Maybe the most unique screenplay of the year!
Genre: Thriller
Premise: When his family is murdered and his child kidnapped, a Neanderthal goes on an epic rampage journey to save her from the new dominant species, homo sapiens.
About: This script made last year’s Black List. Donn Kennedy is a writer out of Milwaukee Wisconsin who has been writing for nearly 20 years.
Writer: Donn Kennedy
Details: 96 pages
I don’t think I’ve ever read a script where the writer has loved their script as much as this one. Donn Kennedy is having so much fun writing this that, at certain points, I thought he was experiencing some nirvana-like ascension to another plane.
Generally speaking, if the writer is having fun, the reader will have fun, too. However, you can overdo it. By only focusing on your own enjoyment, you can lose touch with the reader. So, which happened here? Let’s find out .
It’s 40,000 years ago.
It’s a time when you either kill or be killed. Society hasn’t really started yet. So, mostly, you’ve got these individual Neanderthal families scattered about, trying to get by. Our protagonist Neanderthal family is made up of the father, Bato, the mother, Kaza, and twin 13 year olds, Meeka (a girl) and Booka (a boy).
Bato is definitely a badass. He’s got a mysterious scar slashed across his face. The dude heads out every few days and kills a mammoth so his family can eat. His son, Booka, is a burgeoning artist, writing up stories on their cave wall. His daughter plays the bone flute and is pretty good at it. It’s your typical Suburban Neanderthal family from 40,000 years ago.
But, one day, when Bato is out hunting, a group of people come to his cave and murder his family. Well, they murder Kaza and Booka. Meeka was able to fight back and kill one. But the others still kidnapped her. When Bato arrives post-slaughter, he removes the mask of the bad guy to see… A SHOCKING FACE. Smaller nose. More distinct features. A homo sapien!
Bato immediately grabs his things and goes to find his daughter. But you have to remember, this isn’t some waltz through the local forest preserve. This is a land of endless predators. Bato finds that out immediately when he catches up to the group crossing a river in some kind of contraption (a boat).
Bato takes on Yama and kills him, then uses an alligator carcass to swim across the river and not get attacked by other alligators (it doesn’t work – the alligators attack him). Not long after that, he falls into a literal Venus flytrap. Like, one big enough to hold a Neanderthal. He uses fire to smoke his way out of that.
He eventually runs into a tribe of people who provide some much-needed first aid, only to then tie him up and march him out to some pole. Turns out they’re cannibals and they’re going to eat him! He cuts the rope and takes out 20 cannibals in a chaotic running dance through a bunch of hot-spewing geysers.
But the further he travels, the more distance the homo sapiens seem to create. Soon, he’s lost, turned around, and after two long years of pursuing his daughter, he’s shocked to find that he’s done a giant circle and ended up right back at his cave house. Hey, GPS was still in its infancy 40k years ago. Give him a break.
When Bato discovers another group of homo sapiens nearby, he fights them off. But when he’s about to kill one, he pulls off her mask and discovers that it’s… HIS DAUGHTER! But they don’t have time to reunite because Kaza, the leader who kidnapped her two years ago, is closing in. They must split up and Bato loses his daughter AGAIN! But he eventually discvoers where the homo sapien village is. So he arms himself and goes in for the final battle!
One of the things I crave most as a reader is SOMETHING NEW. I want to experience something I haven’t experienced before. The more unique moments you can pack into your screenplay, the better.
This script achieves that. It’s not like any script I’ve read in a long time. Bato is always running into something shocking – shocking for him, shocking for me. For example, he falls into this cavernous valley at one point and the next thing he knows, he’s face to face with a Homo Habilis. Just like the Homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals, the Neanderthals wiped out the Home Habilis.
Except there are a few still around. And this one is 7 feet tall and has the anger of his entire race ready to throw at Bato. It’s moments like that that made this script stand out.
Another thing that Kennedy did well is he made the writing sparse. Most paragraphs are one line long. He uses a lot of GIANT FONTS to emphasize the intensity of the moment. And what this does is it makes sure our eyes fly down the page.
Why is this important? Because there’s no dialogue. And I have seen many a non-dialogue screenplay die a quick death because they take forever to read through. Remember, dialogue takes 1/4 the time to read as a description. So readers love dialogue. Cause it allows them to shoot through a lot pages quickly. When you take all that dialogue out, a 100 page script can read like a 300 page script.
So it’s good that Kennedy understood that and created a writing approach that still allowed the script to read fast.
On the flip side, the writing here is borderline annoying. Every line is so on-the-nose that it’s hard not to roll your eyes at times.
And if you’re a reader who doesn’t like when the writer talks dirctly to you? You’re not going to like this script. Kennedy loves to tell you how he just made cutting the trailer easier, how much you’re going to love a scene cause it’s just like “Oldboy,” he even celebrates, on the page, pulling off successful setups and payoffs. There’s a ton of that here.
When it comes to flashy writing like this, I’m not going to say don’t do it because, the truth is, people either love it or hate it. And maybe it’s worth losing the haters if you gain the lovers in the process. The opposite of this is an entirely neutral style and that can be so boring that nobody likes it. So it’s a creative choice. Just know that you’re going to piss some readers off and they’re going to let you know about it.
As for the story, I thought the worst choice was the cut to two years later. I hate any big time cuts in a story because they tank all the tension you’ve built up. I mean, imagine if, at the beginning of last night’s White Lotus episode, there was a title card that said, “3 weeks later.” And the whole episode took place at the island 3 weeks later. Everybody watching would be like, what the f&%$?
I know why the writer did it. He did it to create the moment where Bato unknowingly fights Meeka. He did this because he’s a giant fan of Oldboy. I only know this because he says so earlier in the script. So, the big twist in that movie obviously motivated this plot development here, and this is something I always warn writers about. You want to be inspired by your favorite movies. But you don’t want them to impede upon your scripts too much.
There’s a huge reason why that twist was needed in Oldboy. There was no reason to cut to 2 years later here. The script would’ve been better had we kept the tension throughout, never leaving this timeline. The only reason that mistake was made was that the writer was obsessed with another movie. Make creative choices only to create the best version of YOUR MOVIE.
Overall, I don’t know how to rate this script. It’s got some great stuff. It’s got some terrible stuff. I do think the pitch of “Taken 40,000 years ago” is a good one. And the script is very visual. You can see, with a good director, this looking like a really cool movie.
So, for that reason, I think it’s ‘worth the read.’ And let me be clear about that so you understand. As a script, I would probably give this a “wasn’t for me.” But when you take into account how unique the concept is combined with how visual the movie would be, that’s what makes it read-worthy because the endgame here isn’t putting words on a page. It’s getting movies made. We should all be writing scripts that, like this one, have a shot at becoming a movie.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You have to give the reader room to interpret what you’ve written. If you don’t, you risk being on the nose. Here’s a segment of the scene after Bato finds his family.
She’s alive! But mortally wounded
Falls by her, Bato cradles her head
His love. His world. The only thing good in this god forsaken prison of existence.
There is no reason for this third paragraph. None at all. You have to trust that the reader understands the gravity of this moment. You don’t have to yell it in his ear.
What I learned 2: This is the stuff that AI is great at. If you have a story idea like this, feed it into your favorite AI client and ask it, “What are 50 unique things my character might encounter on this journey, stuff that the average person woud never think of today?” And it will. It will give you at least 25 things you hadn’t thought of. And you can then build a lot of your plot beats or set pieces around the best of those things.
