Gladiator

Stars: Russell Crowe, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris
Director: Ridley Scott

There are no two ways about it. Ridley Scott is one of the world's best Directors. Sadly, he is also one of the world's patchiest directors. His films range from the beyond brilliance of "The Duellists" "Alien" and "Bladerunner" through the solidly adequate "Someone to Watch Over Me," and "Black Rain" the visually astonishing fairytale "Legend" to the embarrassingly buggered "White Squall" and "GI Jane."

Any Ridley Scott film is worth watching and at every release his fans dutifully troop into theatres all over the world hoping that he has re-achieved the immaculate form that won them over in the first place.

"Gladiator" is true Ridley Scott. As visually brilliant as "Bladerunner" or "The Duellists", close to perfectly acted and sadly, just as buggered as "White Squall" and for exactly the same reason. An excellent movie with an idiotic ending.

The story is simple.

Russell Crowe plays Maximus, a Spanish General in the Roman Army. The film opens with Maximus' troops giving the Gothic Hordes a fine taste of Roman military strength. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris)then arrives at the battlefield and privately tells Maximus that wants his favourite general as his successor. In a sudden turn of events the Emperor dies and Maximus who is considered dangerous ends up a gladiator in the bloodbath of the Roman Arena.

He must fight and kill to survive and fight his way to the top if he ever hopes to get revenge against the people who have destroyed his life. Needless to say, for a lowly gladiator to want revenge on the new Roman emperor is a tough call. This being the type of film that it is, before long Maximus is fighting in the Colosseum right in front of his target. Only a budgie would ever be troubled by the question "Who will win?" after all, this isn't REALLY ancient Rome, it's Hollywood! Where a goldfish is considered a dangerous deep thinker.

Visually "Gladiator" is breathtaking. From the opening huge scale battle, to all the wonders of a recreated Rome very little comes close to this film. Everything is historically accurate, every detail from Legionaires shoes and weapons through to the moveable roof on the Colosseum is lovingly and expensively recreated. If you have any interest in Ancient Rome parts of this film can be seen as an astonishing travelog of wonders and well worth the trip.

The acting particularly from Oliver Reed is pretty much faultless. The camera work, costuming and editing are easy shoe-ins for the Academy Awards.

But storywise this film is basically "Rollerball" in different costumes with Russell Crowe even looking like James Caan from some angles. Then again, Rollerball is an almost classic science fiction action film, so whats wrong with "Gladiator?"

The ending. Any mollusc that happened to wander into a theatre showing "Gladiator" would be able to tell you about 20 minutes into this three hour epic that Russell Crowe was going to kill the evil Emperor Commodus at the end, in the arena, in hand to hand conflict. About two hours later this same mollusc would say "See, told you so, but the chariot fight was good." Then it would wander across the road to McPlankton's and have a McShellfish McDinner.

THATS what's wrong with "Gladiator" but for anyone who knows a bit about Roman history (unlike molluscs) it gets worse.

The Emperor Commodus was a real person. If memory serves me right he was a big ugly bastard who was not averse to leaping into the ring and doing a spot of throttling and bludgeoning to amuse the crowd. BUT, he was strangled to death by his servants for being an unpopular turd, when he was nowhere near the arena.

He was guilty of a great many things but being a cheating imbecile with bad judgement was not one of them. So what, you ask? Well, how would you feel about a movie about, say, World War Two which asserted that the war ended when Adolf Hitler parachuted alone into the Yalta conference and after beating Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin to death with a lump of wood lost the war when killed by the American Presidents speeding wheelchair? "Ah" you say, "but that's just stupid. No-one would believe that!"

My point is this. Why dress up fictional stories with real people's names? Why have such a stupid unbelievable ending anyway? With "Gladiator" the answers to these questions appear to be that firstly, Ridley Scott started with a purely historical film with real names and then some nice people from the studio started saying things like "Hey, we've got X million dollars tied up in this, the ending has GOT to be dah dah dah" ... and Mr Scott caved in.

That's the nicest possible answer. The nastier one is this. Think about the ending for "White Squall" (if you've seen it) reasonable characters, a good story, one of the best shipwrecks ever filmed and suddenly one of the worst courtroom dramas ever put on film ending with a vomitous "hug in." End credits.

The ending for "Black Rain?" The film is for all intents and purposes over, when there is a completely pointless motorcycle chase. Why?

How about "Bladerunner." Ridley Scott admits that Rutger Hauer wrote his own final speech, ( "I have seen the attack ships, burning off the shoulder of Orion" ) the night before the scene was filmed. The ending of that film is perfect, due entirely to ... that last speech.

The nasty explanation to the ending of "Gladiator" may be that Ridley Scott does not do endings very well.

Rating: Almost perfect, except for the ending.
See it, but don't expect it to be high art.

(C)opyright Alex Rieneck, 2000.