"The middle drags a bit" is often true. It is also close to useless, because nothing in the sentence says where to cut or what to add. This note is about seeing tension as axes rather than as an impression.
Notes on a first draft tend to sound like this. I wasn't drawn in. The character doesn't land. The last act feels rushed. All of these can be accurate. The trouble is that none of them points at a place to fix.
To point at a place, tension has to be described against something. With something to measure against, "this drags" becomes "through this stretch the character is not standing anywhere between reason and emotion." The second sentence can be acted on.
What you choose as that something is the whole of this layer. It could be personality types, or genre convention. Movie Kick uses axes with two poles.
Movie Kick calls one such axis a Boundary. An axis is a pair of poles pulling against each other. Reason and emotion; trust and distrust. Neither pole is the correct answer, and where a character stands between them is their state at that moment. There are seventeen such axes, grouped into four domains.
| Domain | Axes |
|---|---|
| Self | Reason vs Emotion · Courage vs Fear · Authentic Self vs Mask · Release vs Obsession · Greatness vs Ordinariness |
| Bonds | Love vs Hate · Trust vs Distrust · Connection vs Isolation · Truth vs Deceit · Forgiveness vs Revenge |
| Order | Empowerment vs Powerlessness · Justice vs Injustice · Responsibility vs Self-interest · Escape vs Bondage |
| Fate | Life vs Death · Hope vs Despair · Free Will vs Fate |
Axes differ in kind. On some, the two poles complete each other; on others, choosing one pole means giving the other up. So the same character in the same position reads differently depending on which axis you look through. Measure them all with one ruler and stories that are genuinely different come out looking the same.
More axes is not better. A film usually works on two or three in earnest; the rest sit in the background. The reason to keep seventeen is not to use them all, but to make it possible to choose which ones your film is actually about.
Once your plot is in place, Movie Kick shows which axes the film is moving along. You see the flow as characters cross from one pole toward the other, and the stretches where that flow goes flat become visible.
The Dark Knight — Bruce Wayne
Taken from a real analysis screen. The bold line is this character's main axis, Responsibility vs Self-interest. It climbs through beats 8–10, falls to its lowest at 11–12, and from 13 on never comes back — that trough is where the story makes the character pay.
This is not a score. It does not grade the work, and it does not tell you what to change. Putting a name to the place that felt slack is where this layer stops. What to do about it is the writer's call.