Genre: Period/War
Premise: In the 1st century, a woman defends the country of Briton against a Roman empire determined to conquer the world.
About: While I don’t like to designate anybody by who they’re dating, today’s script is unique in that it’s written as a female Braveheart, and the writer, Rosalind Ross, is dating Mel Gibson. I find that serendipitous. Don’t you? The script landed in the middle of the 2016 Black List with 11 votes. Since then, Ross has signed on to adapt “Hell From the Heavens,” a book about the greatest kamikaze attack in World War 2.
Writer: Rosalind Ross
Details: 107 pages
After seeing the trailer for the Netflix movie, The Outlaw King, I found myself in a festive mood. I looooooooove Braveheart. And this film is clearly taking its cues from that classic, positioning itself as a pseudo sequel. In a completely unrelated situation, I learned that Mel Gibson, star of Braveheart, has a girlfriend, Rosalind Ross, who is a super-fan of Braveheart, so much so that she wrote a female Braveheart! It’s like Braveheart everywhere you look. Braveheart over here, Braveheart over there.
I still consider that film to be a screenwriting masterpiece. It does everything I say not to do (namely tells a story with an endless number of characters and an unclear end point in a period setting where it’s easy for the viewer to become bored). Yet it still works. And that’s due to the fact that its main character is the most driven and motivated character in cinema history (Goal = obtain freedom for country, motivation = avenge wife’s murder). It goes to show that if you put a jetpack of a goal on the back of your hero, it can turn any narrative into Superman.
Which leads us to today’s script. I still think playing around in distant period settings is one of the bigger challenges in screenwriting. It was a slower world back then and modern audiences don’t do well with slow. But there are ways around that challenge. Let’s see if Ross discovered any of them.
It’s the first century AD and Rome keeps invading Briton. It gets to a point where Briton’s king, Prasutagus, offers Rome a yearly sum of money if they’ll leave Briton alone. Boudicca, Prasutagus’s wife, is none too pleased by her husband’s cowardly actions, to the point where she wonders if she should’ve married her childhood crush instead, the cool-as-a-cucumber Aedan.
When Prasutagus dies of an illness, Rome rips up their truce and steals all of Briton’s able-bodied men, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves. A furious Boudicca teaches herself to hunt and to fight, always with an eye on doing what everyone else is too afraid to do: fight back.
That day comes when the Romans murder Boudicca’s daughter, prompting Boudicca to unite the local tribes, slip into Rome and massacre hundreds of people. Nero, Rome’s emperor at the time, has Boudicca captured so that he can watch her die in a Colosseum battle. But Boudicca easily kills her adversary, a tiger, then gets some help escaping.
She heads back home where she teams up with Aedan and finalizes her army in preparation for attacking Rome. But Rome attacks first. In a devastatingly brutal battle, there are very few survivors. Is Boudicca one of them? Or will she go down in folklore as a martyr?
Ahhhhhh!
I reallly realllllllly really wanted to like this script.
At one point I even put on my Scriptshadow pom-poms and gave it a cheer.
Braveheart and Barbarian
Both start with “B”
Please both be good
So it earns a “worth the read”
And the script starts off well. I like how Boudicca’s father is killed by the Romans. That gives her instant motivation. I liked the love story with Aedan, how she was forced to marry a man she didn’t love. And I liked how the man she was forced to marry wasn’t a dastardly on-the-nose asshole, like we usually see in these scripts. He was just a normal guy who Boudicca didn’t love.
All that was good.
Where the script goes south is in its lack of momentum and frustrating pacing. It has a very start-stop nature to it, with a lot more stopping than starting. We’d attack the Romans and then sit around in the village for an endless number of scenes. And I wasn’t really sure what any of these scenes were for.
I’m fine with slower moments in screenplays. Not everything can be an epic battle set-piece. But then the slow scenes need to have dramatic value. Interesting stuff needs to be happening. And I struggled to find any of it interesting.
The closest we got was Nero’s relationship with his mother, Agrippina. The two had some weird sexual mommy-son stuff going on. And I liked how Nero began to shun his mother once he found a regular girlfriend.
But this movie wasn’t about Nero and Agrippina. It was about Boudicca!
And a lot of her scenes were boring. We’d sit in the village. She’d talk with her friends, with her daughters, with Aedan occasionally. And during these moments all script momentum would die.
One of the reasons Braveheart was so good was that he was always moving forward. William Wallace was always conquering the next city. And if he wasn’t conquering, he was scheming on how he would conquer. I can’t remember us ever hanging out in any village in Braveheart for more than one scene.
And I’m not saying every period piece has to do that. Not every story is going to be constructed so that the hero keeps moving from city to city. But if you don’t have a setup like that which keeps the story moving, you have to be aware of that structural weakness and figure out a way to overcome it. Because nobody likes dozens of scenes with people sitting around in a village chatting.
There needed to be more tension, more conflict, more outside pressure so that our characters were never comfortable. So that we – the reader – were never comfortable. And unfortunately, it was the opposite for me. Whenever we were back in Briton I could lay back and feed myself grapes because I knew that nothing bad was going to happen for a long time.
On top of this, I was never sure what the ultimate goal was. In Braveheart, the goal is clear as day: FREEDOM. It was mentioned two-dozen times. With Barbarian, I went back and forth wondering whether Boudicca was trying to conquer Rome or just be a pest so that Rome would stop bothering Briton. It was never clear.
Nor was the scope of the story. The way it’s described, Briton is made up of like 500 people, most of whom were women, children, and seniors. So the whole time I was thinking, “How are they realistically going to defeat Rome, the city of a million people with the mightiest military in the world?” There’s a disconnect there that wasn’t being explained.
This is why period scripts are so tricky. There’s a lot of knowledge required to know who’s who and what’s what and where we are in history and the scope and scale of all the cities involved. It’s either you exposition us to death or don’t explain these things, risking the reader being confused, which is what I was.
Since I never quite knew what Boudicca wanted and I never understood why the mightiest army on the planet couldn’t destroy a village of 500 people, I couldn’t get into this. Which is too bad. Because I really wanted to.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Never give your hero a free pass – ESPECIALLY!!! – late in the script. The later in the script you get, the harder things need to be for your hero. You need to throw the biggest obstacles at them, and your hero has to use everything at their disposal to overcome these obstacles. Late in Barbarian, after Boudicca is captured by the Romans, one of the Romans just… LETS HER GO FREE! She literally gets a free pass. Seeing your hero use their unique skills and intelligence to overcome obstacles is what makes us fall in love with them! Make them figure it out. Never give them a free pass.
