As a lifelong film fan, I’ve always been fascinated with the trials and tribulations of the many seasons of Project Greenlight. It began in 2001 as a contest shepherded by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and irritable producer Chris Moore to select the best submitted script and turn it into a movie. The process would also be documented at every stage by TV cameras for an HBO documentary series, but this is an organization defined by its chaos and mistakes, which make for spellbinding schadenfreude television and rather disappointing movies. Each season tried to retool. Season one winner Peter Jones was more a writer than a director and not fully ready when he was thrust to also direct his winning script, so season two had separate submissions to select a winning writer and a winning director to pair. Season three realized that the coming-of-age indies of the first two seasons (Stolen Summer, The Battle of Shaker Heights) didn’t exactly ignite the box-office, so the intent was a more commercial genre script, which ended up becoming the monster siege thriller, Feast. Season four, coming nearly ten years later, decided that the commercial script needed to come from a more trusted and studio-backed source rather than amateurs. That source: Pete Jones, now having become a co-writer to some Farrelly Brothers comedies. That season only sought to select a director, having now completely ditched the screenwriting aspect from the start of the contest, but the winning director ditched the approved script to make a middling comedy feature of his own short film (The Leisure Class). Now, many years later, HBO Max (or now just… Max, because somebody thinks “HBO” lacks brand value) has rebooted Project Greenlight, again, and has another more commercially-minded script to serve the eventual directing winner, this time among a team of ten female finalists. So after twenty years and five movies, what has Project Greenlight proven? Good TV doesn’t mean good movies.

Gray Matter will forever be known as “the Project Greenlight movie,” and if it wasn’t for that series, we wouldn’t be seeing this movie because it’s so generic and underwritten, which, having spent the day binging through the new Greenlight season, are the same problems that all the many producers were complaining about with the script. Well, you folks picked this script, right?

Aurora (Mia Isaac) is a 16-year-old who just wants to feel like a normal teenager. Her mom, Ayla (Jessica Frances Dukes), is afraid she won’t be able to defend herself in this scary world. They’re a mother-daughter psionic duo, exhibiting mind powers. After a tragedy away from home, Aurora finds herself in a weird complex run by Derek (Garret Dillahunt), a mysterious authority figure who says he’s trying to find all the psionics he can to help them better understand their unique abilities. Aurora suspects her captors don’t really have her best interest at heart.

That plot description above sounds like a hundred other YA-tinged stories, from The Darkest Minds to Firestarter to the X-Men TV show The Gifted, which also co-starred Dillahunt. It’s a fine starting point but the story and characters need to find ways to better personalize this formula, and that’s where Gray Matter falters. It’s all too surface-level, from the mother-daughter relationship, to the determination of Ayla, to the self-actualization of our teen. It’s not that you’ve seen it before, it’s that you’ve seen it before much better in so many other stories.

The story pieces are present that can be developed for a more engaging and character-centric sci-fi drama. There is potential here. I think more could be made about Ayla’s past connections to this psionic complex, but instead of being offered to co-chair it as an administrator, it would have been more interesting if she had been younger, a pregnant teen, and her unborn baby was the course of great speculation for the facility, especially being the child of two psionics. This would add an extra layer of urgency why Ayla felt she had to leave as well as why Aurora would be more coveted than other psionics. It could also easily explain why Aurora would be more powerful than any other psionic. It would also personalize the sacrifice of Ayla as well as her paranoia about the lengths they will be hunted. We needed more time with Ayla as a character because once the daughter gets kidnapped around the Act One break, she’s seen more in flashback and fantasy sequences than reality. If this is going to be the emotional core of the movie, then we need to flesh out the mother and the scenes between them. As demonstrated in the movie, Aurora is here to push her daughter, tell her she isn’t ready, then restrict her but also not really restrict her, as Aurora seems to sneak out every night to meet boys. If this woman is so paranoid, why is she alternating between being a strict gatekeeper and a free-range parent? It didn’t make sense. She’s keeping her child out of school and the public and constantly moving, but hey, go ahead and fraternize with these teenagers supposedly behind my back?

It’s also a shame that our protagonist is such a boring blank. The puberty/super power allegory has been prevalent for decades, but for a movie that literally spends so much of its time inside the mind of its main character, she’s unfortunately too underdeveloped and unexplored. She’s just kind of present for too many of her scenes rather than an active participant. This is partly from the nature of the script, where Aurora has to learn about her powers and the history of psionics, but why does the first act of the movie resort to repeating this exposition? We have one scene where mom is explaining powers and what’s at stake, and then twenty minutes later we have another scene of Derek explaining powers and what’s at stake. The biggest problem with Gray Matter is that its central character feels like an afterthought of a simple yet empty empowerment message. It’s about a young woman coming into her own power, externally and internally, but it’s also expressed under such generic terms. What do we know about Aurora? She wants a “normal life” but what does this constitute? Does she resent her mother’s rules? Has she rebelled in the past? What really animates her? What is her sense of purpose? I don’t know, which diminishes all the sequences of her running in terror, and that dominates the middle hour. I wish the script had started with her sneaking out, hanging out with these kids who consider her “that weird homeschool girl,” and then when things go wrong we have to learn with what we see rather than sitting through multiple people trying to explain the world and rules. It would be a better shock when things go wrong, and the added time would allow more breathing room to try and flesh out Aurora before she’s defined by her powers.

Another aspect that needed further re-examination was the nature of the psionic powers. The plot needed to better define the rules of these powers, which are quite varied. We begin with the powers mostly being telekinetic, the ability to move things with one’s mind. Then it jumps into telepathy, the ability to speak through one’s mind, then read the minds of others, then project mental structures, then working all the way to teleportation. There is a good scene where Derek is impressed by Aurora’s ability to hide her thoughts with a false setting construct, and I enjoyed him pointing out the giveaway details, like a character reading a book that is only ever the same page. That was a smart scene that better visualized the powers. However, the characters talk too broadly about the powers in sweeping proclamations. I think the movie could have improved had the story ditched more of the powers and settled down on one, with Aurora having the ability to manifest more than one power being a sign of her extraordinary identity.

As a low-budget genre movie, Gray Matter looks like a professional movie and has good actors doing their best. Debut director Meko Winbush has made a genre movie that looks practically indistinguishable from other disposable Hollywood genre thrillers, and maybe on a sliding scale, feeling and looking like a generic sci-fi thriller might be a success in the history of Project Greenlight. But I doubt all the many people who lent their labor and names to this project were hoping for it to be on par with a forgettable streaming entity eventually crushed by a library of content. Winbush presents enough visual polish that could lead her to future work, something that has also plagued many of the director winners from seasons past (Jason Mann, the season four winner, has one feature credit after The Leisure Class, serving as DP to a 2019 Slovenian movie). It’s hard to feel what exactly people could get passionate about with Gray Matter, and they just waited for a rewrite to supply all the missing emotional engagement and introspection and fun that was absent. Once again, the finished film ends up being a disappointing season finale to a train wreck of reality TV.

Nate’s Grade: C