End of the Year

 On this Solstice, I want to take a minute to pause and thank all my Patrons:

Nathan

Rebecca

Jason

Mike

Laura

Etio

Matt

Cassandra

David

Mel

Eilis

There are not many of you, but especially in this year, you made a big difference, and have helped keep me afloat.  I hope you have enjoyed my stories, and I hope you enjoy the new ones.

I normally try to put up some kind of bonus content for December, but this past month I have been heavily involved in getting my elderly father moved and situated in a new house, and it has eaten up all my spare time and energy, so I just have not had any left to write an extra story.  Look for the new stories to start in January.

And if you are looking at this post and are not a Patron, consider pledging, and helping me to keep making quality Sword & Sorcery fiction.

Everybody who made it through this year should take a moment to pat themselves on the back, and I hope everyone manages a little cheer this holiday.  I'll see you on the flip side.

Down to the Sea of Flowers

 

Jaya has lived all her life on the island of Ulu’a, among her tribe, the Tau’ta.  Her existence has been idyllic, living in the green hills and shady forests of the island, swimming and fishing in the crystal blue waters beyond the white beaches, protected by the reef that keeps the storms at bay and protects them from any who might seek to land on the shores of their island paradise.  She is the younger child and only daughter of the chieftain, and her life is simple and comfortable.

The Tau’ta have stories of their past, when they were once a greater race.  They dwelled on grand islands to the west, amidst palaces and cities of ancient splendor.  A disaster drove them forth, and her people are all that remain of that once-great bloodline, living in seclusion as they dream of past glories.

But when a storm drives a foreign ship to their shores, Jaya’s world is transformed.  The strangers are a terrible, pale-skinned race of giants out of dark legend, and their arrival is a stroke of lightning that shatters the peace of Ulu’a.  Jaya discovers that the dark powers that once ruled the world of men are not gone, that their island refuge is not safe from the wider world, and she will find that the history of her people is not one of peace, but one of conquest and war.  A history written in blood.

Looking forward to the new story next year.  Watch this space...

Rise of Empires: Ottoman

 

History is a constant wellspring of ideas for fantasy literature.  Authors as diverse as George R.R. Martin, Howard, and E.R. Eddison have drawn on historical events for the inspiration for their stories, and I have done it myself.  History provides a panoply of betrayals, assassinations, wars, and empires that provide fodder for endless stories, and Howard himself often switched back and forth between outright fantasy and historical fiction in ways that blurred the line between them.

Rise of Empires: Ottoman is an interesting blend of historical drama and a documentary.  I expected it to be a pure pulp soap opera, like Marco Polo or Rome, but instead it switches back and forth between fully acted and dramatized scenes from the narrative and talking-head segments with scholars and authors discussing and clarifying the events as they unfold.  As a history nerd I will say I like this approach, and I have never seen anything else quite like it.

With overall narration by Charles Dance, Ottoman is the story of Sultan Mehmed II and his siege of Constantinople in 1453.  This was a major turning point in history, as by that time the city of Constantinople was all but surrounded by the Ottoman Empire, and only the powerful fortifications had so far prevented the city from being taken.  More than twenty armies had broken against the ancient Theodosian Walls – the most massive and formidable city defenses in the world – and behind them the remnant of the Roman Empire had outlived its western counterpart by almost a thousand years.

A lot of documentaries make do with a bunch of narration and some stock footage, but this goes much farther than that.  The experts – including Marios Phillipedes, Emrah Gurkan, and Roger Crowley – provide cogent, wide-ranging testimony about the events at hand from both authors and academics of varied backgrounds.  The dramatized portions of the story are what lift this above anything you would find on the History channel.

With a cast of genuine Turkish actors this has a level of authenticity you will not usually see, and the caliber of the talent on display is considerable.  Cem Yigit Uzümoglu is energetic in the lead role, but he is almost overshadowed by great performances from Birkan Sokullu, Damla Sonmez, and the luminously beautiful Tuba Buyukustun.  A lot of work went into the costumes and the props, and the period weapons and armor all look pretty good.  The battle scenes are extremely well-done, detailing the differing tactics and fighting styles of the Genoese versus the Janissaries versus the Byzantine troops.  The series does not shy from gore, and there is plenty of bone-crunching, head-cleaving violence.

All the elements are here for a tremendous story, and it’s all made more powerful by the fact that it really happened:  The young, ambitious ruler of a rising empire determined to make his mark, beset by temporizing court officials and ministers he cannot quite trust.  The last ruler of an ancient city that has stood for a thousand years, the last remnant of one of the greatest empires of all time, now all but vanished from the world, decadent and decayed, hiding behind walls raised in an ancient age with artistry the later world cannot match.  The turbulent foreign mercenary commander determined to set his skills against a vastly superior enemy and hold the city at all costs, for both honor and gold.

If you substituted somebody like Conan for Giovanni Giustiniani and some kind of magic for Mehmed’s cannons, then this would be a Sword & Sorcery tale to rival any other.  War, betrayal, passion, loss, ambition, treachery – it’s all here.  For those who want pure drama, this series will not quite hit the spot, but for fans of history or historical fiction, there is a lot to dig in on and enjoy.

Emperor of the Black Flame

 

Dust rose beside the river, and the sun set the ranks of spears afire as the legions marched to war.  Emperor Retarius rode among his armored bodyguard, watching his men deploy even as he kept an eye on the horizon where another cloud of dust showed the approach of his enemy.  All roads led to this place, all decisions and plans and strategies led to this single moment where men and blood and iron would decide the fate of kingdoms.

His plans to move his men south along the river and catch the approaching Hatta in between two armies had been checked, and the river battle had been costly.  He had lost both ships and men, but he had both in plenty.  The Hatta had taken the main crossing, and there they awaited him, and he knew they only waited because they expected reinforcement, and now that force was drawing close as well.

He had word that this desert usurper had allied himself with the deposed queen Arsinue, as well as the barbarian king of the Hatta, and that troubled Retarius, for he knew the true danger of a man who can make alliances as well as enemies.  A ruler must have both, after all, and the test of greatness is the choosing of them.  Retarius was a man with no enemies who remained alive, and so he felt a strange kind of gladness to meet a new enemy now, in this unexpected place.  He had come to put down the last spark of rebellion from an old, respected foe, and now he found himself grappling with a worthy adversary.

The river lay on his left, and the crossing was just out of sight to the south, over the scrub-covered hills and a cluster of date palms in a small orchard.  There was a town nearby, and he could just see the dusty rooftops if he looked to his right, but it was deserted and would not matter.  The enemy expected him to come and try the crossing, exposing his legions to the sweeps of Hattan horsemen, but he would not oblige them.  He knew this enemy would come leading with the charge of horse, and his foot-bound legions could not match their attack power against that.  Against a mounted enemy, he was forced onto the defensive, but he was prepared for it

The ground here was broken by small hills, scattered with irregular stones.  Already his men were setting their lines, picking up rocks and hurling them outward, where they would make charging horses trip and stumble.  He had siege weapons brought from the city, dragged here with great effort and set to fire on the rushing enemy.  Here the horsemen would find their mobility restricted, their charges shortened by a lack of open ground.  Arrows and javelins would bring them down and blunt their assault before it could land.  He knew if he could break their first two attacks, they would begin to lose heart, and his own position would strengthen.

There was little for him to do until the hour arrived.  His men knew their business, and he had no need to watch over them.  He rode to the small, upraised hill where a few broken pillars marked where a temple had once stood, and there his pavilion had been set, slaves waiting to attend him.  The enemy attack would not come until the afternoon, and he would rest until then.  Some cool water and cool wine, something to take away the close heat of this place.  He came down from his horse and went inside, feeling the tremble in the earth below him of armies on the move.

