Is this the same guy that made Blade Runner? Seriously?

Rating: 1/10 (28 December 2012)

Well I hated this film; I've hated nearly all Ridley Scott's films. Loved Alien; Loved Blade Runner. Then I hated everything up to American Gangster, which I thought was alright but not fantastic. Robin Hood was the next one I hated. Then came Prometheus, which I didn't hate, but after three viewings I'm still wondering if it was just a really expensive commercial for Christianity. Still, at least Russell Crowe wasn't in it.
Russell Crowe! Does he know something about all the big Hollywood directors that they don't want made public? Did he find their sex dungeon? Seriously, how is he getting all these roles? It certainly isn't on ability. I think he might actually be a worse actor than Sean Connery.
That's the main problem with Gladiator, and with many of Ridley Scott's films. Russell Crowe is in them, and I think it's a sign of Scott's increasingly poor judgement. Yes, I grant you, Russell Crowe may have appeared to be good in Romper Stomper, but we now know that he actually is a mentally challenged thug with delusions of grandeur so it doesn't count.
Anyway, there are other issues, like the mind numbing tedium of watching an unimaginative director play with his enormous budget for hours, or the excruciatingly familiar plot lurking beneath the costumes, or the pantomime bad guy hammed into the middle of next week by Joaquin Phoenix.
That brings me back to the acting, and the Crowe. Crowe time! That's what my inside voice shouts when he appears; it helps me get through films that he's in. The worst instance of Crowe time! in Gladiator is the bizarrely comical moment where he finds his character's family dead and tries to act accordingly; it's like an acting version of karaoke. I started to think that the original role was played by Harvey Keitel and he was probably this Australian bloke's favourite actor.
Story wise, it's like a badly remembered history lesson retold in the style of Dallas, or Prisoner Cell Block H, at least that's the way the "Dramatic" scenes come across; the action is much more in the direction of a period Arnold Schwarzenegger film where the bad guys appear to have run straight out of a computer game just in time to be slain due to their low skill level and intelligence. Don't get me wrong, I like Arnie; you know where you stand with Arnie. Ditto computer games. The problem here is that it seems really out of context.
Some people have complained about the historical accuracy; I don't care about that. I'm not overly interested in the Roman Empire and as a result the level of historical detail/accuracy would be lost on me anyway. I mean, if Attenborough started telling me that Gorillas are actually cleverly disguised Ninjas I'd be a bit annoyed – assuming peer review established such a claim to be untrue – but I went into Gladiator expecting a film not a documentary.
I'm not saying that accuracy is never an issue; I'm from Belfast and I know that a great many people were upset at the awful way the Titanic disaster was treated by Hollywood. You can't help but wonder if, somewhere in Hollywood, there's a script for a whimsical look at the Hindenburg sitting on someone's desk.
I think it's long past time we all stopped expecting the next great Ridley Scott film; it isn't going to happen. Ridley Scott is not a great director. David Lynch is a great director. David Cronenberg is a great director. David Lean is a great director. Why are they all called David? I don't know. In Britain high profile political journalists are called John. No one knows why