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Genre: Action-Adventure
Premise (from writer): After witnessing the slaughter of her village by a rival clan, a woman warrior treks across Japan in search of revenge.
Why You Should Read (from writer): This script came out of my love for sword fighting. In every samurai film ever made, it’s always by far the highlight of the story, which is why I set out to make the plot of Onna-Bugeisha so simple. The characters have no spoken dialog. I thought it would be a great experiment to write a film in which the battles, the duels and the score were the dialog. — Uma Thurman aside, rarely do we see a woman take center stage in a samurai action film. The main protagonist in this story is not only a woman, but a mother of two. Women of the households, defending their families at sword point, is ingrained in the samurai culture, but to the best of my knowledge, I haven’t seen that story play out on film. — Please note: Although the page count is low for a feature film, I’ve timed it at around 1 hr 50 min.
Writer: Jon Sanhueza
Details: 48 pages (yes, 48 pages!)
I had a feeling you guys would dig this one. There’s something about martial arts and movies that goes together like Silver Lake and hipsters. Now I’ve never been leading the martial-arts charge. Maybe it’s because, as a kid, my karate instructor used to make me hold two books out with my arms until they fell off. But, hey, what 13 year old doesn’t go through their “Enter the Dragon is the best movie ever!” phase. I know I did.
Still, we’ve got a writer who’s taking a huge chance here. I’ve read a few scripts over the years that have been dialogue-free, and while telling a story without anyone speaking is one of the purest forms of storytelling, it tends to work best in short spurts, and not for 90 minutes at a time. Let’s see if Onna-Bugeisha is an exception to the rule.
Lord Mori is dead. And that’s never a good thing. This thrusts his son, Lord Jiro, and his daughter, Lady Takara, into the kingdom-running spotlight. And with Lady Takara running off to get married, it means poor Lord Jiro will have to do everything by his lonesome. And how does he celebrate this? With a concubine, of course! Oh man. Who wouldn’t have loved to live in feudal Japan.
There’s only one problem. That concubine? She’s kind of a secret assassin. And after giving Jiro a little sexy time, she strangles him to death. Meanwhile, Lady Tanaka is riding to her new hubby’s place with her number 1 bodyguard, the Samurai, “Katsuro.” But when their carriage is attacked, not even a samurai can take on a couple dozen gun-slingers. Maybe this is the moment in time when samurais realized, “You know? This gun thing might be an issue for our longevity.”
Katsuro’s beautiful wife, Maiko, is back at home using her residual samurai knowledge to take down the raiders destroying Jiro’s kingdom. In the process, both of her children are killed. But somehow, Maiko escapes, and heads into the woods after her man. She finally finds him in a cave, rescues him from the nasty raiders, and heads to the nearest village for some food.
Unfortunately, Katsuro wants to kill himself. Something about tradition for being a failure or something. Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to live in feudal Japan. He succeeds when Maiko’s away, and now Maiko is all alone with no home, no children, no husband, and no In and Out. So she does what anyone in her situation would do: She plots some revenge, muthufuka!
Eventually she finds out that Lady Takara and her new hubby were responsible for this whole thing, probably so they could rule more land. So Maiko heads to their kingdom, now looking like a haggard beggar, and slices her way to a local tournament, where she takes down her competition, and finally, the couple responsible for her family’s death.
Writing a script without dialogue is like eating a pizza without cheese. It’s not that it can’t be good. But you’re going to have to come up with some bomb-ass recipe to make us forget about that cheese.
One of the lesser-talked about things in screenwriting is the way dialogue helps a reader’s eyes move down the page. It’s ironic when you think about it because we’re all telling you, “SHOW! DON’T TELL!” And yet secretly, we like you to tell because a page of dialogue moves about four times as fast as a page of description.
I remember getting to what I thought was at least page 25, and I looked up and saw that I was on page 8. That’s never a good sign. The goal in any script should be for the reader to look up and NOT BELIEVE it’s already page 40 or page 70.
And it’s not that Jon deluges us with endless paragraphs. Actually, the majority of his paragraphs are 1 line long!
So it led me to wonder, is the problem here that there’s no dialogue? Or is the problem that the story isn’t very compelling?
I can pinpoint one area that might help answer that question. After Maiko’s family has been killed, she finds some sort of piece of paper that highlights a contest with Lady Takara. And it seemed to me like this was supposed to be a key plot revelation. Like it was telling us who had raided the kingdom. And yet, it wasn’t clear if that’s what was happening, leaving me to wonder if I’d just read a major plot twist (Lady Takara betrayed her brother!) or if this was some run-of-the-mill exposition to get Maiko to the contest.
If there had been dialogue in this script, I’m sure there’d be zero confusion here. You’d have that scene where a character literally said this out loud. But there wasn’t, and that left me wondering who was responsible for this attack, a major plot point in the story lost due to the vagueness of a voice-less screenplay.
On top of this, I’m not sure this would be a 90 minute to 2 hour movie. That’s another problem you run into when you don’t follow proper page-protocol. 1 page = 1 minute of screen time. That’s how Hollywood’s been doing it since the beginning. They’ve even go so far as to keep certain dead fonts alive during the personal computing font revolution of the 80s so they could accurately determine a script’s length.
This may seem trivial but remember, you’re talking about a business that wants to know EXACTLY how much something is going to cost, down to the thousand dollar mark. Warner Brothers will force you to write scripts for them in their specific template so they can have a better understanding of this number.
I don’t know if this movie is 30 minutes long. 100 minutes long. I have no idea. And if I don’t know, I’m guessing a studio exec won’t either.
All of this overshadows the fact that Jon is a really good writer. You can tell he loves this subject matter. The way he describes things is very simple and elegant (“A ninja drags the samurai onto the roof and plunges the sickle into his chest.”). There’s just something about this no-dialogue format that’s interrupting my enjoyment. I wish I felt differently but that’s the truth. And as Will Smith likes to say, “Tell the trust.”
Screenplay link: Onna-Bugeisha
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me (but writer is definitely someone to watch out for)
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Despite my reaction to this specific story, today is a reminder to write about what you love. It really makes a difference in the product. Readers can tell when you care. Everything feels more detailed, more vibrant, more thought-out. You can’t fake that. It’s like a born and bred country singer being asked to sing R&B. If he’s talented, he can do it. But you’re never going to feel the same passion in his voice as when he’s singing country.
