A Beautifully Realized Film

Rating: 9/10 (12 May 2000)

We had grown used to Ridley Scott missing in action when it came to story concept, plotline and story elements. He seems to have gotten away with these shortcomings because his taste for visual aesthetics is peerless. He is one of the few working directors whose grasp of visual beauty is constant and always gratifying.
In Gladiator, we are once again surprised because the grapevine said that the script was not really finished at the start and it kept changing with more than one writer in the pot mix. Indeed, the Gladiator story is superficial and the concept as old as the hills of Rome, but one can delight in the hearing of an old song once more, finely rendered.
Unquestionably, this is a beautifully realized film. It has all the elements, atmospheric musical score and a fine lead player with a solid supporting cast. It did not get an overall excelent vote from me due to the current in-style dark lensing and film processing, apparently to look realistic or just to copy an awful dark style we first noticed on television, copied now by nearly everyone and as such will immediately lock the film into a quickly dated style as in the overuse of zoom lenses in the early 70s and similarly, with the Steadicam a few years later. Heavy style like this serves only to date a film and cut its legs. This brooding, dark style would have worked fine in the north country scenes, the Germanium campaign, but when it continues into sunny Rome and then, worst of all, becomes even darker in the depiction of the Astral Plane in the final scenes, we had to wince. The Astral Plane, for those who have been fotunate enough to visit it during meditation, if anything, is gloriously luminescent.
Here, we also bid good-bye to Oliver Reed, who died with three his scenes left undone. The scenes are not missed, but some of us will miss Reed.
This is one I will be purchasing in wide screen DVD when it comes out. Thanks to an extraordinary filmmaker and company, it is a keeper.