Review: Gladiator
"When a Roman general is betrayed and his family murdered by a corrupt prince, he comes to Rome as a gladiator to seek revenge."Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielson, Oliver Reed.
Rating: 6 / 10
I am having trouble writing this review. In fact I even had trouble deciding how many stars to give it.
Gladiator is a movie that follows the same formula as just about every other hollywood action/drama. It uses the same "feel" as Saving Private Ryan, with desturated colour and splattering blood. The sound effects aren't great, and the mixing of them is certainly no better. The music is .. instructional, at best, and the hero is a such a good man that the fact that he kills more people than anybody else in the film by a magnitude of at least ten is something you come to respect about him.
Yet despite all this mundaneness, the movie works. Mind you, it works a lot better on a big screen, with a big sound system.
The story does not have enough detail to enthrall you past the second or third viewing of the film, but it is quite certainly an involving film at first, due to the slight overuse of emotional cues, which consist largely of LSD-inspired floating and dreaming, and the music, which has no restraint when it comes to letting you know which bits are sad, which happy, and which exciting.
The fight scenes are also very impressive the first time, but do have a fairly rehearsed quality about them, something which is perhaps slightly betrayed in the scene in which Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) is seen rehearsing a battle against 8 or 9 soldiers.
Russell Crowe does quite a good job of bringing his character to life, given that it requires a lot of facial expressions and a little snot. I may be wrong about this, but his character seems to have a lot less dialogue than the other main characters, which leaves the job of explaining his prowess to the fight scenes and the revelations of others.
There is some pretty awful editing, some very bad sound mixing (as I mentioned earlier), and even the traditional inappropriate use of slow motion a couple of times.
As I said, isolating any part of this movie results in that part's seeming very ordinary, but once it all comes together it works, and not too shabbily.
If you didn't see it at the cinema, it probably isn't worth the effort on video/DVD, unless you have a fair bit of home theatre, and even better a big screen.
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