Moses ~ And The Ten Laws of God by Christopher Sorensen - Drama, Historical, Fantasy, Biblical - A young prince of Egypt starts his walk on a path of righteousness to help free slaves that that have been kept in bondage for the last four hundred years. 230 pages - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

Immediately thought of the Burt Lancaster mini-series when I saw this.

I would say this at least has to be cut in half. Unless this is a mini-series. As a 100-page script is about 2 hours, and that is being generous.

It's strange I never heard there was a series about him. I only saw The Ten Commandments from when I was age six all the way up to my adulthood every year on Easter. Most likely I probably thought at one point that if I did hear about the television series it wasn't anything special, so I didn't bother to watch it. After you mentioned that there was a series I went hunting and found a trailer of Burt's film. It's a six hour series and not very admirable because it takes place mostly in the desert. No mention of an Ethiopian war nor does it contain a lot of the plagues or the arrival to Jordan with Joshua. I'll probably change the title but I will keep the name of moses intact. As for cutting it down... not a freakin' chance. My last script - Necromancer was 197 pages long and it won a grand prize in the 2012 screenplay festival in the thriller/horror category. 8)
Here is the address:

https://screenplayfestival.com/2012-winners/

Quoted from thenextscott As for cutting it down... not a freakin' chance.

If that’s your attitude, you’ll forgive me for having the same response to reading it.

Quoted from Twenteen If that’s your attitude, you’ll forgive me for having the same response to reading it.

You don't have to read/review the whole script.

If it piques your interest you could just read and give feedback on the opening, for example.

Quoted from thenextscott After you mentioned that there was a series I went hunting and found a trailer of Burt's film. It's a six hour series and not very admirable because it takes place mostly in the desert.

It's not very memorable that's for sure. Funnily enough, the Pope was so impressed by this series that he asked the producer Lew Grade to make a series on the life of Christ, and the result was Franco Zeffirelli's incredible 'Jesus of Nazareth'.

Pages: 1-20
This starts of with a bloody battle in the 300/ Game of thrones mold. It seems you are using this first battle to establish Moses as a great general; just as the first battle in Gladiator established Maximus as a great general. It seemed to me very standard battle, nothing really memorable.
The many capitalized words, was really distracting: 'FROM BEHIND THARBIS: She moves and escapes with her father MEROPS to the INNER CLOISTERS’.  People got different opinions, but I don’t think you should do this for a spec script.
You use a lot of camera angles like you are directing the film. I think you should get rid of all of those. It is irritating to a producer and does not allow interpretations of your scenes to the reader.
The biggest problem for me is the dialog is too chunky and you use it to tell a lot of exposition, rather than have things flow naturally through action and plot. Think of how little dialog was in that first battle scene in Gladiator.
I liked some of the soldiers but hampered by the dialog.  The whole thing had an atmosphere of greyness that I liked.
Although I only read a small part, it really felt like this is heading the ‘Exodus: God’s and Kings’ route, and that film, with exception of a few scenes, was damn boring.
There is quite a few mistakes and uncapitalized names, and character names under wrong dialog (like Moses saying Merops dialog on Page 12).
Fair to say, with the length this will be very, very expensive. Avengers expensive.
If you want to see it made, I think you should cut it down to at least 115 pages.

I still won't cut it down. The length is necessary to keep the story intact so that people will understand what Moses is all about. If I cut it in half it could be done in two installments which I might consider. As for the capitals, It is known as impacting or enunciating through a scene, which no judge will mark as irregular or unneeded. Capitalization is all part and parcel of a script which wraps the reader's attention span and to open up the senses as they read on.

I corrected the Merops mistake and went through it again to capture more if any. As for camera angels there are no references to a camera. I either say wide aerial or close on - Not close up or even focus on. But I do use Hover or fly or float rather than using boom. You must understand that nothing has changed about my writing since 2012 when I took the grand prize for my script Necromancer.

Producers opinions vary about every script they read in their office. They don't read them in a contest because they are too busy like arranging for a new movie to be made. But what remains a constant is that they read a good story. That much is certain. As for the inner cloister scene I changed that to - Tharbis retreats with her father to the inner cloisters of the palace. So it's a good thing that you reminded me to do a third proof read.

And last to the war itself. Moses was never shown in any version to be in Ethiopia during his two year campaign. It was only described in both the ten commandments and exodus. I wanted to include it because most people love that kind of intro. What's a good movie without some kind of violent brawl at the beginning, which leads to the ultimate peaceful resolution that Moses had designed at the behest of his mentor - Seti?, and not ramses

This was also why he was so dangerously close to becoming the next pharaoh over his brother. It had to be included so that the reader knew what Moses was trying to do. It's all about justice, and that - is what Moses was all about. The law. So, I'll still keep going over the script to find more mistakes if any and change other points of the story if something feels off. Then it's on to scriptapalooza for their contest.