The epic that topped them all

Rating: 10/10 (30 March 2014)

I am not going to write an essay on this film, because everything that could have been said about it has already been said. I first saw it when I was sixteen, and loved it. I must have seen it thirty times ever since, and I never get tired of it. The film certainly has many goofs. The chariot race is full of continuity mistakes between shots and the contenders certainly take a lot more than the nine turns they were supposed to take around the circus. But it is absolutely great and exciting, and still unmatched today as a piece of live action. It took weeks to shoot and one of the stunt-men smashed a $100,000 camera when his chariot skidded out of control. In the naval battle you can tell the scale models used in the long shots. But who cares? In the crowd scenes with extreme long shots, both at the Victory parade and later at the circus, you can tell they are matte shots. But they look so beautiful that you almost believe they are real things. Nowadays CGI always sticks out like a sore thumb -that aerial shot of the circus in "Gladiator" is just awful! Messala is one of the greatest villains of all time because of Stephen Boyd's brilliant performance. A usually underrated actor, here he steals every scene from Chuck Heston. Also, he has one of the greatest death scenes ever. Miklos Rozsa created the mother of all epic scores, still unmatched today. Two years in preproduction and ten months of actual shooting, thousands of extras, a real-scale replica of a Roman circus, accurate replicas of Roman chariots, and eighty pure-bred especially trained horses. Final cost: fifteen million dollars. The most expensive film ever made to that date. A remake would be totally ruined by today's trendy styles of camera-work, music, acting, sound effects and visual texture. And CGI, and PC issues. Fourteen years ago, "Gladiator" was awful. Today, it would be even worse.