A special film for one odd reason...

Rating: 10/10 (5 August 2000)

Detractors claim this film is a hollow entry in the Roman gladiator genre for the most pedantic of reasons. Nothing could be further from the truth. This film is one of the greatest ever made because it has the power to move people, specifically myself. I don't mean just move me in the same way that Robocop or the Star Wars saga move me by making me see aspects of my past and how I would ideally change them. I mean that Gladiator moves me by making me look at the details of a life that was, and still is to some extent, slowly dragging me down and making me abandon life altogether, and motivating me to make a commitment in the way I deal with it.
That commitment? Like Maximus, I realised that I am not ready for my life to be over until I have made something more of it. Maximus could not die until he had transcended the way in which Commodus had victimized him, and liberated Rome from Commodus' inferiority complex that masqueraded as a dictatorship. As I saw this unfold on the screen in front of me, I took the death of my fiancee and the abuse of my past and saw that the future was not set, and I could still make my life something worth living.
This alone justifies Gladiator's place in the 250 best films of all time, in spite of its relatively miniscule flaws. Before I die, I want to shake Russell Crowe's hand. His performance as Maximus reduced me to a tearful wreck, and at the same time moved me to do something nothing else could move me to do: let go and move on. I will always owe Crowe and Scott a huge debt for this film, which means more to me than any film I have seen before (more than five thousand, so don't bother arguing with me about it) or probably will in the future.