The Norseman

 

I have generally avoided reviewing some of the more notoriously bad films that burst out in the wake of the success of Conan the Barbarian in 1982.  There were a lot of shoddy attempts to cash in on the trend of oiled-up musclemen with European accents cavorting through cheap sets full of bikini models with feathered hair, and I have no particular desire to go through and skewer trash like Ator, the Fighting Eagle.  That said, I thought this one might have a bit more interest to it.  The Norseman came out in 1978 – before the barbarian surge – and was an attempt at actual historical fiction.  Turns out it is still embarrassingly terrible, but sometimes life is like that.

This was the big-studio directorial debut of Charles B. Pierce, who had made his reputation with the minor cult hit Legend of Boggy Creek, and this looks exactly like you’d expect a viking movie made by that guy would look.  The lead role is assayed by Lee Majors, who was then riding high on the popularity of The Six Million Dollar Man, and who seems to have taken the job as a bit of a lark, as it meant a Florida vacation between TV seasons.

This is ostensibly the story of a viking named Thorvald, who journeys to “Vineland” in search of his father, who vanished on a journey to the western seas years ago.  The longship they sail on looks pretty good, and seems to have been actually functional, as there are many shots of it tooling around the mangrove swamps where they filmed.  The ship is crewed by faded action star Cornel Wilde, walleyed character actor Jack Elam as some kind of wizard, and a host of Tampa Bay linebackers as background vikings, including one black dude, who is explained away with a throwaway line about a raid on North Africa, but otherwise doesn’t contribute any more than anyone else to this mess.

It turns out the missing King Eurich was captured and blinded by Native Americans, and he and some of his men are still kept as slaves.  None of the natives are played by actual indigenous actors, seeming to be mostly Italians and regular white dudes in long black wigs.  The Native costumes and general depiction are as shoddy and cringe-worthy as you would expect, given what kind of movie this is.

As such, there are not really any sets, save for the viking ship and the cave where the prisoners are kept.  The costumes are hideous, looking like they simply raided the prop rooms of older movies to come up with a bunch of plastic shields and helmets.  Said helmets have ridiculous-looking cow horns stuck on them – which might also have been plastic – causing the vikings to look like an invasion of bovines.  Majors wears a different style of helmet which seems to be influenced by the one Kirk Douglas wore in The Vikings, and it’s the only one that looks any good at all.

Everything about this is pretty painful.  The script is incredibly tedious, with long stretches of nothing happening, or scenes where people declaim things to each other.  Nobody acts in this movie, they just declaim.  The pace is glacial, and even at barely 90 minutes the movie feels extremely padded out.  Even when an actual fight scene breaks out, things don’t get better, as the action choreography is what I would call “nonexistent”, and there is a heavy use of slow-motion to further deaden any excitement that might leak through.  There is a little bit of fake blood, so it’s not completely G-grade, but there’s just not much going on here.

I find it hard to believe that Majors, who was then the star of one of TVs biggest shows, could not find something better to do with his time.  His casting is a misfire on a par with John Wayne in The Conqueror, as Majors is a similar kind of broad, American actor, and he’s not attempting any kind of accent or performance.  When he pulls out his plastic sword and starts to invoke “Our gawd Oden” the major reaction is to snicker.  If this had been made 20 years earlier, then it might have shared the screen with movies more like itself, and be remembered with a bit more affection, but in the 70s it was already a throwback to an earlier era, and not a good one.

I find it interesting that this movie arrived at a similar place as Pathfinder would almost 30 years later, though the point of view regarding the natives is completely flipped.  The theme of men, far from home, at war with a strange people and a strange land remains a compelling one, and could be made into something quite good.  Survival, savagery, a hostile wilderness and the strange powers of an unexplored world and mythology could be the basis of a compelling story, it just has not been done, or at least, not done well.

Rivers of Blood and Fire

 

Prows sheathed in bronze gleamed like gold in the haze of dawn as they cleaved through the wine-dark waves.  Out of the shadows a great fleet emerged, dark sails furled, oars scything through the water as they cut across the calm seas toward the glittering lights of Qahir where it dreamed on the shores of Ashem.  The great lighthouse shone its blaze forth into the dying night, but no one saw the oncoming ships until the sun turned the eastern sky to fire.

Cries went up along the shore, and fishermen headed to their daily toil paused and stared at the rank upon rank of warships coming in toward land.  Alarms sounded on the walls of the palace, and people just roused from sleep gathered their children and ran, hiding themselves in their houses and beneath false floors.  Bells rang and horns blared, and soldiers on the fortifications watched as a greater armada than they had ever seen came swarming to the docks.

One after another, the beating drums of the oarmasters ceased, and the oars lifted from the water and vanished into the black hulls.  Ropes were cast, planks dropped, and formations of legionaries began to pour forth from the ships like swarms of ants.  To the east, ships forced their way up the river mouth and drew ashore within the city, disgorging more troops.  Hundreds, thousands.  The ships unloaded their men and then withdrew to make room for the next, and the next.  The waterfront swelled with armed men beneath spears like grain and battle standards hung with gold leaves and wolf skins.

A grand ship came ashore and from it came a cohort of men in gilded armor, and in their midst slaves carried a purple canopy and the warriors who walked beside it carried naked swords and watched from behind silver war-masks that made them seem like statues rather than men.  The Varonan legions pushed into the city, clearing the roads with careless force, and they made their way toward the tall towers of the royal palace, clearing a path for the canopy and the standard of the imperial power.

Barbarians

 

Considering what a big deal it is, historically, I am kind of surprised that we haven’t seen more coverage of the battle of the Teutoberg Forest in film.  Fought in 9 AD, it was one of the most decisive contests in military history, in which gathered Germanic tribes dealt Rome one of the most severe defeats it ever suffered, destroyed three entire legions, and captured three regimental eagles, two of which were never recovered.  Shocked by the crushing setback, the aging Emperor Augustus decided never to push the empire’s borders beyond the Rhine, and the eastern Germans would never be subservient to Rome.

Barbarians (Barbaren in the original German) is a six-episode miniseries about the lead-up to the battle and the characters that drove it, finishing up with the epic event itself.  A German series, it was picked up for international distribution by Netflix.  The settings default to dubbed, but it is easy to switch back to the original spoken German and Latin, and I highly recommend that.  The German is modern, but it still adds a layer of verisimilitude to see historical Germans speak their actual language.  The Latin in the series has been lauded as being pretty authentic Classical Latin, and watching it all in subtitles emphasizes the cultural distance between the two cultures.

The authenticity of the show overall is high.  The Roman costuming is first-rate, and the Germanic characters are dressed in line with what we know about what the people of that era wore.  The weapons and armor are really excellent, as they are all accurate to the arms of the time period.  The soldiers of the legions wear a mix of styles of armor, from scaled to mail, and they don’t all look identical.  The swords all look really good, from the Romans with their gladii to the longer Germanic swords.  Spears are used much more often than we usually see in period pieces, and there is some effort to show the actual, historical battlefield tactics.

But this isn’t just a show about a battle.  Barbarians is a story about the conflicts between two peoples, expressed by characters.  The central figure of the battle is Arminius, who was born in Germania, then later went to Rome as a leader of auxiliary troops and returned to his homeland as a cavalry officer.  Here he is depicted as a son of a chief who was taken away as a hostage and raised by Varus, the Roman commander of the legions in Germania.  He comes onscreen presenting as a pure Roman, proud of his position and his adopted culture, who is pulled back to allegiance to his people by events and the ties of family and friendship.  Played by German actor Laurence Rupp with tremendous magnetism, Arminius is multilayered and conflicted.  Rupp is going to be a star someday soon, or he should be, with his gift for microexpressions and his bright blue stare.

