All Reviews

This draft adds a visually interesting but talky 4-page prologue and makes some significant alterations in the third act, but otherwise makes only very minor changes in the core story, structure, dialogue, and characters.

There is now a supernatural origin for the zombies: Pluto tricks Mars into lending him a wolf, then infects her with Gorgon venom. The story then proceeds much as before.

Pluto is thus a new villain, but he’s missing from most of the story after page 4, reappearing briefly on pages 55-57 and then again late in the third act. We don’t see what he’s up to until the very end, and it turns out that all the humans in the story (including Titus) were his pawns. This really killed the story for me and also undercut all the fun from the original version.

Titus doesn’t turn up until page 7. He has the same back story, actions, and most of the same lines as in the original and is no more engaging.

On pg. 94, Mars’s sword is a gladius ex machina and makes it way too easy for Titus to kill Flavius and defeat all the zombies. But then Titus dies five pages before the end, betrayed by a comrade, having seen Lavinia die first, and leaving Rome and Olympus in the power of Pluto. It’s not even a tragic death because it’s meaningless -- he was being used, and evil triumphed. And it’s certainly not a crowd-pleaser.

Pg. 96 is getting close to porn territory: “Jupiter gropes their big breasts, one at a time, leisurely.”

Much of the new writing is awkward:

-- It opens very slow and very loud.

-- Sitting next to Flavius is LAVINIA (25), emperor's most favorite servant, known for her beauty among the senators.

-- This is the House of Meditrina, a place of many wounds and sufferings.

-- Suddenly, the massive door that has been locked Mars inside, opens wide.

The final reveal on page 99 of Pluto’s plot is heavy-handed exposition, as well as manufactured out of whole cloth with no relation to genuine Roman mythology:

“You see, according to the Ancient Law, King of the Gods must protect the city of Rome and its Emperor at all cost...

(to Jupiter)

Oh, and this is the best part... The King will lose his godly power if he or his children killed the Emperor!”

Overall, I thought that the changes weakened the script, and destroyed the audience appeal, without effectively addressing any of the AS notes.