Is Gladiator 2000 a good movie?
Gladiator is a big-budget 2000 American epic film directed by Ridley Scott. The story and screenplay is written by David Franzoni, and starred by Russell Crowe, Juaquin Pheonix and Connie Nielsen. The film won Academy Awards for Best Actor in Leading Role, Best CostumeDesign, Best Fffects, Visual Effects, Best Picture, and Best Sound, and gained some other Oscar nominations for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Music, Original Score and Best Writing Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. The film also got another 45 wins and over 70 nominations.
Gladiator taken as most accurate picture of the Roman Empire Hollywood has ever put out, Gladiator's plot is a whirlwind of faux Shakespearean machinations of death, betrayal, power plays, and secret identities (with lots of faux-Shakespearean dialogue ladled on to keep the proceedings appropriately “classical”), but it's all briskly shot, edited,and paced with a contemporary sensibility.
Gladiator is set in 180 AD, and uses actual historical personages and events for background. In Gladiator, victorious general Maximus Decimus Meridias is a powerful Roman general, loved by the people and the aging Emperor, Marcus Aurelius and has been named keeper of Rome and its empire by dying emperor, so that rule might pass from the Caesars back to the people and Senate, Marcus'neglected and power hungry son, jealous son Commodus learns of the plan, murders Marcus Aurelius, and plans to execute Maximus in order to secure his claim to the throne.
Escaping an ordered execution, Maximus hurries back to his home in Spain, too late to save his wife and son from the same order and he is soon taken prisoner by slave-traders. Along with his new friend Juba(Djimon Hounsou), he is bought by Proximo (Oliver Reed), an owner and trainer of Gladiators and trained as a gladiator by him.
The only desire that fuels him now is the chance to rise to the top so that he can look into the eyes of the man who will feel his revenge and fulfill the dying wish of his emperor. Recognizing Maximus's potential, Proximo grooms him for a trip to Rome's Colosseum.
The time soon comes when Proximo's troupe is called to Rome to participate in a marathon of gladiator games held at the behest of the new emperor, Commodus. Once in Rome, Maximus wastes no time in making his presence known, he gains fame as a gladiator and uses his celebrity to cause further damage to Commodus’ tenuous hold on the susceptible Roman people, hoping to inspire them to rediscover their lost values and overcome the corruption that is eating away at them, he becomes more powerful than the emperor .
He is later involved in a plot to overthrow the emperor with his former-love Lueilla, Commodus's sister, after whom he lusts, and also the widowed mother of Lucius, heir to the empire after his uncle, and democratic-minded senator, Gracchus, However, the plan is revealed, These actions prompt Commodus to square off with Maximus in the Colosseum with the fate of Rome at stake, At last he makes his will come true avenge Marcus Aurelius’ death, kills Commodus, frees the men whom he himself Cammodus arrested and gives the rule back to the people and Senate but he himself dies for that, To honor him people lift his body walking outs the Colosseum solemnly leaving Commodus's body on the ground behind.
The Epic
Epic films often take an historical or imagined event, mythic, legendary, or heroic figure, and add an extravagant setting and lavish costumes, accompanied by grandeur and spectacle and a sweeping musical score. Epics, costume dramas, historical dramas, war film epics, medieval romps, or “period pictures" are tales that often cover a large expanse of time set against a vast, panoramic backdrop. In an episodic manner, they follow the continuing adventures of the hero (es), who are presented in the context of great historical events of the past.
Epics are historical films that recreate past events. They are expensive and lavish to produce because they require elaborate and panoramic settings, on-location filming, authentic period costumes, inflated action on a massive scale, and large casts of characters.
Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria was quickly followed in Italy by many films dealing with ancient Rome and Greece. In America, after the birth of Nation established the viability of longer, ambitious historical films, MGM, in 1925, released Ber-Hur, directed by William Wyler(1902~1981),which became a commercial blockbuster. Cecil B. Demille's (1881~1959) The Ten Commandments(1923) established Hollywood as the major producer of epic films in the 1920s.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, however, the epic form waned as audience tastes turned to contemporary subjects, exemplified in the sophisticated musicals and comedies of Hollywood and in the ltalian " white telephone" comedy genre (films about the rich and idle). But the form returned full force in the early 1950s, with Quo Vadis (MeryLeRoy, 1951) and The Robe ( Henry Koster, 1953), and the first to be shot in Cinema Scope. The epic, with its lavish sets and mass choreography of crowds and armies, lent itself to the widescreen format that was one of Hollywood's responses to the threat of television. For most critics, BerHur represents the high point of the style, King of King(Nicolas Ray,1961),and ElCid(Anthony Mann, 1961) were also accomplished works as DeMille's The Ten Commandments(1956), which marked a return to subject he had first treated in 1923.
The epic form in Hollywood reached its zenith in the early 1960s with three films; Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960), Cleopara Coseph L Mankiewicz, 1963), and The Fall of the Roman Empire (Mann, 1964). (Spartacus, which gave screenwriter credit to Dalton Trumbo (1905~1976), a prominent leftist who had been blacklisted Hollywood for refusing to cooperate the House Un-American Activities Committee, became known as “the film that broke the blacklist”) However, The Fall of the Roman Empire did poorly at the box office, and from 1964 until the mid-1990s the epic was decidedly out of fashion. With Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995) and Gladiator (Ridley Scott.2000), the epic renewed itself in a way that heralded a return to cultural prominence. Gladiator, in particular, provides a fascinating example of the use of new visual technologies to narrate the past. Its elaborate use of computer-generated imagery recreates the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and an exceptional sense of realism in its gladiator contests. With varying degrees of critical and box-office success, twenty-first-century directors have made more films in the epic genre, including Troy(Wolfgang Petersen, 2004),Alexander (Stone, 2004), and The Passion of the Christ(Gibson, 2004).
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