Thanks, I Hate It: Gladiator

Thanks, I Hate It: Gladiator

More than for any other reason, I hate this movie for killing Oliver Reed. One of the greatest actors of his generation, Reed’s career had been ruined by his alcoholism and womanizing in the 80s and 90s. At the time of Gladiator’s filming he’d been sober for almost six months, but locals pressured him into a drinking competition during which he handily destroyed all comers before dying of a heart attack a few hours later at the age of 61. Scott elected to complete Reed’s performance using CGI, an embarrassing capstone for a once-incendiary career. Reed, the man who should have been James Bond, who fucked literally everyone of consequence, who as Urbain Grandier in Ken Russell’s wildly controversial The Devils exuded more sexual magnetism than a thousand Tom Hardies! Dead during the filming of a fucking Ridley Scott movie. 

And then, my highly personal grievance aside, there’s the movie itself, a turgid paean to a Rome that never was. Scott sanitizes the empire’s mighty capitol into a glittering fairytale metropolis of white marble and impassioned speeches about democracy and freedom where the Coliseum is a moral boil just waiting for the white-hot needle of Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe). Scott has this idea of Rome as a bastion of virtue, but he completely fails to understand the virtues the Romans themselves held dearest. In Gladiator, Maximus’s unexpected mercifulness in the arena earns him instant acclaim and popularity which builds until it threatens Emperor Commodus’s (Joaquin Phoenix) grasp on power. In reality, Romans as a people found great pride and excitement in watching gladiators defy and meet death.*

This moralizing approach to history aside, the movie is a bore. Its hero’s personality is “dead wife” and, other than Joaquin Phoenix’s entertaining turn as Commodus, it has no other roles of note. A love interest. A world-weary mentor. A brief Richard Harris cameo. Russell Crowe is good, Joaquin Phoenix is bad, and that’s it. In neglecting his setting Scott trades an opportunity to make viewers reflect on their beliefs in the face of an alien system for the smug self-assurance of reproducing our own as simply as possible and then telling you which parts of it are right. Nothing is left to the viewer to puzzle out on their own.

The movie’s action is sterile and uninteresting, slow-motion hacking and slashing, a few gory shots of decapitations and other sensationalized violence. There’s no sense that the arena where Maximus fights is a real place, that the people who bleed and die there are real people. For a movie about a spectacle to tell us anything worth listening to, it has to understand the nature and appeal of that spectacle. Gladiator breezes past this work without interest, and the result is a hundred-million-dollar book report on why democracy will save us.

* For more information, listen to History on Fire’s two-part episode on the gladiatorial games: Part 1, Part 2