Funny in a way

Rating: 2/10 (4 September 2000)

This film is drivel. But it's kinda funny drivel, like when a five year old kid shows you a picture he drew, and its a terrible picture, but you laugh because it's cute that a five year old is proud of his terrible picture. Ridley Scott is the five year old in this case. Of this nearly 3 hour long film, I would say a good 20 minutes were landscape shots, with a poorly mixed musical chiming in to make them seem important. Speaking of the score, that battle theme music (again poorly mixed) is more than slightly reminiscent of Gustav Holst's famous "Mars". This film is derivative in so many ways that it hardly matters, but why didn't they just use that piece instead of paying some guy to imitate it? That opening battle scene was the most poorly filmed sequence of events I have seen in awhile. The cinematography is pretentious and irritating throughout the film. It's truly terrible, but it seems that everyone involved genuinely wants you to take it seriously. That makes for good camp at least. I would like to point out one irony. The film criticizes Commodus, and the Roman empire in general, for attaining wealth and power by providing trashy entertainment for an unintelligent mob, who love every minute of it. Well, Gladiator is certainly trashy entertainment, and judging from the user ratings, I'd say the mob loved every minute of it.