Gladiator

8 Pages 2005 Words

The promotional tag-lines succinctly sketch the plotline and its major movements: "the general who became a slave, the slave who became a gladiator, the gladiator who defied an emperor", "a hero will rise" and "in this life or the next, I will have my vengeance". The Quicktime trailer at the official Gladiator website promises a tougher, pacier and bloodier version of the classic sword-and-sandals epic movie - Quo Vadis with cutting-edge SFX. And these first impressions are not wrong; Gladiator does indeed employ many of the conventions of the Hollywood epic genre. The plot revolves around a decadent, scheming villain (Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix) and a rugged, defiant hero (Maximus, played by Russell Crowe). The cinematography is spectacular, there is a cast of thousands (albeit mostly computer-generated), a vision of ancient Rome sliding into decline, tumultuous, shattering battle-scenes, political intrigue, an array of debaucheries ranging from patricide to incest, and the foregrounded savagery of the gladiatorial arena. Like other epics, Gladiator works through "a series of spectacular moments" that can be "traced back to the equestrian shows and circus spectacles which toured Europe and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century" (Wyke, 1999: website). All the usual ingredients are present, only better constructed; CGI gives the film's reconstruction of ancient Rome visual depth and apparent authenticity; the chariot scenes in the Coliseum are a dazzling rupture of spinning wheels, blades and broken bodies that make the famous chariot race in Ben Hur (1959) seem pedestrian in comparison. Gladiator does everything that Hollywood epics are supposed to do, only Gladiator does it much better. But, for all that it draws upon the visual and thematic lexicon established by its generic precursors, the film's deployment of these conventions is skewed and unsettling. The mood is different; the familiar elements of epic c...