The other two sides of the triangle are the invented character of Folkwin, Arminius’s childhood friend, and Thusnelda, the woman they both come to love.  Folkwin is played by David Schutter with a wonderful, mercurial energy, and I promise you that actress Jeanne Goursaud is going to get some attention.  Not only is she head-turningly beautiful, but she plays Thusnelda with complexity and ferocity.  She is completely believable as both the daughter of a Roman sympathizer caught up in events beyond her control, and as the war-painted, bloody-eyed witch-woman slaughtering legionaries with a spear.

The show goes to a lot of effort to not paint either side in black and white.  The Romans are patronizing and imperialist, and the show does not soft-pedal that, but we see them as actual human beings with their own desires and flaws.  Varus, the Roman commander who led the legions to disaster, is rather likeable in his own way, and we see him through Arminius’s eyes as a man who treated him well, and raised him like a father.  The Germans are fractious and fight each other at a moment’s notice, and they are not depicted as any kind of “noble savages”.  The show simply lays the battle out as a conflict of cultures, brought to a point by the choices of a few people who found themselves at particular places in the crucial moment.

So this is a series for Sword & Sorcery fans to dig in on.  It presents morally gray characters making choices against a backdrop of political intrigue and personal danger.  The violence is visceral and the fight scenes are satisfyingly brutal.  The culminating battle is suitably epic, even if, for my taste, there could have been a more detailed treatment of the tactics used, that’s just me being a military history nerd.  The show does a good job balancing known historical facts with the needs of drama, and makes for a satisfying historical epic.

The Valley of the Dead

 

Night brought the moon, and the red haunter on the horizon brought forth the sorcerer.  Dekenius waited with unease, for he was more accustomed to granting audiences than having them granted.  He waited in a ring of burning torches upon the sand-cut ruins of some forgotten temple, and as always he wondered at the age of this place.  So many centuries of rise and fall, of passion and war and the slow returning of the floods year after year.  So many ruins to be seen everywhere, places without names, none remembering what they had been.

There were no guards, he would not look the fool by thinking his men could protect him from one like this.  He had seen what this desert warlock had done at the battle, and it frightened him, and the fact of that fear was like a stone on his tongue he could not swallow.  Dekenius feared little, and he ill-liked the taste of it now.  He had called for aid in a moment of weakness, and it was bitter.

The sky was clear as glass, ancient stars blazing on high, and he saw a darkness come from the horizon beneath the moon.  It billowed like a banner, and then he heard the beat of hooves.  A lone rider approached, robed in ebon like the night.  The horse was black and breathed glowing light as from a fire, and sparks trailed from the hooves where they touched the earth.

The rider drew closer, and larger, until Dekenius saw it was a horse taller than any he had seen, if horse it was, and the man who sat upon it was a giant who loomed against the stars.  Beneath the cowl he saw the shadow of a white face and dark eyes that gleamed like jewels, and there was a scent of bitter earth and heavy incense that came from within the black robes.  The rider drew to a stop and looked down at him, and Dekenius had never felt so small.

Wrath of the Titans

 

This is a strange one, because as a sequel to a remake that no one liked, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for this movie to exist, except for money to be made in foreign markets.  It’s always weird to make a sequel to something that is a remake or a reboot, and this had a new director, new screenwriters, and only a few returning members of the original cast.  Everything about this signals that the movie should be complete shit, and yet it is somehow ten times more awesome than the movie it is following.

The better script goes a long way, as we are freed from most of the bad dialogue and painful narration of the original.  The overarching story of men at war with the gods didn’t seem to have anything to do with the original Clash or the remake, really, but freed from the constraints of interpretation, this movie develops the idea into a crazy kind of superhero/mythological mashup that is like nothing else you have ever seen.

Sam Worthington is back as Perseus, but without his military buzzcut or his dull love interest, as Gemma Arterton was unavailable, so she was killed off between movies.  Perseus’s motivation this time out is his young son, and Worthington actually does much better connecting with the kid than he ever did with anyone else.  Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Danny Huston are back as the trio of Zeus, Hades and Poseidon, and we also get Bill Nighy as Hephaestus and Toby Kebbel as Agenor, bastard son of Poseidon.  Princess Andromeda gets a big upgrade from Alexa Davalos to Rosamund Pike, and goes from damsel in distress to warrior queen.

Free to invent, Wrath goes big, depicting a war against and among the gods, and isn’t shy about killing them off.  There are shifting rivalries and alliances, and there is not really a set moral compass.  The characters battle in a welter of uncertainty and necessity, trying to survive, and not on any holy or unholy crusade.  The movie kind of depicts the gods as parasitic, beings who were once needed but have now outlived their time and must be destroyed.  The new villain in this one is Ares, played with excellent selfish impulsiveness by the underrated Edgar Ramirez.

The effects in this one are so much better than in Clash it borders on shocking.  The set piece battles look amazing, and it’s obvious the growth of the MCU at the time was having an effect on how the action was depicted and shot.  The year before, Immortals had covered a lot of the same subject matter, and despite strong art direction, the action in that film now looks petty and small compared to the huge, thundering, mountain-breaking battles of this one.  The CGI is first-rate here, and it really brings everything to life alongside some inspired creature design, like the freaky chimerae, or the weird machai with their two bodies grown together.

Away from the expectations of a remake, the movie is more its own thing, and comes off as miles better for it.  The script is much better, with some real character moments and some genuine humor, rather than the dull exposition-fest of the first film.  The number of extraneous characters and elements is pared down, and the whole is more focused and seems to be about something, rather than just a bunch of shit thrown in randomly.  The action sequences and battles go really big, and you never feel like they are being held back or pared down.  When Perseus is riding his black pegasus through flying rivers of lava thrown off by the lumbering, molten form of Kronos, it is really like Greek myth as a superhero movie, and it looks spectacular.

Originally there was going to be a third film, but I honestly don’t know where they could have gone, having killed off all the named gods and finished the whole plot arc.  If you passed on this one because of the poor quality of Clash, then be assured this is one sequel that is worth your time.

The Lion Will Rise

Dekenius watched the fire rise against the dawn sky, and the stench of burning flesh came to him like a blessing.  The sun was just coloring the eastern horizon, and he tasted the cool breeze from beyond the horizon in between the breaths of killing and slaughter.  The fortress was ancient and much of it was made from soft stone or even earthen works.  Flames rose from it as from a pottery kiln, and the heat from it distorted the stars.

While it was yet dark he had loosed his war engines upon the fortress and shattered the walls like dry mud.  It burned fiercely in the wash of flaming oil, and he heard the screams of the dying.  Now he sent his legions across the bridge they had made from lashed-together reed boats, and they moved across the flat ground north of the fort to form a barricade between the bastion of his enemies and the deeper waters where they might take to their boats and escape him.

He sat on his horse, sword in hand across his saddle-bow, the shadow of his banner over him like a piece of night that remained in his service.  The stars were fading to pinpricks of silver, and he was glad of the smoke, because at least it masked the underlying smell of rot from the omnipresent river.  The floods were receding, but that only left black, stinking mud where the waters had lain, and for all the peasants rushed to gather up the foul stuff for their fields, Dekenius longed to return to the palace in Qahir where he might at least pretend he was in a civilized country.

