Gladiator

Sometimes you see a movie a quarter of a century later and you think, eh, maybe I was wrong. 

It’s not so much that my tastes have changed it’s that a lot of current movies look cheap and small. 

I didn’t hate this but I never got the full scale love that all my peers had for it back when I was in college. I just never could let go of several dumb turns of the plot and how pointless most of the violence seems to be. I mean this thing ends with a sword fight between a gladiator and an emperor. 

It’s a turn of events so ridiculous that I probably just threw up my hands. But the secret of gladiator is to embrace the ridiculous. It’s to accept that Director Ridley Scott left ‘this is all ridiculous’ safely back in the first half hour. 

Watching it again I couldn’t get over how great it all looks. It’s like suddenly watching Cecil B. Demille after a marathon of How I Met Your Mother. There’s nothing wrong with tv, I love tv, but movies can be a lot more if people will finance a great director and take the time to write a great script. 

Gladiator lacks a great script but it gets away with it. 

They used CGI to make a convincing Parthenon but they also had film cameras and hundreds extras throwing on armor and running at each other. Hard to explain this people now but up until the last 20 years or so every World War Two battle, Civil War conflict or samurai sword fight in the movies was recreated by the painstaking work of costume designers, production managers, camera operators and hundreds — sometimes thousands —  of extras who put on costumes and faked a war. 

We didn’t know what we had. 

The score by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard is wonderful. It just screams classic adventure moviemaking. It’s probably a little too happy for the dour revenge material but when it swelled I was moved regardless of what was happening on screen. 

Russell Crowe had been a big brute in American movies but between this and The Insider he became a star. He’s in another phase of his career now and he seems happy to play heavyweight older guys in mildly trashy movies. 

But seeing him in his prime makes me wish he would drop 50 pounds and move mountains again. 

Joaquin Phoenix is the smarmiest villian to ever smarm. And the rest of the cast are doing the heavy lifting character work that pulls a production like this along between one action scene and the next. 

In Gladiator 2 I was waiting for the Denzel scenes but here all the fun is had in the arena. The difference may be that all the other plot building in Gladiator didn’t make me cringe. It’s not Shakespeare but it’s serviceable.

Who knows, maybe in another 25 years I’ll be able to say I love this thing.