How the TV Series '24' and the character Jack Bauer relates to our thriller and the character Sean Finch

What the TV series “24” is about

The TV series '24' shows the life of Jack Bauer covering 24 hours. Bauer is the main character in the series and works for the Los Angeles-based counter Terrorist Unit. '24' shows Bauer who is racing against time to prevent people from being killed by terrorists. Jack is portrayed as the hero of the situation to protect people from assassination plots. Jack Bauer is therefore there to help subvert terrorists and save the nation.

How Jack Bauer relates to our character Sean Finch

Jack Bauer is played by Kiefer Sutherland in '24' and is a middle aged man. This character portrays many traits similar to Sean Finch who we would like to be played by an older man who is more strong and willing to fight. Jack Bauer also has a hero persona of which Sean has an essence in our thriller as a hero of the action. Jack Bauer has to race against time if he wants to save people, before it's too late just like Sean Finch has to race against time to save himself. The difference is that Sean Finch is in a situation where he has to kill people to save himself whereas Jack Bauer in '24' is risking his life to save people. Even though Sean Finch has to kill people he is still the protagonist in the situation as it his mission to find the villain and to correct wrong doings.

The characters of our thriller opening sequence

Sean Finch

- Protagonist/Anti-hero

- Victim of a toxin injection

- Bald and middle-aged to make the situation seem slightly more realistic than our original plan which would involve having a teenage actor

- Wears a suit, showing that he is a business man and dresses smartly, but his suit is disheveled when he wakes up in an alley to show there was some sort of struggle

Sebastian Giles

- Antagonist

- Age not revealed

- Psychotic personality

- The holder of the antidote and the person responsible for Sean’s injection with the toxin

- Appearance is not fully shown which makes his character more suspicious and mysterious from the audience’s perspective in addition to Sean’s

- Only seen from nose down so his eye’s are not shown, causing a question of identity

How 'The Long Kiss Goodnight' relates to our thriller

What is The Long Kiss Goodnight about?

The Long Kiss Goodnight is about a school-teacher called Samantha (Geena Davis) who suffers from amnesia and remains curious to how she acquired it 8 years prior. After she is involved in a car accident causing a brief concussion, she recuperates to see that she possesses skills with a knife that she cannot explain. When trouble from her past finds her again she demonstrates the prowess to subdue and kill him bare-handed and so leaves with private detective Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) in order to protect her daughter Caitlin. Disturbed by her haunting reminiscences and frightened by a group of people who are terrorising her, Samantha begins to recover her memories and along with Henessey, they discover that she was once a top government assassin.

How does The Long Kiss Goodnight relate to our thriller?

The Long Kiss Goodnight relates to our thriller in that at the beginning, Samantha was unable to remember anything before the event 8 years ago that caused her amnesia. In our thriller, Sean Finch wakes up to find that he cannot remember what happened the previous night. Although they both involve memory loss, they also differ in this way as Samantha’s memory loss was long-term, while Sean’s is short-term. Another way in which they are similar is that they are both required to kill people so they can survive. However, Samantha also needs to rescue her daughter, whereas Sean is only trying to save himself.

How 'The Bourne Identity' relates to our thriller

What is The Bourne Identity about?

Bourne Identity is about a character called Jason Bourne played by Matt Damon who is suffering from extreme memory loss, he wakes up to find two gunshot wounds on his back and he has only one clue to who he is, the number of a safe security box which is implanted on his hip. He soon realises that he is being hunted and he runs away with his new friend Marie Helena Kreutz to find out why this is happening to him. 

How The Bourne Identity relates to our thriller?

Bourne Identity relates to our thriller because like Jason Bourne, our character Sean Finch has woken up to discover that he has strange wounds that weren’t there before and he also suffers from memory loss because he does not remember the previous night when he wakes up. The differences however is that Sean has 36 hours to live throughout the film while Bourne has no such situation. Moreover, Sean only has memory loss about the previous night while Jason does not remember anything of his previous life except for his impressive skills.

How 'Crank' relates to our thriller

What is Crank about?