From here he could watch as his columns advanced fast across the muddy flat and cut off Arsinue’s forces in the open.  He saw the blur of spears where battle joined, and he closed his eyes for a moment, hoping to hear the clatter of hafts and the battering of shields, but he was too far away.  He simply watched the battle flags move, and by their paths he knew the enemy was being routed, men fleeing across the reed-thick floodland.  They would not reach their boats.

A rider came close and saluted.  “My general, they are broken and fleeing, but there are not very many of them.  It seems this is a token force, left to hold the fortress and slow our advance.”

Dekinius shrugged.  He had expected no less.  Arsinue thought to occupy him with these pitiful old mud forts and her tavern-sweepings while she joined with her nomad army in the east.  He knew that the Hatta had invaded and taken Keshan, and that meant there was an army of horsemen no more than three days ride from where he now stood.  He knew they outnumbered him, but not by how much, for his scouts sent to learn that had not returned, and he did not think they would.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

 

The idea of remaking Clash of the Titans had been kicking around Hollywood since at least the 90s, and once we entered the CGI era that would make the creature effects doable there was more and more interest.  Finally, in 2010, the remake, directed by Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk, Now You See Me) arrived in theaters with a heavy thud.  Despite a budget of $125 million and the work of a lot of creditable actors, the film is a complete, disastrous mess.

The result of multiple different screenplays mashed together, the film seems bent on fucking up everything that made the original movie great.  In the 1981 version you get the operatic, brooding opener with Acrisius putting his daughter and bastard grandson into a coffin and casting them into the storming sea while he curses the gods.  It delivers all the exposition you need with a dramatic bit of monologue and a great location shoot.

The new movie, however, never saw anything it couldn’t narrate the fuck out of, and it starts right off with what becomes the major problem of the script: it’s terrible.  The fact that the person writing it could not create decent dialogue to save their life did not stop them from writing a whole fuckton of dialogue that will be crammed into your face in many, many boring scenes of people standing around and delivering exposition in rote, declarative sentences.  The movie even added the character of Io – played by the lovely Gemma Arterton – expressly for the purpose of narrating things, just in case you missed the point that this is all super-serious and not fun.

The quality of the cast is the real tragedy here, as aside from Liam Neeson as Zeus, you have Ralph Fiennes shamelessly hamming it up as Hades, Luke Evans as Apollo, and Alexander Siddig as Hermes – even though he appears on screen for about 10 seconds.  Other familiar faces include Mads Mikkelsen, Alexa Davalos, Jason Flemyng, Liam Cunningham, Nicholas Hoult, Vincent Regan, Polly Walker, Pete Postlethwaite, and Rory McCann, among others.  You will spend the whole movie thinking “hey I know who that is.”  So many good actors, and so little for them to do.  The only one not slumming it is Sam Worthington, who is as bland and dull in the role of Perseus as he is in all his movies.  This was the time period where they were casting him in everything, hoping he was the new Russell Crowe, except it turned out his talent is strictly mediocre.

The story deviates so far from the original that it seems less like a new interpretation and more like mockery.  Here, Perseus is born to Acrisius’s wife, who Zeus seduces, Uther-style.  She is not named, and she dies in the sea-casket, so she never even gets a line.  Then Acrisius is struck by lightning and turns into Calibos, with a makeup design that is really boring and uninspired.  In this movie, Hades is the main antagonist, part of a plotline about humanity rebelling against the gods, which comes across as really, really stupid and forced.  The kraken is not “the last of the titans” as in the original, but a monster Hades created to kill the titans, and despite expensive CGI, it looks nowhere near as cool as Harryhausen’s striking creation.

Andromeda is given nothing to do, has no romance with Perseus, and is demanded as sacrifice for seemingly no reason.  Even after Perseus rescues her, he just leaves to go be with the Goddess of Exposition.  Perseus is saddled with a cast of side-characters who serve as fodder, plus the inexplicable presence of “Djinn”, who look like tree people and seem to be from some other movie.  The design of Medusa is like something out of a video game, rather than the terrifying monster Harryhausen created, and indeed the entire sequence seems like a stage from a video game.

The CGI, overall, is not great, with everything looking muddy and grayish, and yet somehow too shiny, like plastic.  The costumes and set dressing are fantastic, and the digitally-painted backgrounds and vistas look top-notch.  It’s too bad the effects overall look so underdone and ugly, which is not helped by the rather poor art design, which makes everything look too slick.  There is a definite Blizzard kind of aesthetic in the design of the monsters and the gods, so it all kind of reminds me of Diablo.

I don’t object to the idea of making a version of Clash that does things differently, the problem here is that every change they made from the original makes the movie worse, muddies up the story, and makes things more complicated without adding anything except shitty dialogue and sub-par CGI.  In the original movie Perseus falls in love with Andromeda, and everything else follows from that motivation.  In this version, Perseus has no personal motivation except that he’s mad at Hades, and he seems to slog rather grudgingly through the plot.

Despite being a pile of crap, this movie made enough worldwide to warrant a sequel, and that will be where things get interesting.  The idea of men at war with the gods is a good one for both over-the-top action and some genuine existential undertones.  Here the whole theme fell flat, but in the unlikely follow-up, Wrath of the Titans, the full awesome potential was realized.  I’ll get to that one next time.

The Doom Idol

 

Like a storm, the armies of Kadesh poured forth from the borderlands and rode through the valley of the Nahar, a plume of dust in their wake as though they were a fire upon the earth.  Summer was waning, and the floodwaters were drawing away, leaving fields covered in the black mud of the high season.  The roads emerged from the water and dried in the fierce sun, and armies of horsemen rode over them, seeking the heart of empire.

Zudur was at the forefront, high in his war saddle, his helm shielding his face from the sun, and his standard-bearers riding close behind him.  At his side walked the lion who was his only brother now, black mane vibrant in the waning light of day, the rear leg limping slightly as it went, a mirror of the misshapen king who led his hosts to war.

Too long had the warriors of the Hatta rested upon old victories.  Too long had they grazed their horses on sweet grass and rode in hunts and mock battles, forgetting the taste of blood.  Zudur remembered his childhood days, when it seemed the world lay open to their conquest, and the city of Kadesh was only a stop along the path.  He had watched as months became years, and years decades, and now his father was dead and he was king, and no more would he allow the strength of his warriors to wither away.  Ashem awaited, and they would take what had been ordained for them.

If he had any doubt of it, he had only to look on the lion that paced him, sent to him by the god of the sky.  Ezurhad was the god of the lightning and the fire of the storms, and he had led the way of the people out of the eastern lands with a golden lion.  Now another lion followed him and guarded him, and he knew he was favored of the god who had shaped his race like iron on a forge.

Clash of the Titans

 

Released in 1981 after a difficult production history, Clash of the Titans was famously the swansong of visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen, who retired from filmmaking shortly after he finished it.  Already in his sixties, it is likely that the advent of Star Wars and the new age of special effects had shown him which way the wind was blowing, and that his kind of small-scale monster picture would not survive the new era that was coming.

It was a good way to bow out, as Clash is the most lavishly produced Harryhausen film, and boasted the biggest budget he’d ever worked with.  He created a huge cast of monsters for the movie, from the humanoid Calibos to the winged Pegasus, from the mesmerizingly terrifying Medusa to the towering, city-flattening Kraken.  It is also the film in his ouvre that has most in common with Sword & Sorcery, and displays more grit, horror, and violence than any of the other, more kid-friendly movies in the Harryhausen history.

