Might Emancipation be the next Revenant, switching out a bear for an alligator?
Genre: True Story/Drama/Thriller/Period
Premise: (from IMDB) A runaway slave forges through the swamps of Louisiana on a tortuous journey to escape plantation owners that nearly killed him.
About: This is the huuuuuge package that sold to Apple TV (for 105 million bucks!), no doubt buoyed by the attachments of Will Smith and Antoine Fuqua. One of the more interesting things about the project is that it was written by Bill Collage, who isn’t known for this kind of material. He wrote Assassins Creed, Allegiant, and broke into the industry with the college comedy, Accepted. This is pretty cool to see since it’s often thought to be impossible to break out of your pigeonhole. Emancipation proves it can be done!
Writer: Bill Collage
Details: 104 pages
Readability: medium
Figure out what’s unique about your script THEN LEAN INTO THAT. Simplest most effective screenwriting advice there is. If your concept doesn’t have anything unique about it, you’re probably in trouble. Because how do you mine unique scenarios out of a familiar premise?
You would think, at first glance, that Emancipation would fall victim to this pitfall. A slave on the run isn’t exactly an original premise. But look closer and you’ll find that you’re dead wrong. That’s because of one, seemingly, irrelevant factor – TERRAIN. The terrain that our main character must escape through is swampland. And swampland might be the most unique terrain of all.
It’s 1862. The Civil War is raging. Slaves are free but only in the North. In the South, where our main character, Peter, lives, slavery is still legal. Peter is ripped away from his family and sold to a man named Jim Fassel, who’s using slaves to build a railroad halfway across the state. Peter’s specific job is to bury slaves who die on the job.
Peter is two things – a God fearing man and a perceptive man. And he hears a few of Fassel’s men talking about how Baton Rouge was claimed by the Union army. That’s about a 5 day journey north. He thinks he can make it. So he pitches the idea to four other slaves. They think he’s crazy but eventually buy in.
When the time is right, they make a break for it. When Fassel and his hounds begin chasing, the five split up. Which means Peter is alone. He eventually trespasses on a farm, resulting in the family hunting him throughout their cornfields. Peter escapes to the bank of the swampland, and reluctantly enters. Within seconds, he’s attacked by an alligator. This is not going to be easy.
Peter improvises his way through miles of swampland, at one point building a makeshift canoe out of a hollowed tree. He encounters 100 degree heat, giant spiders, gianter rats, snakes, more gators, even raging fires. He finally makes it to the end of the swamp and jumps on a passing train. The train takes him to the battlefield, where he’s forced to join the war and fight. But before he does, someone sees his back, which is scarred with lash marks. A war photographer takes a picture of it and that picture becomes one of the most well-known photos in American history and the face of slavery.
Emancipation tries to walk a three-pronged tightrope over the course of its 100 pages. Those prongs include 1) entertainment 2) reality 3) trying to win an Oscar. I liked when the script was focused on 1, not so much when it was focused on 2 or 3.
One of my favorite moments occurs when Peter first goes into the swamp, sees an alligator, turns back to shore, sees his pursuers, and must choose which direction to go. He chooses the alligator, which forces him to fight it, leading to, easily, the most memorable scene in the script.
There are also encounters with snakes, with spiders, and with a terrifying animal I’d never heard of before called a Louisiana swamp rat. Just the way these things were described scared the hell out of me. These were the moments when the script felt most alive, mainly because of what I said at the outset – we were leaning into what was original about the material.
The reality stuff was harder to stomach. There’s a sequence where Peter comes across an abandoned slave house and goes down into the basement to find that a dozen slaves were chained up and left to die. There’s one 10 year old girl barely still alive who Peter tries to save to no avail. Those moments were too sad for me. I found myself not wanting to subject myself to more of that.
Then you had the statue-chasing moments. The big one occurs when Peter takes off his shirt to have his scarred back photographed. It’s an iconic moment because Peter is based on the slave who the original picture was taken of. The problem is that the original picture has inspired so many versions of this scene throughout history that it, ironically, feels cliche. It also feels like it’s trying to be a big important moment. And that’s when moments don’t work. Cause we feel the manipulation of the writer underneath the scene. For these moments to work, you have to come at them in the most natural way possible. Which Emancipation does not do.
I think the reason I’m on the fence about Emancipation is because the first 45 pages promise something intense and visceral and entertaining. I loved, for example, the escape sequence in the opening act. It was like a mini-version of The Great Escape. Then, right after that, it becomes this exciting chase movie.
But the script makes this choice to become darker as it continues on and so, with every 15 pages, I was a little less engaged than I was the previous 15 pages. Which leaves me not quite sure how I’d rate the script. If I were basing the rating off the first 45 pages, it would get an “impressive” without question. But, unfortunately, movies don’t get graded on their best 45 minutes.
The straw that may have broken the camel’s back was Peter himself. He just wasn’t that interesting. His core identity is built around his unwavering belief in God. For every obstacle he encounters, he assures everyone that he’s going to be fine because of God. And he’s right. He always comes out okay.
But how does that make for an interesting character? For characters to be interesting, their inner beliefs need to be challenged in some actionable way. So what you would do is place Peter in a dire situation where his only way out is to denounce, or stop believing in, God. In that moment, Peter has an actionable choice of whether to live, in which case he denounces everything he believes in, or die, in which case he goes to the grave still believing. That’s how you develop character. You constantly challenge their belief system, whether that be a belief in God or a belief in drinking alcohol til you’re blackout drunk every night.
But nothing like that ever happens in Emancipation. There isn’t any character growth at all. I think they figure you’ll get your emotional needs met through the ups and downs of Peter’s harrowing journey. But my experience has taught me that these movies only stay with audiences when there’s character growth. And there’s none of that here.
Emancipation has some really great moments. But the majority of them are packed into those first 45 minutes. What my rating comes down to is simple. Would I tell people to read this? I probably wouldn’t. It just never quite lives up to its promising opening.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make a little movie out of your first act. Don’t get locked into this idea that your first act is only about setting your characters up. Do what Emancipation does. It uses its first act to create a mini-movie built around escaping “prison.” The planning, the suspense, the build-up to their escape – all of that makes for a really exciting mini-movie that thrusts us into the second act.
