Index – Culture – Twenty years is the best movie of sandals and swordsmen

We call movie works of sandals and swordsmen that take place in ancient times (or a similar mythological setting), in the era of leather heels and short swords. Its peak was in the 1950s and 1960s, with Kirk Douglas Spartacus (1960), Charlton Heston Ben Hurja (1959), and Cleopatra by Elizabeth Taylor (1963), but this only scratches the surface, the Italians, for example, made 19 films Hercules between 1958 and 1965. They were filmed, and even that was just the beginning.

The genre was briefly resurrected in the 1980s after the Fire and Conan wars in the wake of the barbarian, and then, until 1999, essentially no studio came up with an old fencing script.

It wasn’t an easy birth, of course, at the time, $ 100 million was not just thrown at the directors, however, CGI was not so advanced that Russel Crowe and the actors had to run in front of a green background instead of tigers. alive. Today, a box office hit with a similar theme with such an exhibition, which meets the expectations of the audience and the creators, could hardly be presented for less than 250 million and would not be better than the original, I am willing to accept a very serious amount For this. The film, which won five of the 12 Oscar nominations, was made in an inspired moment, despite the fact that its preparation and filming was like an endless extraction of teeth without pain relievers.

The 155-minute Gladiator (170 minutes in the director’s version) is basically a story of revenge, no more, no less. Its protagonist, Maximus, is a melting pot of good qualities, faithful, loyal, fun, human, child-loving, noble, strong, kind and even beautiful. He loves him as the son of an old ruler because he only had one nyikah, Commodus, who is the opposite of Maximus in everything. Okay, she also has a daughter, but in Rome it was not a blessing, it was an uproar.

Maximus is a successful general, and the ruler also sees himself as a successor, which he rejects in vain by disarming me, Your Majesty, and going home with my wife and son to farm in Spain, he sees a rival of Commodus in him and wants to kill him. He only joins half: his family succeeds, Maximus does not, but the half-dead soldier cannot help but be dragged away as a slave.

By implication, the Spaniard does not look good as a gladiator, as a muscular and dense boy, as a domestic servant, even more so as tiger food. Then, of course, he also reaches the top in this profession, and the county becomes an elite gladiator with two hard-working jobs, and finally appears in Rome at the Colosseum, before Emperor Commodus, to come the death of his family. . Curtains

Virtigli is a story of revenge, in the first version of which Maximus kills the emperor in the arena and survives, which has been the culmination of such works since the Vengeance films, and what the public expects of such a story, but for director Ridley Scott is not It was round. Crowe told Empire magazine that Scott saw no point in the hero fulfilling his revenge by living longer because he had no reason to do so. His family was dead, what he wanted, he caught up with, he reached the end of his journey. “Were we stupid about what I was going to do next? Open a pizzeria or what?” Crowe said of the decision, which he supported. But the study does not.

Because DreamWorks wanted to stay beautifully alive, have a mandatory emotional climax, let people applaud a big one at the movies, and trade tickets for the second part. Scott didn’t even want to know anything about it, and with Crowe’s support, they were able to rewrite the end of the movie, let’s say I was wondering if the other gladiators wrote the text of a dying soldier asking for freedom demanding political reform because he should no longer do so. .

There were serious problems with the stage from the beginning. Crowe’s character Maximus, considered to be no more than the names they speak, was his original name instead of Narcissus, and it was only after several hours of yelling that he managed to convince the producers that no one would want to identify with a character. who bears his self-esteem. The story was not ready either, Crowe said that the medium was missing and that everything had to be resolved on the fly, so much so that they filmed in the morning and co-wrote with Scott at night.

This bothered them again, and there is a version where they wanted to stop working, but Scott told them that he couldn’t figure out that every little thing had to be approved by a committee. It was only after filming that they supposedly learned that the last 21 pages of the script (effectively 21 minutes after the end of the film) were discarded one by one by Scott, and before the recordings they discussed with Crowe what they were going to film and then they also told the other actors. and touch.

