Gladiator Review

Scott revived a genre that had been dead for thirty years by treating Rome as a place with weather, mud and administrative tedium rather than a marble postcard. The opening battle in Germania is shot with desaturated, shutter-stuttered brutality that makes the arena sequences feel like entertainment built on the same violence, which is the film's actual argument. Russell Crowe plays Maximus with almost no dialogue in the first act and holds it anyway; he says more with a hand through wheat than the script's aphorisms manage.

Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus is the better piece of writing, a man whose cruelty is entirely a symptom of wanting to be loved, and the sibling subplot gives the palace scenes teeth. Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard's score has been imitated so relentlessly it is hard to hear freshly, and the Elysium cue still works anyway. The plot is a straight revenge line with a Senate subplot that never quite lands, and Oliver Reed's death mid-production forced some visible patching. None of that matters much: the film is a thrown spear, and it hits.