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.