United States, 2000. Starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris, Derek Jacobi, Djimon Hounsou, David Schofield, John Shrapnel, Tomas Arana, Ralf Moeller, Spencer Treat Clark, David Hemmings, Tommy Flanagan, Sven-Ole Thorsen. Directed by Ridley Scott. Available on DVD from Amazon.)

I'm still tinkering with the format for these viewing journals, trying to determine which way best suits my needs, and I think what I'm deciding on is that I'm not really going to worry about a set format. Whatever works best on any particular day is how things will be. Sometimes that means just a series of separate reviews, and other days it will mean something where a couple films all get mixed I together - or some combination of those two, and whatever else pops up along the way. It is, after all, a journal and not a dissertation.

But enough of that uninteresting and largely unrelated stuff. We're here to watch some movies, right? So let's move on down, move on down, move on down the road to the next little pile of films coming to us through the miracle of the modern postal system.

As I said just a few days ago when talking about King of Kings, and as I've no doubt said several times before in some place or other, I love big historical epics. For that matter, I love little historical epics. And big and little films that might not necessarily be considered epics. A good epic - and mind you, despite the budget and cast of CGI thousands, there have been precious few good epics in the past twenty years - has more to it than just a lot of money and eye candy thrown up on screen to dazzle. There has to be a thread of intelligence weaving its way through the grand proceedings, something emotional and human and philosophical. If you slap a bunch of people fighting each other and blowing stuff up on screen and forget to add some element of humanity, of intellectual discourse, then you've done nothing but make a big, dumb movie. The best epics have famous action sequences - the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind, the chariot race in Ben Hur, the battles in the desert with the Turks from Lawrence of Arabia - but these action scenes are relatively few and far between and are remembered partly because they were so grand and sweeping in design, but also because surrounding them is a story worth remembering.

At the heart of any good epic, no matter how vast the scope of its setting, is often the story of one or two human beings. A romance, a crisis of faith, a quest for redemption - these small, human elements are what make the grand epics worth rewatching decades later. Because these movies make an effort to engage you emotionally, they carry more weight than their fluffier counterparts. This is not to say they need be oppressively talky and weighed down by their own sense of importance. No, a good, rousing epic must figure a way to balance itself between emotion and plot and breathtaking action. They must, in every traditional sense of the word, be romantic.

In our modern era of filmmaking, the trend has been toward bigger, louder action sequences and less and less characterization or thought. Thus we have the $200 million action blockbuster, but without any vestige of humanity these films are nothing more than a light confectionary, perhaps nice to look at for a hundred or so minutes but hardly warranting a second viewing in the future, and certainly they are not demanding of any manner of discussion beyond the very basics to match their simplistic approach to telling a story.

We are not without hope, however. In the first half of the new millennium, there seems to be renewed interest in the art of epic filmmaking. There have been many failures and many more still will come, but there have also been a satisfying number of successes, films that have managed to do more than parade a lot of money and technical wizardry across the screen, that have remembered that at the heart of every quality epic there must be just that: a heart. Peter Jackson's monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy is without a doubt the most obvious example. They are films that feature immense battle scenes and countless special effects, but they also never forget to take time out for a quiet scene of two main characters lying back in a field for a smoke. And the film's most memorable special effect - Gollum - is memorable only in part because he is realized with such a high degree of photo realism in so many scenes; he is memorable more because there is an engrossing human performance and conflict behind his façade.

And there have been others lately, and despite some missteps (Troy being the biggest and most disappointing) there seem to be a lot of potentially wonderful films on the horizon. We may not yet be matching the golden age of the epic that came during the 1960s, but all things considered and in light of how little most people seem to demand from their films, that we have anything at all worth celebrating is itself worth celebrating. The modern epics more or less got their start in 1995 with Mel Gibson's Braveheart, but the ball really got rolling in 2000 when visionary director Ridley Scott gave the world...

Although out of fashion for decades, Scott decided it was high time that someone dusted off all those old tunics and golden helmets and gave the world a gusto-filled ancient world epic again, and God bless 'im for it. Ancient world epics are probably my favorites, and I'll gleefully sit through even the most threadbare of old Italian productions so long as it has some guys in togas and armor throwing each other around. Gladiator, for all its visual flare and state-of-the-art special effects is, at its heart, nothing more than a rousing resurrection of the old sword and sandal actioners that thrilled audiences throughout the 1960s. In this sense and as a gladiator film, it does pretty much everything right. It gives you everything you demand from such a film and manages to make them seem fresh and reinvented without turning them into something unrecognizable or mocking.

Russell Crowe, looking the best he's ever looked and probably the best he ever will look, plays Maximus, legendary general of the Roman legions campaigning against the Germanic hordes in 108 AD. As befits a gladiator epic, he is betrayed by a deceitful man of power (in this case the dying emperor's son Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix), finds his family murdered, his home destroyed, and his freedom taken from him when he escapes death only to find himself a slave forced to participate in brutal gladiatorial games in the less developed reaches of the empire. He is the archetypal wronged hero who must lead the oppressed masses against men who have been corrupted by power, lust, and greed.

Crowe's performance is exactly what it should be. On the surface, his character is simple enough for anyone to understand and relate to, but inside he is a much more complexly drawn figure. A farmer by birth, he discovers a knack for becoming one of the greatest generals the Roman army has ever seen, a fearless fighter who, unlike some generals, leads his men into battle and risks death alongside them. But his dream is not of glory or fame. He simply wants to one day return to his wife and child and harvest his wheat. Crowe strikes the perfect balance between swaggering, sexy manliness and simple emotion and depth. Maximus is not a philosopher or a poet or a man prone to eloquent speeches and poetic waxing. But he is no dumb, violent slab of meat, either. He is an everyman who, as is often the case in epics, finds himself caught up in sweeping social upheaval and political machination.

