Freedom is worth dying for

Rating: 5/10 (19 July 2013)

Spartacus is about a group of slaves rebelling for their freedom and ending up crushed, crucified and used as a political tool for a Roman senator to seize dictatorship. The main external plot, the slave rebellion, falls to a failure. The failure tries to convey the point of the story: that freedom is worth dying for, and the failure leaves us with a hint of hope for the future as a baby of a slave has been born free.
The external plot is pulled to a failure because of another external plot's rise: that of a Senator abusing the slaves cause to capture dictatorship powers. This adds another dimension to the futility of the slaves' cause: that all their lives added together is worth no more than a politician's expediency.
The external plot's hope at the end is given by an internal arc of another senator who turns moral and saves the newborn baby of the slave.
The main plot of the story is powerful mainly because it unexpectedly fails when you expect it to succeed: the hero is spared by a "Negro" fighter instead of winning as we expect, thus showing him the compassion that he would bring to his army of slaves in fighting for their freedom. The ultimate failure and crucifiction of all the slaves is also quite powerful in that you expect a journey like this to end positively (I didn't read the wikipedia article on Spartucus until afterwards).
The supporting plots that involve the power struggle in the Senate are also surprisingly engaging.
The story mainly falls flat on the arc (or lack thereof) of the main protagonist. Spartacus has no arc: he is a rebellious slave from beginning to end. Sure his rebellious nature gains greater purpose as he seeks to bring freedom to all the slaves, but that is established in Act 1 (the first hour). So for the next two Acts (the next two hours), the story's energy is sapped and stalled every second we spend watching Spartacus alone: building his army, getting a wife, building a bigger army, the slaves getting along harmoniusly, Spartacus and the slaves dancing in the sunset etc... These scenes are a complete waste of time since it doesn't come with any turning point on any plot. Maybe audiences in the 60s expect these filler moments to go to the bathroom during this 3 hour marathon, or maybe the female lead demanded Kubrick shoot her with fuzzy focus to make her look good and had a contractual limit on the amount of screen time she got, but it does no service to the story. With these scenes cut you can probably have a powerful film in a compact 90 minutes.
Tangential thoughts below...
My theory is since the story was produced by and starred Kirk Douglas, who brought Kubrick in after a disagreement with the previous director (see wikipedia), maybe the actor had too much say in the storytelling. So much so that the director and editor couldn't leave the boring bits on the cutting room floor. Or maybe the producers wouldn't let army marching scenes be cut since they paid so much money for so many extras to fill the screen. Reminds me of the big boring fight at the end of the first Pirates of the Caribbean that ruined a great movie: no way the producers would shorten those scenes after millions were already spent on the computer graphics. Maybe that's why the Pixar films are so great and tightly cut: its all computer graphics anyway and they all cost the same amount of money to render so cut away. So this leads me to think its a good thing for Director's to have final cut. But then again, a lot of these extended director's cut versions basically put a lot of boring filler back in. So I guess its only a good thing for "good" Director's to have final cut, and they should only be allowed to make one cut, not a short one and (guaranteed worse) long one.
My Story Chart of the movie is at storycharts.ca