In just a few years, Emily Carmichael has gone from making an animated webseries for Penny Arcade to writing Pacific Rim: Maelstrom and directing Powerhouse, the next big project from Steven Spielberg. Today on Ars Technica, we’re proud to host the digital debut of Stryka, one of Carmichael’s short films that rocketed her from gamer geekdom to Hollywood. It’s the tale of a neurotic alien lizard living in Brooklyn, just trying to get by on small time heists. She has just one problem. Her partner in crime just isn’t bringing the zing anymore, and she’s been secretly doing jobs on the side with someone else.

What’s immediately apparent is that Carmichael has an uncanny ability to make a completely alien world feel familiar. Even though main character Stryka (Aimee Mullins) is covered in horns and speaks in clicks, her problems are relatable. She’s torn between two thieves, Callen (Homeland's Rupert Friend) and Peterson (John Behlmann), very different men who both want to work with her. Meanwhile her mother keeps calling to nag about what she’s doing with her life. The scenes with Stryka’s coin-op shrink give us the perfect window on the rather mundane inner life of a lizard thief.

Welcome to the Reversiverse

Perhaps the world of Stryka is so vivid because Carmichael has been inhabiting it for a while in her imagination. She told Ars that Stryka is actually a main character in her forthcoming feature film Eon, and that both stories are set in a larger world she invented called the Reversiverse. “It’s like our world but it’s the place where every commonly explored sci-fi plotline is a reality,” she explained with a chuckle. “In the Reversiverse, World War II never happened because 8 time travelers shot Hitler. People are living in NeoNeoNeoTokyo because of the combined effects of every anime plotline ever. Stryka’s species launched an alien invasion of Earth in the 60s, but now they’re very assimilated and super conventional. Stryka’s sister lives in the suburbs and her niece plays field hockey. But her species doesn’t have human vocal chords, so they still speak their own language.”

One of the intriguing quirks in Stryka is that it turns our conventional understanding of heroes and sidekicks on its head. At one point, Stryka observes that she’s the Han Solo and Callen is the Chewbacca. Given their roles in the heists, this is clearly true, but as Carmichael pointed out, we never expect the lizard alien to be the hero with a human sidekick. Usually, we never learn about the inner life of the Wookie-style character. A common trope, seen all over the place in Star Wars, is that we never even get subtitles to translate what Chewie is saying. He’s just a hairy lug who growls a lot. Carmichael didn’t want that for her lizard alien character.

"There’s something suspicious about characters being denied a chance to speak,” she mused. “It’s an obstacle in perceiving their humanity and knowing them.” Carmichael worked with Mullins to give Stryka a language that felt human and alien at once. “Stryka’s language was improvised by actor Aimee Mullins using two different languages and a smattering of Game Of Thrones references. It was then digitally perfected by sound artist Laura Sinnott.”

In case it’s not obvious, Carmichael is interested in what she calls “the everyday lives of sci-fi characters.” That’s what inspires humor and emotional moments in her work. Her other inspiration is action scenes. In college, she fell in love with theater and found that she had a knack for writing fight scenes—especially ones with a lot of “quipping while fighting, like in The Princess Bride.” In fact, she called the fight between Inigo Montoya and the Six-Fingered Man one of the very best in film:

You might argue this is not so much a great fight as it is a vehicle for a great piece of dialogue. But the dialogue would be nothing without the fight. I like this fight because I remember seeing it when I was like, 7, and being like—this is a subplot. I can tell this is a subplot. And that guy—that’s not, like, the blonde hero-guy that the blonde lady falls in love with. But this is still the most moving fight in the movie.

Pacific Rim: Maelstrom and Powerhouse

It’s easy to see why Carmichael caught the eye of Steven DeKnight, director of Pacific Rim: Maelstrom, the second film in the series that pits giant robots against giant monsters. He recently brought her on board to co-write the movie with Kira Snyder (The 100). “He told me I was hired to help provide banter, warmth and cleverness,” Carmichael recalled. But DeKnight and his colleagues were also impressed when Carmichael met with them and immediately offered several ideas for what the next generation of Jaegers should be like.

Some unanticipated questions arose for Carmichael when she was writing about giant robots. For example, the Jaegers are variously called “she,” “he,” or “it,” depending both on the Jaeger and the character speaking. And when a new robot came into play, “I would do this whole mental calculus about what gender it was, and whether the character speaking even assigned gender to robots.” (She made use of a helpful table on the Pacific Rim wiki). Writing kaiju was more straightforward, said Carmichael. “For me the most important thing about a kaiju that there is one moment in the fight where you really feel how big it is. The correct size for a kaiju is bigger than you ever thought possible.”

The best part of writing Pacific Rim: Maelstrom has been adding humor to the action. “I have been writing action sequences my whole life and when I sat down to write them for screenplays it came easily and quickly,” Carmichael said. Expect fight scenes that have some of that Inigo Montoya magic.

Carmichael’s other upcoming project, Powerhouse, is also indirectly connected to Stryka. She got the writing/directing gig after Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow read Eon, the feature film where Stryka also appears. Trevorrow was so impressed that he showed the script to Spielberg, whom he'd worked with on Jurassic World. Spielberg promptly offered Carmichael the gig writing and directing Powerhouse, which is based on a story by Trevorrow.

Though she can’t say much about Powerhouse, Carmichael did tell Ars a little bit about it:

Powerhouse is a very human, sentimental story about parents and children and how discovering who our parents are is important to growing up. There are lavish, extended fight sequences in which a lot of physical architecture is destroyed. It’s definitely a world that resembles our world, but maybe there are secret things going on under the surface of our world.

It sounds like the perfect place for the inventor of the Reversiverse to spin her next tale.

Listing image by Stryka