Because I forgot that Ridley Scott knows how to build a film. While he did make my dating life hell for a year thanks to Thelma and Louise , he was also the man behind Blade Runner and Alien , two films that breathed atmosphere and tension as well as character. Here, though, his setting is not the claustrophobic or crowd-choked. This is open-air business. The scope is wide and broad, creating tension from the action itself, instead of within the confines of space.
Blood is thrown from one end of the screen to the other.
The opening battle scene takes Saving Private Ryan 's opening back some two thousand years, and pulls the action right to the camera instead of having the unseen enemy strike from hundreds of yards away. But the violence is completely within the frame for the time the movie is set. Gentle readers, I bid you welcome to the second generation of the epic film. Cecil B DeMille and William Wyler, we have accepted the gauntlet you threw down so many years before. Ridley Scott has his cast of thousands crammed into the Circus for the Games, just as Wyler filled the Circus for Ben-Hur's chariot race with Massala and DeMille had his thousands walking through the Gates of Egypt toward the Red Sea and the Promised Land.