The most strong feelings: disbelief and frustration

Rating: 4/10 (6 September 2000)

I'm not going to talk about the historical truth - one should not expect this from epic movies anyway. The problem is - I cannot understand where is this meaningful 'plot' in this movie. A Roman prince cannot dispose of a slave? (recipe: kill him silently, then kill at the Arena someone who looks similar). One cannot kill a sleeping man (s)he wants to be dead? (this man IS reachable and how about a poison instead of sleeping pills?). A new emperor suffers from a lack of female attention?(does word 'hetaera' ring a bell?).
But the above is not the worst. The worst is the characters. They are flat and lifeless. Chess pieces have more personality. In the real life if a homo sapiens does something, this means he has some reason to do it (this reason may be an emotional one but it does exist). Not so in this movie. If Commodus does something, it serves only one of the purposes: to show how evil he is, or to advance the 'plot'. Don't try to find a reason or to understand why he does something - the story-writer wants him to do it and that's enough here. Maximus - see above but replace 'evil' with 'good or suffering'. Lucilla exists to build schemes , to be the weakest point of these schemes and to be a woman (almost the only one in the movie). That's all. Behind almost every scene I see a shadow of the story-writer who wants this scene to be that way - no matter does it make any sense or not, no matter if such scene is even slightly possible. Frustrating.
Don't get me wrong - the movie is beautiful and visually detailed. But I expect of a movie significantly more than to be a set of beautiful pictures.
2 for the story and 10 for everything else.