The original script was apparently much more pulpy, with the Kraken ripping Pegasus into bloody pieces at the end, and Andromeda spending a lot of time naked.  As it is, there is still quite a bit of pulp DNA in this, with some casual nudity and some quite graphic violence.  Between Calibos getting his hand chopped off, the soldiers’ gruesome deaths at the stingers of the giant scorpions, Medusa’s bloody decapitation, and the butchery of her two-headed guard dog, there is a good bit of gore to be found, certainly out of bounds from what one expected from a Harryhausen movie.  The film opens with King Acrisius putting his daughter and her infant son in a coffin and casting it out to sea while she wails and begs for her life, followed shortly by the complete destruction of the city of Argos.  It’s actually pretty intense.

The cast is famously star-studded, with both big names and some that would go on to greater notoriety later.  Lawrence Olivier may have been phoning it in with laser Floyd lights behind his head, but his natural gravitas and authority made him the perfect Zeus.  The gods are rounded out by other well-known names like Ursula Andress, Pat Roach, Claire Bloom, and Maggie Smith as the antagonist, Thetis.  Sian Phillips does a lot with a small part as Queen Cassiopeia, and Judi Bowker adds some spark to the bland princess role.  Harry Hamlin as Perseus is good-looking, but comes across as rather dim, and he’s not that good an actor, being totally upstaged by Burgess Meredith as his funny sidekick.

In Sword & Sorcery the gods are always either distant and unknowable, or they are monsters from some ancient epoch when mankind was cattle.  In Clash the gods are – as in the genuine epics – very much present in the narrative.  They talk to the hero and villain, they take sides, they grant favors and send gifts.  What keeps this from turning into a moral axis that would be more reminiscent of High Fantasy is that the Greek pantheon were never paragons of virtue.  The gods were just very much like people with their passions writ large.  The whole story starts because Zeus couldn’t keep it in his pants, and the rivalry between Perseus and Calibos is fueled by them both being the semidivine children of gods, favored by their parents.

There’s nothing inherently opposed to S&S with this idea, as there is never a sense that Perseus is engaged in some kind of holy crusade.  He is caught up in a very personal struggle to save the woman he loves and defeat the subhuman monstrosity who has cursed her and the city she will someday rule.  That he is aided by Zeus, his father, while Calibos is aided by his mother Thetis makes it seem more like a war by proxy, with the divine parents using their children as agents to fight each other.

But Perseus is saved as a hero figure because he does not get everything given to him by his dad.  He takes actions that he decides on himself, and which take courage and involve great danger.  Nobody told him he had to tame Pegasus, consult cannibal witches, or do battle with the Kraken – those are all things he decides to do himself, he just gets some help along the way.  At the end, when he rides across seemingly half the Levant to face the Kraken, he gets just the tiniest nudge from Zeus to help him along.

This isn’t really a Sword & Sorcery film, because the characters are drawn too broadly, and too easily divided into good guys and bad guys.  But the crazy, overheated landscape of monsters and curses, bloody burnings and beheadings, and of everything being at the whim of capricious, vindictive gods is something that could definitely be made to work.  Almost 30 years later Hollywood decided this needed a remake and, unfortunately, we will get to that one next.

Heart of the Night

 

Utuzan went alone into the western desert, and a flame went before him to light his way.  He left the fortress of Hamun at the setting of the moon, and no one saw him, for he moved as one with the night.  Once he was away from the works of man, among the rocks and the sand, he held up the ancient jewel called the Heart of Anatu and he called forth a light from within it.

He studied the indecipherable carvings upon the translucent red stone, uncut and rough.  Even he did not know where it came from, or who had marked it.  In his long-ago age it had been a forbidden thing, a relic of an ancient goddess who the people of the empire did not revere.  Only he had dared to take it up, only he had dared to use it, and it had always given him strength, always been his ally.  Now, it was faded from what it had been, and his power seemed to fade with it.

Since his poisoning he had been weakened.  He still knew all his secrets and mysteries – the names of wind and fire, the conjuring of spirits from outside time and light.  It was his innate power that had been sapped, and he at last had come to understand that the heart had spent too much strength to preserve him.  Its power was finite after all, and now it was dying.  It grieved him, as the loss of a friend, for without it he would be very alone in this fallen age.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Every so often, Hollywood decides to try another King Arthur adaptation, and it seems like they just keep getting worse, because this is one of the most grandly, flagrantly bad versions I have ever seen. Oh, I am sure there have been worse ones, since the Arthurian legends have been done so many times, but how often does a movie studio decide to launch $175+ million at a project so completely misguided? A movie where every narrative decision prompts another chorus of what were they thinking?

Ever since he married Madonna, Guy Ritchie has been making questionable decisions, but a run of success with his Sherlock Holmes movies got some people thinking he was a great director, despite there being little evidence that he is anything but a competent cinematographer. Anyway, apparently 3 or 4 King Arthur scripts were Frankensteined together to make this horror, and it shows in the almost complete lack of any kind of tonal consistency. This is a movie that doesn’t know whether it is a high fantasy, a gritty crime thriller, a political allegory, or a jaunty action-adventure, instead just deciding to shift gears whenever it feels like it.

The problem with shoehorning the Arthurian tale into one movie is that the real villain is Mordred, who is Arthur’s son and thus shows up way too late to serve as a foil for an origin story. This movie “solves” the problem by making the bad guy Uther’s evil brother Vortigern, who is played by Jude Law doing his oily, charming villain thing. He does a good job with the role, but Vortigern is so obviously evil and treacherous that it makes Uther (Eric Bana in a part so small it’s basically a cameo) look like a complete idiot for trusting him even a little bit.

The opening of the movie sets the stage by showing what the whole rest of the movie will be like: it looks awesome, it doesn’t make any sense, and it’s about as Arthurian as World of Warcraft. Less, maybe. The prologue explains how humans “lived in peace” with “the Mages” until the “Mage Sorcerer King Mordred” started some shit. And so you get a massive assault on Camelot by elephants that make the Oliphants from Return of the King look like pygmies. They come shambling in, entire fortresses on their backs, crushing everything in their path. It looks freaking amazing, but it is such a complete butchery of the legends as well as anything resembling history, that I am not sure what it is supposed to accomplish.

It gets even crazier from there, with Vortigern sacrificing his wife to a trio of tentacled siren/witches (who are never explained) that live in pools under Camelot (also never explained) and they help him overthrow Uther by turning him into a towering, armored, Grim Reaper dude who looks almost exactly like Frazetta’s Death Dealer and wields a ridiculous double-ended scythe. He kills Uther and Igraine, and little Arthur floats down what is apparently supposed to be the Thames to “Londinium”, where he is taken in and raised by whores in a bordello.

If you already have a lot of questions, well, neither I nor the movie have much in the way of answers for you. Part of the problem reviewing this movie is the fact that it would take a 10,000-word essay to unpack all of the stupid shit going on here. Do I talk about how Uther, before dying, throws Excalibur in the air and lets it impale him, and then he turns to stone and sinks to the bottom of the lake? Do I discuss how we keep talking about “Mages” as a separate race, despite that having no correspondence in the legends? Do we talk about how Arthur learns to fight from an Asian guy who has a martial arts dojo in “Londinium” and that said guy is called “Kung Fu George”?

It’s just so painful, the moreso because the cast is generally pretty good, and the movie is filled with images and scenes that actually work and have some resonance to them. The problem is that most of the scenes don’t seem to have much to do with each other, and so they don’t build to make something greater, they just pass by and are over and then something completely different starts. There are too many elements that go nowhere or are so bizarre they need explanations which never come. Ritchie makes some good sequences, but he can’t make this mess into something coherent, and he doesn’t seem interested in trying.

