Despite Flaws, Worth Seeing

Rating: Null/10 (8 May 2000)

At his best, few people can make a better movie than Ridley Scott. *Alien* and *Thelma and Louise* are masterpieces of two wildly different genres, sci-fi/horror and the on-the-run movie. Here, Ridley jumps into yet another genre, historical drama, and while his success isn't as great as it was in those two movies, it's still way ahead of some of his less successful efforts. (*Legend* comes to mind: a movie so boring that even Tom Cruise and Tim Curry couldn't save it.)
Let's talk about the bad stuff first STOP READING HERE IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THIS MOVIE!!!
It's common for historical dramas to take liberties with the facts for dramatic effect. However, I hope it doesn't come as a surprise to you that no Caesar was ever killed in the Colloseum. Stop and think about that for a second: Suppose someone made a movie where they fudged the facts a bit so that Richard Nixon died in a duel with a The Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Okay, so this story isn't really historical fiction after all: It's historical fabrication.
While I heard some TV critic complain that the accents were all over the map in this film, that actually wasn't a serious criticism if he meant that all the accents should be Latin (a language whose pronunciation we can really only guess at, by the way), that's false. By this time (several centuries after Christ), Rome was a cosmopolitan empire, and its armies were drawn from all over the empire, from Scotland to Egypt. However, whenever Russell Crowe talked, I could close my eyes and hear shades of Mel Gibson. One accent you can be sure wasn't present in Ancient Rome was Australian.
The movie was strangely lacking in color. Almost everything was brown or metallic and dark. When the camera moved over the virtual recreation of the Colloseum, it looked like the Colloseum on a cloudy day.
Probably the worst visual problem is the filming of the battle scenes, which was done in a jerky style that gave the effect of something like 6 frames per second. This, combined with very hectic cutting and editing, made the battle scenes somewhat headache inducing.
The digital tigers were a bit less than convincing, too.
Okay, enough for the complaints. Now on to the praise.
Russell Crowe (accent aside) was perfectly cast for this role. Imposing enough to be believable as a master warrior, he is also a good enough actor to bring off the dramatic aspects of the role. I'm sure someone would have preferred Jean-Claude VanDamme or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but those would have been too much. This was not a kick-boxing epic or *Son of Conan the Barbarian*, after all.
All of the supporting performances were very good, I thought, and I must say that Connie Nielsen (Lucilla) is simply one of the most beautiful women on the screen today. (If she seemed vaguely familiar, but you couldn't quite place her, you probably saw her in *Mission to Mars*, *The Devil's Advocate*, *Rushmore* or *Soldier*.)
The story, despite being 100% historical hogwash, is compelling once you let "willing suspension of disbelief" kick in. The production design was first rate, too.
The computer-generated recreation of Rome and the Colloseum were pretty good, although the virtual tigers were less than 100% convincing, as I said earlier.
On the whole, I recommend this movie, though I wouldn't nominate it for *any* Academy Awards. But then, who am I?