a wide gap, wider than both ship's "air bubble".

What's more, when I get to work shooting this I aim to make the effects with as little CGI as I can. The door scene on the cruiser? Balloon latex and a precut door. The scene where the kid gets his eye cut out? Close up on a goat's eye being penetrated by a knife, then cut to the actor (holding a fake-blood filled condom in their hand which has been broken by the other character's prop knife) dripping blood through their fingers. A wooden model of a few ships, with large wooden boxes being used to shoot room scenes in ships.

I've got that much down, but I don't have any names for anything or anyone. I'll also need to cast people when I get back to school.

So, how is it?

Needs a moral dilemma, IMHO. What you outlined above is too vanilla. Action doesn't carry a movie by itself.

Ehh, moral dilemmas are pretty overused imo. There'll be more than enough drama, don't you worry; this is only the rough outline.

The moral dilemma is one of the Eternal Tropes for a good reason. I don't think that one can actually ever be overused, though particular instances of it certainly can. But it's your tale to tell, so by all means take it in whichever direction appeals to you.

They are these days. Either that or preachy political shit.

From the sounds of it, this flick might be a tad shallow but with Space Pirates who cares? It's all popcorn flick type stuff.