And this movie is a complete failure as an adaptation because it shows no desire to respect the myths it is supposed to be based on. The characters from the legends are nothing like their onscreen counterparts, and there is no attempt to make this feel like an Arthurian piece, rather they just slap a bunch of names on things and call it done. If this had been a fantasy unconnected to anything, it would actually have been better, because it has some cool elements and ideas, but they needed developing. This could have made a fine Sword & Sorcery movie if the creators had been able to make up their minds about what the hell they were trying to do, and cut out all the extraneous shit that didn’t need to be there. The only consolation in the whole mess is that the idiots who screwed it up lost a shit-ton of money, and the five planned sequels will thankfully never be made.

The Killing Dark

Arsinue felt the sun dying, even through the stone walls of her crypt. By day she slept here, shielded from all light, her limbs heavy with a languor she could not resist, but when the day waned she woke and lay here in silence and cold, waiting for the night, all but unable to move. Alone, she seethed with the anger in her, with the will that sustained her now, beyond the gate of death.

In the beginning she had denied that her brother’s traitor poison had done its work, and that she had survived, but now she knew she had not. Now she knew that her spirit had passed through the barrier into the Fields of the Dead, and yet she was not dead. She walked and breathed and spoke and hungered. Hers was a living death, and at first she had dwelled in terror of what she had become. Now she knew she had been given the power to revenge herself and to fight for her kingdom.

The sun vanished below the horizon, and it was as though she felt a coolness come over her stone tomb. She thrust her hands up, suddenly alive with purpose, and she pushed aside the great lid of the sarcophagus in which she slumbered during the daylight hours. She rose up naked in the torchlit dark of this deep place, and she heard the soft chanting of the priests of Anatu. This hidden temple was the only place she had found refuge, and from here she stretched forth her hand to take back the power that had been stolen from her.

King Arthur

This movie was another product of that early-aughts surge of historical epics in the wake of the success of Gladiator. It had been a while since there had been a major-studio effort about King Arthur, and the initial info about this film seemed to indicate they were focusing on a more historically-plausible interpretation, rather than the more fantastical, romanticized takes we more often get. That turned out not to be at all true, but it did fuel some interest in this before it was released.

It is amusing to me that big-budget films about King Arthur only seem to get worse over time. Excalibur was not a perfect movie, and it didn’t get a lot critical respect at the time of its release, but with the perspective of time it seems like the Platonic ideal of Arthurian movies, and that things have only declined from there, finally descending down to the level of 2017s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword – a film which I will get to sooner than I would like.

King Arthur, the movie, starts with the premise of an actual historical period – the days when the Roman Legions were pulling out of Britain and abandoning it. Rather than Romans or native Britons, Arthur and his knights are depicted as Sarmatian cavalry attached to Roman service, thus forming a possible historical basis for the legend of fearsome mounted warriors. Now, there is historical evidence that some Sarmatian auxiliaries were in Briton about the time this is supposed to be set – 467 AD – but they were probably gone even by the time of the Roman withdrawal, which was actually in 410, and there is no evidence of mounted units in action.

The other problem with this is that the cast of “knights” do not look at all like Sarmatians. An Indo-Iranian people, some Sarmatians were said to be blonde or red-haired, but as a steppe nomad race they likely would have had the long-faced, long-nosed features of their close relatives, the Scythians and the Huns. The actors playing the knights not only don’t look anything like one another, they just look British, largely because they are.

The cast as a whole, however, is amazing, containing not only actors who were big at the time, like Clive Owen as Arthur and Keira Knightley as Guinevere, but a bunch of actors who would go on to being much better known in years to come: Ioan Gruffud, Mads Mikkelsen, Joel Edgerton, Hugh Dancy, Ray Winstone, Stellan Starsgard, and Ray Stevenson – there are so many familiar faces here it’s a constant surprise, and they are all earning their money, turning in better performances than the material really demands.

The story is pretty straightforward, with the ragtag band of warriors first tasked with rescuing a Roman family, and then deciding to stay after the legions leave to fight off the invading Saxons at the climactic Battle of Badon Hill. The theatrical cut was trimmed for violence, but the Director’s Cut on DVD has quite a lot of grit in it. The action choreography is solid if unimaginative, and the gore is satisfying, with a lot of head-chopping and limb-lopping. It could be better, as there are a lot of times characters get hit and act wounded but you can’t see any blood or where they were hit.

The historical accuracy is, overall, a mess, with anachronistic weapons and armor, Romans living north of Hadrian’s Wall, and the Saxons (who already occupied large parts of England at the time) inexplicably invading from across the sea, well north of the wall, and then walking south. The withdrawal of the legions from Britain was finished by 410, while this movie supposedly takes place almost sixty years later. The Picts are called “Woads” for some reason, and aside from painting themselves blue don’t seem to look physically different from the rest of the cast. I do have to say that this is certainly the only major studio film to have a Pelagius cameo , or address the Pelagian Heresy in any way – even if Pelagius actually died in Egypt almost forty years before the year this movie is set.

It’s a solid enough adventure, with a stellar cast and some good action sequences, but the problem with Arthurian movies is you have to either do the romanticized, Excalibur thing, or you have to go the gritty, historical, more realistic route. This movie sold itself as being historical, but then it wasn’t even close to that. So the history nerds didn’t like it, and the people who wanted the high fantasy, Tennyson/Malory approach didn’t like it either. By not committing to one or the other, King Arthur just becomes another action movie with some Arthurian names slapped on it. I can’t help but think that if the filmmakers had gone in a more dark/fantasy direction, with actual magic and the pagan wilderness imagery, this could have been much better. But then I remember that Legend of the Sword went hard with the fantastical elements, and how that turned out, so maybe fantasy is not the way to go here.

There is definitely the potential for a Sword & Sorcery take on Arthurian legends. Start with the grounded, historical idea, then add in some actual dark magic, a world where good and evil are subsumed in the moral necessities of survival in the face of invasion and social disintegration, and you could even throw in some monsters, so long as you imagined them as some kind of prehistoric remnants – like in The 13^th Warrior. You could come up with a dark, bloody, serious tale that would still have some historic plausibility, and could still honor the ideals the Round Table was meant to embody. In fact, it could be all the more powerful if the knights stood all but alone against a dark, chaotic world, striving for ideals they would never reach. That could be awesome.

The Red Fortress

The blood-red stone walls of Hamun rose above the waters of the river, and in their shadow iron legions marched. Dust rose up into the evening sky as rank after rank of Varonan soldiers followed the road up to the rocky promontory where the fortress stood stark against the emerging stars. The first night wind from the desert places whispered cold, and it was welcome, for the way had been long, and the blazing sun of this land was harsh upon the sons of the sea.

Neges, the commander of the fortress, watched from the walls, not certain what he should do. He had received his orders, messages marked with the seal of the king and queen, and yet he distrusted them. Here was an army of a foreign nation moving upon his own soil, and that was not welcome to his heart. Yet he did not have any grounds to refuse their occupation of Hamun, the greatest fortress in the northland, and if what he heard was the truth, then he would need every sword and spear to defend it.