To all this, Scott did not like to record much, “one for me, one for the actor, one for security reasons,” so he didn’t have to stop or scroll through the missing pages. Later, it worked out great for Scott in the post-production of All the Money in the World, you can read about it here.

The cast of the film was a great success, although Crowe was not the number one candidate, but Antonio Banderas and Hugh Jackman wanted to entrust Commodust to Jude Law, and his sister Lucilla would have liked to have played. Thank goodness Scott Connie Nielsen and Joaquin opted for Phoenix, and Crowe said yes invisibly, which was risky because the actor had just stumbled upon insider Michael Mann, twenty pounds overweight, bald. “Oh fuck!” Scott allegedly said. “Relax!” Crowe replied. Richard Harris was given the role of emperor, and Oliver Reed was his former slave but already freed at the time of the movie’s plot, and he was running a school of gladiators.

Crowe made a very good friendship with the first, but Reed was angry, which did not do the job, but made social contact very difficult. After the veteran actor’s death (his alcoholism ended with him during filming), Scott did not want to rerecord the scenes for Reed, so some CGI aides replaced those he didn’t have time for. In 1999/2000, the CGI didn’t really hold there to show the sleek interior of the kitchen, but it was much needed for mass posters, the display of contemporary buildings, cities, and the Colosseum. Interestingly, while for today’s eyes, the computer-painted and turbocharged Roman backdrop looks pretty weird, the action scenes taken in the arena are perfect, even the ones where Crowe battles stuffed tigers. Furthermore, only the Empire interview mentioned above revealed to me that only two (plastic) legs of the crucified wife were available on set, and Crowe’s idea was to kiss his neck and saliva together, indicating the man’s eternal loyalty . if I understood correctly

One of the iconic scenes from the movie is when Maximus takes off his helmet and Commodus receives The Speech. However, the metal helmet was charged with static electricity, and when Crowe lowered it, his hair looked up at the sky, which, let’s be honest, didn’t have much luck with such a dramatic scene. After the sixth attempt, Scott took Crowe’s face quite close when he turned to Commodus, and there was no hair looking up at the sky. I can’t know how Phoenix put up with this without laughing. This, in turn, made the scene even stronger, more powerful, and such nuances made her what she became. (Trifle, but Crowe doesn’t remember well, there are steep strands burning like an antenna in the movie.)

The dialogues on the rewritten stage are legendary, be it “My brothers and sisters, what we do in our lives comes back to us in the afterlife” or “Are you having fun?” lines, perhaps my personal favorite, “Am I Not Merciful?”, which Phoenix performs with my peas to this day. In addition to Scott’s meticulousness, the choice of places and ancient costumes and landscapes, the film’s greatest virtue is its brilliant music, the best piece of Hans Zimmer’s work, and whose motifs he later recycled (e.g. Pirates of the Caribbean 2). ).

Even with today’s eyes, the film achieves what it did just twenty years ago, affects emotions in the same way, and in 2020 we will continue to see the initial ten-minute battle scene, or the sometimes incredibly brutal series of images. in the sand. His pace, on the other hand, was uneven, and the post-battle melodrama could have been thrown in, just as a relentless cutter could have fit in the middle of the Colosseum’s nearly seventy-minute lead.

Mentioning the movie as a historical movie would be a huge hurdle, starting with Commodus (who didn’t kill him) or Maximus, who killed his father, who didn’t exist, but Narcissus (what a big twist already!) Did, and ended with Commodus. Not in the sand, but in the bathroom, but it really doesn’t matter. The disguises were not correct (helmets in particular were not), the Romans did not wear a stirrup, and not even a catapult was taken out of the joke into the depths of the forest, from which a burning projectile was never fired.

This nonsense, of course, only upsets those who don’t let a story that remains fascinating in its visuality, stirring up our oldest emotions, take them with them, sometimes comically, sometimes galloping towards the end. And the Gladiator can do it today, twenty years after the show.