alt Hacker NewsCollections: Nitpicking Gladiator's Iconic Opening Battle, Part I
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As a filmmaker, Ridley Scott has the right to create whatever he believes will be more cinematic.
However, historians also have the right to point out differences. This is not nit-picking; it is the communication of actual historical science, which is as important as the film itself, if not more so.
Not everything is about making the most money. Sometimes, your legacy is about accurately recounting events based on the best available research.
The biggest nitpick for me is that it was filmed in Bourne Woods which was my local mountain biking haunt. Leaving aside me recognising singletrack all over the place, it took me a good twenty minutes of the film to understand that it was meant to be Germania and not Britain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_Wood#Location_for_filmi...
My favorite nitpick about “movie Romans,” is stirrups.
They didn’t have them, and thus, couldn’t really fight well, from horses.
Stirrups are one of those “silly little ideas” that changed the world.
I am led to believe Ridley Scott is over being told he isn't historically accurate. He knows. He also does care about some things, and doesn't like being nitpicked about others. He really cares about a visually beautiful, historically "acceptable" framing, colour matched and evoking a mood. "But the Germanic people didn't wear braes at this time and wolfskin wasn't worn with laminar armour" makes his temper show.
Bret Devereaux isn't wrong. He's also not in the film business.
Ridley Scott thinks "acceptable" means he may at least ask a historian to suggest things. He won't give Russel Crowe a raygun, he may misuse ballista freely and reinterpret gladiator school freely. They didn't die usually? Pshaw.
"nitpick" is the kind of pejorative he'd use I think. I don't think Devereaux is nit-picking, the battle scene and a shitload of other stuff is about as a-historical as you can get without Kirk Douglas and Ray Harryhausen.
"The Duellists" which is Scott's movie of a Joseph Conrad story is beautiful, "Barry Lyndon" (by Stanley Kubrick) levels of attention to detail. I have little doubt Historians of Napoleonic era rip it to shreds. Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine .. just wonderful.
The article talks about some costume goofs but imo the most egregious is after the battle when you see someone walking around in jeans
I wonder if he has covered the battle scene in Rome S01E01, though it's much shorter and has a lower budget.
Part II and III are out too.
I'm a big fan of Bret Deveraux and a long term subscriber, but this is mostly nit-picking.
The Roman armies didn't dress as uniformly as this? They did in contemporary depictions (Trajan's column) so this is only as much artistic license as real Roman artists would take, and for the same reason - it's more visually impressive.
A Roman army wouldn't have this mix of units, or at least, it would have them in different proportions? Well, this wasn't typical, but you fight with the army you have - maybe your light infantry took heavy losses in a previous battle but you were able to cobble together a load of extra archers.
The tactics weren't typically Roman - or maybe they were, but not in 180 AD, because that specific period happens to be well-documented? Mixing some patterns from different eras is again allowable artistic license, one of the things that makes this art rather than an exact reproduction of a specific battle. And also, a good general adapts to the conditions: he had more archers than typical, so needed a different battle plan.
Comparing the weaponry anachronisms to having tanks at the Battle of Gettysburg is unfair: the American Civil War lasted 5 years, while Roman campaigns in Western Europe (Gaul and Germania) lasted at least a few centuries. It's closer to having an ironclad show up at Fort Sumter and complaining that design wouldn't exist until a year later.
The title literally says it's nitpicking, so I'm fine with that. But the introduction oversells it a bit more: "such a deceptive historical mess", etc. Like I said, big fan, but I was expecting inconsistencies more on the scale of "they seem to have marched 30,000 troops 100 miles in two days to relieve Minas Tirith, with no sign of any logistics to supply them".
I would have preferred if the author reasoned through why a filmmaker might make these decisions and/or offer feasible solutions. "This is wrong" does not seem helpful to an audience. That proper roman battle looks an order of magnitude more expensive to shoot, Decimus Meridius Maximus doesn't flow off the tongue as well, and there are plenty of composition arguments to be made for why the fortifications and formations look like they do.