a terrible waste of two and a half hours of your life

Rating: 1/10 (24 October 2003)

Gladiator is an epic movie - it is the most breathtakingly awful fiasco of a film made for many years.
Watch the battle scenes besides other popular movies, like Lord of the Rings, and the direction looks terrible. Watch them alongside Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and it soon becomes apparent that if you deposited two cameras in a cage full of monkeys, they would make a better artistic job of filmaking than Ridley Scott. The actors are uniformly awful, the CGI effects are overused and unconvincing, the script is turgid and the political message of the whole thing is deeply confused. While the historical inaccuracy of the notion that the Romans had a deep affective investment in domestic ideology is amusing for two minutes, the sheer hackneyed conventionality of it soon becomes direly boring. Most offensive of all, however, is its political charlatanism. Gladiator pretends to be advocating radical republican democracy (think Rousseau), but in fact uses classical republicanism as a screen to peddle the same modern right wing liberal message as every other forgettable American B-movie.

The only way the acclaim it has received can be explained is by recourse to the near illiteracy and general ignorance of its "fans".
Basically, if you know anything about art, you will hate this film. If you understand 'cool' you will detest it. If you are an uneducated male, who is slightly insecure about his masculinity, or a brainless Crowe worshipper stuck in a teenage lifestyle with nothing better to spend your time on than dusting your collection of his posters, you will probably adore it.