Geneva Robertson-Dworet writes adaptations of things other people already love, and she writes them as comedies with a body count. Her people are good company and her tone can turn on a line; her plots, on the evidence so far, are the part that still needs work.
Fi1m perspective
The heroine of a Geneva Robertson-Dworet script does not arrive knowing how to do the job. She learns it in front of us, and the writing keeps switching on her between a joke and something horrible, often inside the same scene. Robertson-Dworet has said Fallout is "a mix of weird comedy and drama and violence and incredible moral dilemmas. And it is all of those things at once," and that is a fair account of how she works in general. When it comes off, as it mostly does in Fallout (2024), the switching is the pleasure. When it does not, as in Captain Marvel (2019), a scene never quite decides what it is for.
Her career so far is three adaptations of other people's property. She was hired in 2015 to rewrite Tomb Raider (2018), which we have not reviewed, and her early drafts leaned harder on quips than the finished film before the tone was pulled back. Captain Marvel followed, with five writers sharing the story credit, Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve alongside the directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Then came Fallout, which she created and runs with Graham Wagner, and which is the first time we have been able to see her work without a crowd around it.
Captain Marvel is the cautionary case. Five names on the story and it shows: the Kree-Skrull war, the memory mystery and the 1995 buddy picture take turns rather than adding up. The middle hour, when Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson are simply allowed to talk, is the part that looks like her. Perlman's Guardians of the Galaxy got away with the same clutter by being cheerful and in a hurry; this is solemn about its identity plot, and solemn is not what Robertson-Dworet is good at.
Fallout is the better evidence, and the better show. It is funny and carefully made, and it gives Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins people worth following through a grotesque wasteland. We laughed more than we expected to, and then, somewhere in the middle episodes, we noticed we had stopped minding whether the plot was going anywhere. That is a compliment to the cast and a note to the writers' room. The three-strand structure keeps asking us to move our interest from one set of people to another, and the people are not developed evenly enough for that to be easy; the mysteries are good, but the immediate business does not always have enough urgency.
Television suits her. It has room for the detours, it lets the tone change by the episode, and it keeps her characters around long enough for us to care what happens to them. What we would like to see next is a script, for the screen or the small one, where the route is as good as the company.
Biography
Geneva Robertson-Dworet (born 8 May 1985) is an American screenwriter. She graduated from Harvard College in 2007, where she contributed to The Harvard Lampoon.
She rose to prominence after rewriting the screenplay for the 2018 Tomb Raider reboot. She co-wrote the screenplay for Captain Marvel (2019). Robertson-Dworet is co-creator and co-showrunner, with Graham Wagner, of the Amazon Prime Video series Fallout (2024–present), for which she also serves as writer and executive producer. She is married to writer Hayes Davenport.
