Sincere, optimistic Roman epic

Rating: 10/10 (1 September 1999)

Yes, I know I shouldn't comment on other people's comments, however silly they may be; but sometimes they may represent commonly held falsehoods. So let me state: (1) No, it is NOT worth killing thousands of people in a civil war in order to free one woman and a child, and (2) The film never claims that it is. `Spartacus' is, indeed, an optimistic film; with an ending of neither unrelieved gloom nor unleavened triumph; but what MAKES it an optimistic film has nothing to do with the way it ends.
Instead the optimism derives from the following ... The ancient world was a brutal and uncongenial place, and a modern human rights activist, the sort that your average Hollywood director would so glibly plonk in amongst the togas, would be crushed within a week - and it would only take that long because of the lack of attention he would get. `Spartacus' is a plausible story of how noble aspirations might grow and even flower out of such unpromising ground. That Spartacus could achieve anything at all is a kind of a triumph. Of course, it's not enough for the movie to SAY this; it also has to build the world carefully, so that the message I mentioned doesn't seem like a post hoc attempt to wring some hope from the mud - and it doesn't.
It's also a grand old epic, obeying all the rules of the genre. It looks as if it had as many extras as the Romans themselves had. It has battle scenes. It has more great actors than you can poke a stick at ... among them Peter Ustinov, who gave his best performance: a caricature of a slave owner, but a realistic and insightful caricature. It has great photography. (Kubrick couldn't use a camera clumsily if he tried.) It covers a great deal of ground, with two or three apparently disparate plot strands turning out to belong together, without coinciding too neatly. It creates its own world. In every respect (musical score excepted) it towers over every other ancient world epic.