Script Review of Brian Vaughan’s Roundtable

Leave it to the blokes over at Aint-it-Cool-News to get their hands on a geektastic script and spill the crap out of it for everyone. No, wait, they don’t actually do that, my bad, but they do fill in a lot of details on Brian Vaughan’s script “Roundtable”, which has just gotten the big “Sold” stamp of approval and is headed for the big screen. The final verdict is that this is good stuff, but of course, we’ve all heard that before.

Here is Moriarty’s summation of the script’s plot:

By now, you may have read the logline for the film: Merlin the Magician, trapped in modern-day, must assemble a new roundtable of knights to defend England against a magical foe. And that’s accurate. That is the movie. What that doesn’t really convey, though, is the profound sense of smartass that runs through this thing, or the way it mixes humor and crazy SFX setpieces in a way that we don’t often see. It’s inventive, and it’s a nice way of playing off the Arthurian legend without drowning the viewer in minutiae. You don’t have to know every detail of the King Arthur story to understand what’s going on here, but Vaughan’s obviously done his homework. What he’s crafted is a modern GHOSTBUSTERS, something that uses the humor to actually make the fantastic seem real, and that should play to the fantasy crowd just as well as it plays to a mainstream comedy crowd.

Here’s how it begins:

The beginning of the film establishes who our Merlin is, and just as importantly, it sets up the threat of Morgana, this film’s major villain. Set at the end of the reign of Arthur, the opening battle sees Morgana and her zombie army destroy Lancelot before facing off against Galahad and Merlin. They defeat her, but just barely, and she’s able to curse Merlin before she goes: if he ever steps foot off of English soil, he will never be able to return. He seems unconcerned, though, and as he and the knights walk away, they ask what will happen if she comes back. Merlin tells them not to worry. “For so long as our kingdom has her knights… darkness will never fall on England.”

Of course, knights today are not the same as they were back then, and Vaughan seems delighted by the idea of putting some of today’s knights head to head with a real threat, asking them to step up and live according a code that’s been dead for centuries. We meet SIMON MINTZ, “an affable British dude in his 30s” who would not be inappropriately cast as Simon Pegg, a scientist who is about to be knighted for his work with newts. Queen Elizabeth II seems as underwhelmed with the entire idea of knighthood as she can possibly be, and we get a quick glimpse of just how silly the entire thing is. It’s a nice bit of social commentary that is actually an important part of the set-up, because by page ten, Morgana’s been resurrected, and it’s up to Merlin to assemble a group of real knights to stop her. The thing is… Merlin made the mistake of traveling to America back before the Revolution, so when the Declaration of Independence was signed, he suddenly found himself cursed and trapped, and now he’s got to stop Morgana without leaving the Brooklyn apartment where he lives.

Hah! Merlin trapped in Brooklyn. Priceless. That’ll teach you to mess with our forefathers, you British crank.

Read the rest of AICN’s take on the script here.

Below is a very bored model in a Morgana costume.