A one-time freelance hit man who was just attempting to turn his life around is forced to keep his heart pumping when his vengeful former employers inject him with a lethal poison that will permanently stop his ticker if his pulse sinks beneath an active rate in a non-stop urban action extravaganza starring Jason Statham and Amy Smart. Chev Chelios (Statham) was one of the most skilled assassins in the West Coast crime syndicate. However, when he hung up his guns in the middle of a job to run off with his new girlfriend Eve (Smart), the man who was once the hunter now becomes the hunted. Awakened from his slumber by a telephone call informing him of his precarious situation, Chelios soon discovers that the only way to save Eve from certain death at the hands of his nemesis is to stay two steps ahead of his killers, keep his heart-rate high enough to stay alive, and blast through the streets of Los Angeles in search of an antidote.

How is Crank similar to our thriller?

Crank relates to our thriller as they use the same idea of a person having been injected with something deadly. They also play on the same idea that the main hero must fulfill a specific task or set of tasks in order to stay alive. Our thriller differs from Crank in that the main protagonist doesn’t have to keep his heart rate up, he just has to kill a list of people, and he is given a specific time frame in which to do it.

Real-life incidents similar to our thriller

Woman Kills Her Mother Inspired by Breaking Bad

Kuntal Patel had often fantasised about killing her mother after she had been forbidden her to marry her boyfriend Niraj. She had then contacted a poison dealer on the dark web and claimed that she needed a deadly toxin to get her mother out of the way. When the poison arrived, she claimed it was simply supposed to knock her out but it ended up killing her. She did all this because she felt like she was a Mexican drug warlord similar to the main characters of the television series Breaking Bad. Currently, she is saying that she had nothing to do with it and the only reason that she was doing it was to fulfil her fantasies. This relates to our thriller because the main antagonist Sebastian Giles is using a toxin to get Sean Finch to do what he wants which in this case is forcing him to kill the people on his list.

Russian Spy Killed by Poison Umbrella

On September 7th 1918, Russian Spy Georgi Markov was stabbed on his back thigh with a poison umbrella, which at that point was no more painful than an insect bite. However as time progressed, the area that was stabbed was clearly showing a bruise and it was continuing to get larger. Over the course of the following week he became progressively sicker until he eventually died on September 11th 1918. This incident relates to our thriller because Sean Finch has also been injected with a toxin that is set to kill him extremely painfully in 36 hours and what happened with Markov is that he had also died a painful death as a result of a toxin being injected into his bloodstream.

Feedback from our thriller idea

From presenting our idea, we have decided to make a few changes. Instead of showing the syringe as a prop in the opening sequence, we will not showcase the syringe. This will create suspense as the ending of the film could be that he didn’t actually get injected, showing the whole act was a facade and therefore the character was set up. Feedback also showed that instead of a teenage boy acting the role, we decided that the role should rather be an older, middle-aged man who seems mature and even less likely to be involved in a plot like this.

Looking at other movie openings will provide us with further inspiration. These films are Crank, The Bourne Identity and The Long Kiss Goodnight, which as a group have discovered. These are examples of action thrillers, which can be analysed in how they connect to our thriller and how we can possibly develop our idea. At the moment our thriller has a working title and we will deliberate ideas at a later stage.

Group idea for our thriller

My favourite thriller idea

Thriller ideas from news articles

This news article is about a man who died after being found lying in the road 90 minutes after a woman was murdered one street away. They both knew each other.

I could turn this into a thriller as there could be a serial killer who, by killing a person, someone the murderer knew would also die. It could begin with someone distant, but as the murderer kills more and more people, his friends and family could start to die.

From this article, I have thought that my thriller could be about a father and teenage daughter who have a close relationship, but her mother is dead. The daughter could be unaware that her father is a serial killer and is in fact the person who killed her mother. The thriller could show him killing different people and show his daughter’s gradual realisation of the truth.

This article has inspired me to think about creating my thriller about a kidnapper who continues to frame a woman she hates for her own kidnappings of people connected in some way to the woman she is blaming. The thriller could show everyone believing that she is guilty, although she promises of her innocence.

The Art of the Title Sequence