Starring Russell Crowe, Richard
Harris, Oliver Read, Joaquin Phoenix and Connie Nielsen: Rated M.
BIGGER THAN BEN HUR. The obvious cliché but boy is it ever apt.
Gladiator is an epic tale of a general who became a slave. The slave who became a
gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor.
The story begins in Germania, one of the last bastions of
resistance against the burgeoning Holy Roman Empire. General Maximus (Crowe) opens the
action for us with a battle scene to blow your socks off. Maximus has the love and respect
of his men who would follow him to hell and back if he asked them.
This opening battle gives us some appreciation (in a magically
Hollywood kind of way) of the power and might of the Roman Armies. An appreciation of how
organisation, technology, discipline and good leadership can lead a numerically inferior
army to victory over a larger mob.
Following the battle, watched by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
(Harris), Maximus declares that all he desires, after serving his Empire and his Emperor
for so long, is to return to his wife and son and reap his crops. But Emperor Aurelius has
other plans for his favoured general.
Not merely a promotion to the higher echelons of the army for
this general officer and combat hero. No, this guy is destined for the top.
Emperor Aurelius is old and dying and he knows it. His son,
Commodus (Phoenix), a fine upstanding young heir apparent just doesn't quite meet with his
fathers measure of a new Emperor. And so General Maximus, loyal subject and defender of
the realm is asked to forgo his dreams of domestic and agricultural bliss for a life of
civic servitude, to take the reigns of the greatest Empire the world has ever known - to
rule as successor to the throne - appointed to the highest office in any land - Emperor of
Rome.
But the proverbial fly in the ointment, the spanner in the
works, the mother of all clangers befalls the general and ultimately the empire when the
old Emperor dies before making his wishes known publicly.
As heir apparent, Commodus is automatically elevated to the
throne upon the death of the old man and his first act as the new ruler of Rome is to
order the execution of her most faithful general, Maximus -- and his family.
Gravely wounded in his escape, Maximus is taken captive and sold
into slavery to face death once again, in the gladiatorial arena. He must fight or die,
kill or be killed and with the burning flame of desired revenge, he fights and kills.
Using the skill and mastery of sword that made him a great
general in his previous life, he beats all comers and inspires his fellow gladiators to
survive with him.
Meanwhile the new Emperor in Rome, desperate to keep his unhappy
citizens distracted from the drudgery of life, decrees a tournament. One hundred and sixty
five days of games in the great Roman arena -- The Coliseum.
One hundred and sixty five days of slaughter where the last man
standing lives to fight another day. Where men live to fight, where slaves live to die,
where dying like a man, with honour is the greatest reward.
Into this arena steps the warrior, Maximus at the head of a new
army, an army of gladiators. Where the Emperor of Rome finds to his cost that the tide of
public opinion is as fickle as it is powerful.
Gladiator follows some 40 years in the footsteps of the great
epics of the genre -- Ben Hur, Sparticus, Cleopatra etc. It not only delivers an epic tale
to rival its predecessors, but -- with the advantages of modern digital sets, the
brilliance of legendary actors like Harris and Read, the passion of Crowe, and the insight
of director Ridley Scott -- for my money, it outshines its ancestors. It really is bigger
than Ben Hur.