His opposite number, the Emperor Commodus, is an equally complex character. Simple cartoon villains are easy, as are people who are evil simply for the sake of being evil. Joaquin Phoenix lends Commodus a tortured a soul, a powerful portrayal that is equal parts despicable and pitiable as we watch his most earnest of efforts rejected by his father until it drives Commodus to patricide and an illegitimate ascension to the throne. He is, at his core, desperate to be loved by someone, anyone, and his desperation has twisted him into a creature both monstrous and tragic.

The supporting cast rounds the film out wonderfully and is buoyed by three of the great legendary British actors - Richard Harris, David Hemmings, and Oliver Reed. Reed as the sympathetic slavemaster and gladiator owner Proximo gives one of the best and most moving performances of his career. Connie Nielson is wonderful as Lucilla, the sister of Commodus who is torn between loyalty to her brother, disgust for what she knows he has done, greed for the power that comes with her position, and love for the disgraced Maxiums. As with all the characters in the film, Gladiator takes a simple archetype and invests it with depth and emotion.

Historically, of course, this is a movie. If you want to learn about the actualities of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, and the path of the Roman empire, you really should be reading books. Gladiator is, after all, entertainment and not a documentary about the Roman Empire. True, Emperor Commodus wasn't slain in the gladiatorial arena by a disgraced general, thus opening the door to the reestablishment of the Roman Republic. But you know what? It makes for good cinema. At this point, anyone who goes into a big Hollywood epic and is disappointed by the fact that it plays fast and loose with history is probably the same person that is flabbergasted by the fact that there's a movie in which Hercules fights monsters from the moon. I'm a history buff myself, which is part of the reason I love these epics, but I would never be so foolish as to regard them as history themselves. That's what, as I said, books are for. They should, instead, be regarded as modern-day legends.

A hearty helping of credit should go to the terrific score by Hans Zimmer, easily one of the best movie composers in the business. His score, like the movie, strikes that perfect balance between thundering bombast and introspection. Parterning with former Dead Can Dance songstress Lisa Gerrard (with whom he also worked on the soundtrack for Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down), Zimmer conjures up the perfect gladiator score. An adventure film soundtrack this rousing has not been heard since the great scores for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Conan the Barbarian -- and funny enough, the theme song from Conan was used in the trailer for Gladiator.

Actionwise, the film is remarkable for taking very small scenes and making them seem vast. The opening battle between Maximus and his legions against the Germanic armies is as grand and giant as any battle scene in an epic, and a wonderful way to kick things off. But it is also the only large-scale action scene. Subsequent clashes are between no more than a few men in the Coliseum, and it is the combination of Ridley Scott's visual prowess and the script's emotional impact that make them huge. Although Ben Hur's chariot race remains, I believe, the greatest of all gladiator film action pieces (and simply one of the best scenes of any type, period), the fights in Gladiator are absolutely stunning. Gory, brutal, and bone crunching. Where as large-scale battle scenes wow you with their scope, the fights here are personal. You could call them small if they weren't so pumped full of macho energy and gusto. But never zeal, if you know what I mean. The violence is there, yes, as a spectacle, as it was thousands of years ago, but also as a way to illustrate the point that good men and great men are often forced to kill one another for the most trivial of matters. There is no doubt that Maximus feeds off the crowd, that their cheers give him a glimmer in the eye, but he is never enthralled by the violence. Early in his career as a gladiator, he reacts with disgust as the bloodlust of those around him even as he dispatches his foes with relentless precision. On the grand stage of Rome's Coliseum, the crowd is less an inspiration that it is a means to an end, a weapon for him to use against Commodus when all other weapons would fail. But never does he embrace the violence, and always does he dream simply of personal peace and a return to his simple life.

And once again, it's these emotional flourishes that make Gladiator such a rousing experience. It is what big moviemaking should be. There is plenty of grim machismo and sex appeal on parade, but it's not the sort of big dumb machismo one would get from, say, a generic action flick where everyone is just obnoxious and loud and blustering. It is manliness tempered with philosophy and compassion, honor and heart, as it should be. I know Oscar award-winning films are hardly our forte here, and that many of our readers are predisposed to dislike or avoid a film that garners such accolades. But Gladiator is the rare film that is worthy of its hype. Any fan of epics, of war films, of old sword and sandal movies, of good old-fashioned movie making, should give it a try. Personally, I love it. I love it for exactly what it is - a big, gigantic gladiator film. Nothing unexpected happens, and yeah, everything is predictable, but no more so than in any other film and especially in any other gladiator film. Did it deserve to win Best Picture of the year? Who really cares? The Oscars only have any real credibility these days when compared to, say, the MTV Movie Awards or The Grammies. I don't think a movie getting such an award is a reason to see it or not to see it. Gladiator appeals to me, though, and neither in spite of or because of the pomp and circumstance surrounding it. Is it the best picture of that year? One of the best of all time? Let me just say this: I really liked it. That's pretty much all that matters to me.

And speaking of manliness tempered with philosophy, the next film in our line up is another of my favorite big epics, and once again it stars Russell Crowe.

Labels: Historical Epics, Netflix Diary, Year: 2000