He came down from the tower beside the gate and climbed to his chariot, more for the gravity it would give him than for any need. The land around Hamun was rocky and ill-suited for horse or chariot. Yet he would not meet some foreign general on foot like a farmer. He stood with his guards around him, bronze spearpoints gleaming in the dying sun, and he waited.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand

Bursting onto the scene in 2010 as part of the cultural aftershock of 300, Spartacus: Blood and Sand clearly stands as the pulpiest show ever released on any kind of TV. Produced by Steven DeKnight (a veteran of shows like Buffy, Angel and Dollhouse) the first season went off like a bomb, as nobody had ever seen anything quite this carnal, bloody, and excessive. Taking the well-known story of the leader of the so-called Third Servile War in 73-71 BCE, the show amped everything up to 11 and made a bloody, melodramatic epic for a modern audience.

One of the things that makes the story of Spartacus so popular to rework is that there is not a whole lot of solid information about him. We know he was Thracian (from somewhere in what is now Eastern Europe) and that he was a gladiator. We can tell from his success as a general that he had some military experience and was an excellent tactician. We know he led the largest slave uprising in Roman history, and we know when he died. That’s about it.

The first season of the show stars Andy Whitfield as the titular character, and shows us how he became a slave in the first place and how he ended up in a ludus in Italy, sentenced to be a gladiator. Since we don’t know anything factual about this part of his life, the show is free to invent whatever it wants, and does so. It fills in other named members of the revolt, and adds to them with characters both historical and imaginary.

The first smart thing the show did was reimagine the gladiator school as a hothouse for melodrama, putting in rivalries, jealousies, affairs, hatreds, friendships and betrayals galore. Every character is caught up in multiple different plotlines where they are pulled in different directions, trying to reach their personal ambitions for power, freedom, wealth, or love, all against the backdrop of the brutality and violence of the system of slavery and combat they were caught up in.

Brutality was the other thing the show did right, as they elected to not sugar-coat anything, and in fact did whatever you would call the opposite of that. While shows like Rome strove for historical accuracy, Spartacus went way beyond that into sheer pulp sex and violence. Rather than show tasteful nudity, Blood and Sand was almost wall-to-wall naked flesh and sex so explicit it is still kind of shocking. There was none of this “necessary to the plot” bullshit, and plenty of the nudity and sex was just there to add to the debauched atmosphere. It helped to create a feeling that anything was possible, and you were never sure what the show would do or how far they would go.

And showing most clearly the influence of 300 on the whole idea, the violence in Spartacus was cranked way past anything believable, with plenty of slow-motion and lots of bright, color-corrected blood everywhere. With the saturated digital color, the action scenes are gripping festivals of screaming, hyper-real carnage featuring ripped flesh, severed limbs, and literal buckets of gore.

None of this would work at all if you didn’t have a cast willing to go for it, and the cast of this show really rose to the occasion. Andy Whitfield stars as the hero, but he is almost eclipsed by the rest of the crew, including Manu Bennett hamming it up as Crixus, Nick Tarabay as the serpentine, treacherous Ashur, Peter Mensah as the whip-cracking trainer Doctore, and John Hannah as the cussing, murderous, amoral owner of the ludus, Batiatus. One has to single out Lucy Lawless for bringing a ton of complexity and depth to her role as Lucretia, and at the same time she doesn’t shrink from the sexuality of the role. Everybody here just goes all-out.

Each subsequent season of the show had a different title, and it maybe never recovered entirely from the death of Andy Whitfield in 2011, which necessitated the recasting of the central character with Liam McIntyre. As it moved more into the history of the revolt, the show became less inventive and more a tragedy, which is tonally quite different. The first season stands apart for these and other reasons, though they were all solidly made.

With it’s intense sexuality, gory violence, and overheated melodrama, Spartacus: Blood and Sand is an almost pure pulp entertainment, and that puts it squarely in the wheelhouse of Sword & Sorcery. Adventure writers have spilled oceans of ink over the Roman Empire, and the gladiatorial arena still exercises an enduring fascination even today. Hell, the movies made Conan a gladiator when he never was in Howard’s stories, just because gladiators are so cool. With maybe an undead wizard as the villain instead of a Roman consul, this would be right on target.

The Serpent in Shadow

Malika, Queen of Meru, lay coiled on the heaped cushions of her bedchamber, and she waited for night to fall. Curtains screened away the light of the fading day, and she was glad of it. She had been born a woman, but now she was something other, half-changed in her shape, and her blackened eyes no longer loved the light of the sun. It was Utuzan who had unmade her when she tried to defy him. He had stayed his hand from killing, and instead he had twisted her mortal form into the travesty she now wore.

From her waist upwards she was as a woman, save with skin as pale as frost. Below she was a tremendous serpent, pearl-scaled and strong as iron. Utuzan, the Black Flame, had transformed her when she turned upon him, and now she bided her time. She awaited the night, she awaited the moment, and she believed it had come.

Lanterns always burned in her darkened chambers, day and night. She watched as the last light of day blazed down beyond her walls, sun setting in fire over the endless desert, and then the chill of night came creeping in on silent feet. She heard insects sing in her garden outside, frogs calling out in the waters of the pool, and she waited, for she knew her lover would soon arise.

Gladiator

Gladiator was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle movies where a bunch of shit that shouldn’t have worked came together and transformed the whole landscape of film in ways which are still evident today, two decades later. Director Ridley Scott had a good reputation, as the auteur behind movies like Alien and Blade Runner, but he hadn’t really had a hit in a long time, mostly turning out forgotten movies like Someone to Watch Over Me and Black Rain. Russell Crowe was clearly on his way up, after his breakout role in 1997’s LA Confidential, but would audiences buy him in a period piece like this one?

Further than that, it has to be remembered that the so-called “Sword & Sandal” genre had been out of fashion for literal decades by the year 2000. The big upswell of movies about ancient Greece and Rome had seen its heyday in the early 60s, and there had been almost nothing but TV movies and Masterpiece Theatre since then. As Crowe himself pointed out, for a very long time in Hollywood, if you were on-set in a toga, it meant you were doing a comedy. Nobody had attempted to approach historical drama about Rome with any kind of seriousness since the days of Spartacus and Cleopatra. It was an Old-Hollywood genre and nobody had seriously tried to revive it.

The film didn’t even begin with a completed script. There had been a treatment about the death of Emperor Commodus, who was drowned in his bath by his slave Narcissus (Crowe’s character was even called Narcissus in early drafts) but that was quickly expanded into what became a big, action-oriented movie filled with intrigue, treachery, and what were, at the time, almost unprecedented levels of violence.

Because a big change that Gladiator brought to Hollywood movies that can be seen even to this day was the elevation of action choreography as it pertained to swordfights and other close-up forms of combat. Fight scenes and stunts in the old Sword & Sandal films had been pretty primitive, and the blood in them kept to a low level so as not to offend censors of the day. With modern standards and modern effects, Scott was able to bring the fight scenes to a whole new level. The violence was visceral, bloody, and exciting in a way no one had ever seen before – not in depicting combat in the ancient world. The arena sequences in particular were absolutely electrifying, conveying what it must have been like to see such spectacles in the real Colosseum.

The effect on future movies was profound, as not only did Gladiator touch off a series of historical epics focused on Greece and Rome – Troy, 300, Alexander, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, and Rome among others – it also set a standard for action and excitement that other works had to deal with. You couldn’t just crap out something about the ancient world and call it a day, you had to at least try to stand up to Gladiator’s level of choreography and gore. Scott didn’t just make the Sword & Sandal epic viable again, he made it respectable. Gladiator didn’t feel cheap or silly, it took its subject matter deeply seriously, with a first-rate cast and what may be Hans Zimmer’s finest hour as a composer, creating a score that has been almost as influential as the movie itself.

