Roman history for idiots, as told by an effects machine

Rating: Null/10 (14 May 2000)

This movie was terrible. Remember those toy books they used to sell, where they had a bunch of heads, and a bunch of bodies, and a bunch of legs, all on pages divided into threes, and you'd match the stock parts up and get these fanciful creatures? Apparently so did the plot writers on this thing. Lets see, a noble hero wins a war against odds but someone wants to get him. ooohh... flip flip flip, and then they kill his family... I wonder what will happen next? flip flip flip Oh, and now he's a gladiator, I wonder if he'll get killed? Oh, a gladiator who overcomes all odds and becomes a hero, complete with the plucky african friend who knows bush medicine and the burly german gladiator. That one's never been done before. This movie was completely formulaic. It was nothing more than flimsy glue to serve as a vehicle for Ridley Scott to show off his shiny toybox full of digital effects.
To the effects' credit, the panoramic shots of rome were very cool, but Ridley went a bit overboard. Come on, Ridley, you couldn't afford a real tiger? The CGI tiger when it lashes out at the main character was the fakest movie creature I've seen since King Kong. The only way he could have made it any less convincing would have been to dress up two elementary school kids in a costume made of paper bags and orange and black construction paper. And the camera work for the battle scenes, which tried to depict the confusion of battle, only ended up being visually disturbing because there was no fluidity. Like another poster said, you were really not sure what you'd seen.
I won't even touch the glaring historical inaccuracies. For all of the detail they researched to put together the pretty scenes, you'd think they could have not completely fabricated major events in the history of Rome. Am I the only guy who remembers world history from High School who wasn't disturbed by that? With the three or so plot writers they had on this thing they couldn't have found one who would have come up with an ending that didn't completely and blatantly contradict historical fact? The historical fabrication is probably about the only original thing about the plot.
Not taking the plot into account, I'd give this a 5/10. The panorama scenes and some of the circus stuff is worth the prices of admission alone. But rating this as an actual movie, plot included, I'd have to give it a 3/10. If Braveheart and Spartacus were life partners and spent their box office earnings to create a robotic love child, it would be this movie.