Good, but not for the expected reasons

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2013)

If you look on my top shelf of DVDs and Blu-Rays you will find pride of place given to "Spartacus", "Ben Hur" and "El Cid". I have told the story elsewhere about how bizarre English educational policies permanently altered my brain chemistry so that I became fetishistically fixated on sword and sandal epics and how death by being disembowelled by the sword became linked with stories of baby Jesus in a satanic miasma of adolescent confusion. In short, I like a good epic. I had therefore been looking forward to seeing "Gladiator" ever since I first heard about it. The question is, then, was it worth the wait? Short answer – no. Long answer follows.
I liked Gladiator a lot though it took me half the film to readjust my head to what I was seeing as opposed to what I had expected to see. I would not call this film an epic and it certainly does not compare to the spectacles we used to see in the good old epics as mentioned above. Instead we get a classic Joseph Campbell-like heroes journey story in which Russell Crowe starts out holding high position as a commander of the Roman Army in the North but is betrayed, left for dead and has to fight his way back from the bottom in order to wreak the revenge of the righteous man. On this level it works superbly. Russell Crowe is the man. There can be no doubt after seeing this film that the mantle of romantic tough guy lead must pass to him for the foreseeable future. I would not say that he is a great actor (thank god) but he has the looks and the presence to make the character work. A pivotal scene in which he reveals his identity to Commodus, his nemesis, is simply fantastic.
So we end up with a film that has a very strong emotional centre. The murdered emperor Marcus Aurelius is a highly moral man who wants to pass responsibility to Crowe, not to his real son. We see the struggles that Crowe has to go through to accept the responsibility and then how, even when he becomes a slave and his family is murdered, he can still eventually do the right thing. I would guess that it is because this emotional tale is so central, rather than the fighting, that Scott has chosen to shoot so many scenes by using close-ups of the actors and that they occupy so much time on screen. In fact I think this will transfer very badly to a pan and scan TV version because he often uses close-ups with 2 heads either side of the screen with an out-of-focus centre. Nice to see a director really directing for widescreen (at least on this level).
But as for the much-touted gladiatorial scenes I have to say that I was disappointed. In the first instance the CGI is still not up to the job. We all know only a portion of the Coliseum set actually existed and the rest was computer generated. It's good but it's still not good enough. The flyover shot of the arena which has been much talked about is also good but still not good enough to make you forget you are watching a computer-generated scene in which the movements of people and animals is still too jerky to be convincing. Compared to the epics of the 50s these modern CGI scenes are not as impressive as large-scale sets.
I have to report disappointment over the actual combat too. Compare the opening, admittedly very good, battle with any battle scene from Braveheart and you will see that it is not quite as good. The man to man fighting between gladiators later in the film is even more disappointing with Scott constantly going for close-ups rather than pulling back to let us really see the action. Bruce Lee and Fred Astaire both looked brilliant because they were usually (almost always with Astaire) shot with their full bodies in frame. What made them so impressive was that you could see they used their whole bodies and most of what they were doing was not faked. In Gladiator I seldom escaped the frustrating feeling that tight camera angles were being used to compensate for the fact that the real spectacle was too difficult to depict. Oh and I have to say that men wrestling stuffed animals still looks as silly as it ever did.
I regret saying so many negative things here but I say them because the film seems to have been hyped as something it is not. It is superficially an epic but it in no way compares to the best of the original epics. In my judgement this is a film about character and the relationships between men of honour and men of opportunity. The acting from Richard Harris is as impressive as that from Crowe. Oliver Reed also turns in a good performance for his last film and we can only regret that he did not get better roles in his life. Perhaps Reed's tragedy was that he would have been perfect for epic roles as a young man but epics had become too expensive to make by then.
Ridley Scott is still, to my mind, one of the best and most innovative directors around and I rate this film highly despite my criticisms. The problem lies in the marketing. This is an excellent film but for every reason other than the ones advertised.