And the history of Sword & Sorcery fiction is steeped in the ancient world, as it was a major area of fascination for writers from Howard to Mundy. Howard’s tales of the Picts only work with the backdrop of the Roman Empire to push against, and the opening battle in Gladiator is like something right out of one of his stories. Despite the brutality of battle, Scott does not shy from showing the exaltation of war, or the excitement in spite of the horror. The arena scenes range from ugly to grandiose, and yet they are never less than edge-of-your-seat thrilling.

Ancient Rome during the Empire is definitely a morally compromised world, and we see various characters struggling with that through the course of the film, trying to find a way to be moral in an amoral society that has become decadent and dangerous. Commodus stands as the avatar of that moral decay, and as such the symbolism becomes far too rich for Sword & Sorcery, even if the overarching theme of revenge is one that fits right in.

Gladiator is definitely not a Sword & Sorcery film, but it had a huge impact on action cinema in general, and infused a tremendous amount of blood and violence into the mainstream of Hollywood blockbusters. It affirmed that R-rated films could make money in an era of bland PG-13 fare, and it brought back a fascination with the Classical World that served as a major wellspring of inspiration for S&S authors old and new.

Brother to Lions

The sun set in a blaze of fire across the hills of Kadesh, illuminating the grasslands below in patterns of light and shadow as the burning clouds drifted across the silvering sky. The light fell on the ancient city of Hatara, turning the stone walls to gold and touching the tips of the high towers with points of fiery light, like the points of spears. Eagles circled overhead in the deepening dusk, and drums pounded to drive away the breath of evil, for a king lay dying.

Arnuzana, the War-lord, the Thunder-breaker, lay in his chambers awash in the dying sun, and all knew he would not see it rise again. The wind from the far seas was cool, and it fluttered the curtains and the horsetails that hung from the pillars of the great bed. Age had sunken the flesh on his lean face, leaving behind his narrow mouth and hawk nose like monuments. His eyes were wide-set and dark, almost slitted from many years of squinting through wind and dust. He was a warrior-king, or he had been. Now time and infirmity robbed him of his strength in his last hours.

Servants and slaves clustered in the shadows of the room, but it was only to his three sons that he spoke, his voice ragged and dry as the wastelands of his desert home, far away to the east and the north. He did not speak the complicated, whispering speech of Ashem, but the jagged words of his native tongue.

The Scorpion King

I remember being excited for this movie after I saw the initial trailer, and then when I actually saw it I was disappointed – once again – by a movie that was obviously aimed at something very different than what I wanted it to be. The character of the Scorpion King was introduced in The Mummy Returns as the final end boss of the movie, and was the first movie role for the now ubiquitous Dwayne Johnson, who back then was always just called “The Rock”, as his major fanbase was from pro wrestling. Producers liked his turn as the character so much that they immediately greenlit a film all about him, which would then become Johnson’s first leading role.

The historical “King Scorpion” is a figure about which we do not know very much. He lived sometime between 3000 BCE and 3200 BCE and he may – or may not – have been the initial unifier and founder of the Egyptian First Dynasty. This actually makes him a great focus for a quasi-historical adventure, because there is nothing in the record that can prove you wrong, pretty much no matter what you decide to say about him or what he did.

In the movie, however, we immediately abandon all historical pretense by making the titular character a guy named “Mathyus” who is supposed to be an Akkadian. Now, Akkad was a real place, but as an empire it flourished about a thousand years before the time of the Scorpion King, and “Mathyus” is just a variant of “Matthew”, which is a Hebrew name, and not Akkadian at all. We also quickly notice that no effort is being made to give this any kind of fantasy feel. Everyone speaks in their bland SoCal accents and the script’s dialogue is extremely modern-sounding, with lots of words and turns of phrase that are extremely contemporary, and thus spoil any chance of us taking this world seriously.

The look of the movie is actually pretty good, as they obviously spent some money on it. ($60 million in 2002, about $90 million in today’s money.) The sets are lavish, the cinematography is solid, and the costumes in particular look fucking awesome. I like that while the ladies in the film, especially Kelly Hu, are decked out in sexy outfits worthy of Frazetta, there is also an awareness that the ladies in the audience are here to see Johnson get his shirt off, and so he does that frequently.

The CG effects look. . . well, they look bad, but it was 2002, so you can’t really blame them for that. Everybody’s CG looked bad back then. What is disappointing is the fight choreography, which is not terrible, but just kind of adequate, without any memorable moments where you stop and go “whoa”. Good lighting does a lot to make the film look more dramatic, with a lot of flame-lit oranges to give the scenes a primal look. Director Chuck Russel does a competent job, though I am thinking this maybe caused a slowdown in his career, as he wouldn’t direct anything else for 8 years, and then it was TV.

The real star – as was intended – is Johnson, who successfully transitioned his wrestling persona into a broader appeal. He doesn’t have a great script to work with, but he carries this off for the same reasons he always has: his great physicality, his undeniable, easy charm, and the fact that he is just a good-looking guy and knows what makes him look good. The movie was obviously intended for a broader audience, and is a very PG-13 film of the period, with minimal blood, no nudity, and just not much grit in the proceedings despite all the action. It wallows in cliches like goofy thief sidekicks and adorable kids who have to be rescued, and the villain, Memnon, is a disappointingly bland character, without any real flavor to him.

The real failings of this movie are not in the execution, really, but in the tone and intent. Much like Conan the Destroyer and Kull, the movie is aimed at a wide audience, so all the violence and sex are toned down, and a lot of broad, slapstick humor and modern-sounding dialogue is slapped on it to try and make for a big family blockbuster. What this actually does is make it seem like a big-budget TV movie, and The Scorpion King only barely passes the Xena test – as in, “does this look better than any random episode of Xena?” – mostly by virtue of better lighting and costume design. The bones of a good idea are here, and a more serious approach and a commitment to making it a pulp movie with a lot of blood and carnality might have produced something much more memorable and worth being proud of.

The Black Queen

Queen Arsinue’s slaves came to wake her in the dark, and she squinted into the light of the tall candles and wondered for a single moment if this were the stroke of an assassin, but death did not come and she looked up into the faces of her maids and then sat up, running her hand over her face. It was night outside, the moon coming weakly through the curtains, and she smelled the salt of the sea and the muddy tang of the river.

“Who summons me so late?” she said. She knew only her brother could give the command to wake her, and that made her angry. Menkha was a fool and often disturbed her studies with his foolish worries or silly questions, for all that he was the elder.

“Your forgiveness, my great lady of the Most Ancient Kingdom, but the lord, King Menkha, summons you to the throne hall, for there are warships offshore.” Her body slave bowed her head, looking fearful, and now Arsinue saw the guards waiting in the shadows of the entryway, and she knew this was, in truth, a serious moment. Warships. Who could it be but the Varonans? Warships from Varon could not mean anything good.

She waved the guards out and slipped naked from her bed. Her slaves converged, lighting lamps, and they drew her braided hair back and knotted it into a coil that cascaded down her back. They dressed her in silks and weighted her arms and neck and ankles with jewels. She stepped into her sandals and they laced them for her. It was not a moment to pause and paint her face, but she permitted a dusting of gold over her dark skin and a smear of it on her eyelids.

The palace was quiet in the night, with only a few lights flickering here and there as slaves moved in the hallways and through the courtyards. Arsinue saw the flicker of the moon on the waters of the Nahar, so wide and slow here beside the sea. The city of Qahir stood on a rocky jut of land that thrust out into the water like a finger. In the flood seasons it was cut off from the land altogether and could only be reached by boat. Usually that was a comfort, for the invading Hatta from Kadesh were horsemen, not sailors, but the Varonans were another matter.