Saw Gladiator today. 4 stars out of 5.
The Gladiator fights were too short to have maximum punch, too long to be natural filler. They felt like a forced screening of a lopsided wrestling match. No tension, except in the one with the tigers, which was adequate. The visuals kind of got to me. I particularly noticed the flocks of birds tacked onto the panoramic views of Rome. The snow in the German frontier scenes distracted. It was the lack of any actual story and the mile-wide/inch-deep relationships that cost it the most imo.
One thing I can't figure out is how Maximus wound up a prisoner in the first place. Sure he would have had no protection from the government, but whoever took him captive didn't know that. Landowners had rights and you couldn't just carry off an unconscious one. I thought the legions were behind the captivity, but then Commodus would have known about it, yet was surprised to see Maximus later in the movie. I must have missed something.
Some spoilers follow.
I usually don't mind historical innacuracies in movies, but (i) the notion that the Senate was "of the people" and represented the populace; (ii) all the fawning honorifics used for a pre-Diocletian emperor; (iii) the open discussion of "return to Republican government" in AD 180; and (iv) the calm after the emperor's death, all grated.
Trivium: Commodus did actually die at the hands of an athlete. He was strangled in his bath as part of a conspiracy. Given that this isn't that far from the premise of the movie, and that the actual ending was Lame, a lot could have been done with this.
