Donnie Darko Movie Breakdown

One of the assignments for my screenwriting class was to take a film we liked and break it down in a specific format, noting scene lengths, and seeing if/how the film conforms to a three act, eight sequence formula. Here’s one I did for Donnie Darko. (Warning: Obviously it contains a lot of spoilers.) I thought Donnie Darko would be an interesting challenge, since it’s such a quirky, idiosyncratic movie, but it actually fits the formula fairly well, with the inciting incident coming as expected around the ten minute mark and the emotional low point coming at the end of Act II. The eight sequence fit is a little uneasy, but it still kind of works. I did pick up a lot of things going through the movie like this that I never noticed before just watching it. One thing I noticed was how tightly plotted it actually is. I always thought of it as being a somewhat rambling, digressive story, but if you really look at it just about everything that happens is necessary to set up something that happens later.