Spartacus is an innovative and brilliant movie worthy of praise.
Spartacus shows us the intrigue and
angles of both the Roman senate and the revolting slaves. It shows us the characterization of the
slaves as they built unity and brotherhood.
We also get the unique and opposite angle of the feuding Roman leaders.
Spartacus is grand with its spectacle. In Spartacus
we experience great battles and great scenes.
Thanks to the work of the renowned director Stanley Kubrick and others
who were involved we have fantastic scenes full of great sights and hidden
meanings. From the quiet but intense
relationship between Spartacus and Varinia to the battle at the end of the
movie, few scenes are lackluster in their grandeur. Much of this can be attributed to the
scenography.
Spartacus has an ending that was unique
for its time, and even today. In the
ending of Spartacus the slaves led by
Spartacus, a slave provoked to revolt, fail and are defeated by the Romans. Though the main character’s love interest
manages to escape, the slaves and Spartacus himself are crucified along the
road leading to Rome. This was uncommon
in 1960 and among the 50s toga movies.
Most movies would create a happy ending.
Ben-Hur (1953) and Quo Vadis both end with some of the main
characters alive and well, looking hopefully into their futures. Spartacus
instead tells us that the heroes have failed and they were always doomed.
However,
some would say Spartacus has not aged
well and its missing scenes hurt the movie.
Many of the dresses and hairstyles look ridiculous. With modern knowledge of Rome we see the
great inaccuracies of the movie. Many
scenes were lost between the original and remaster, and this confuses the plot.
Spartacus
may not be without a few problems, but it is deserving of its praise.
It is good that you are bringing up both sides of the debate, by bring in some of the weaknesses in Spartacus. You may want to then disprove some of these weaknesses in order to make your claim that Spartacus is a brilliant movie more persuasive.
ReplyDeleteYou are both right and wrong about the spectacle in "Spartacus". There's actually only ONE SINGLE battle we get to see, and that's the one the slaves lost. Script writer Dalton Trumbo was very unhappy about this because it seemed to conceal the fact that these slaves, because they were driven by the thirst for freedom and high ideals, actually posed a serious threat to the Roman Empire for quite a long time, for almost two years. For this reason, Trumbo called the movie the "Little Spartacus". He wanted a "Big Spartacus, but more battles were too expensive to shot, and so all he could get was a compromise, the montage of victorious entries into Italian towns, including Metapontum, that were shot after everything else had already been done.
ReplyDeleteStill, you are right that the movie does offer a lot of visual spectacle, and I hope you will explain in more detail what is great, for example, about the scenes that show the gladiators training, the two gladiator duels that cause the slaves' uprising, the grand landscape shots of the slave army on the move or the Libyan quarry at the movie's beginning, and, of course, the decisive battle.
What you say about the movie's weaknesses is mostly justified as well:
The forest set where the love scene between Spartacus and Varinia was shot does look almost painfully artificial,
The movie must also have been marred by a number of noticeable discontinuities before it was restored to the version we saw. For example, how is anyone supposed to understand Tony Curtis' role (the singer & magician Antoninus) without the "Oysters and Snails" scene? Before the restoration, we would see him first when Crassus inspects his most recently bought slaves in his palace, and then the very next scene would show Antoninus among a bunch of fugitive slaves trying to join Spartacus' army. We would have no idea what made him run away, and we couldn't compare Spartacus' ability to inspire love and devotion with Crassus' complete failure to do so. I just don't know whether this can actually be listed as a flaw of the movie when this flaw clearly was not caused by the director and has been fixed in the restored version we saw.
I think some of Kubrick's beloved gross-out cuts (cut off hands, etc.) were also restored to the movie, but I don't know if anyone would seriously miss them if they were still missing from the battle sequence.
Finally, I can't comment on the ridiculousness of "many of the dresses and hair styles" without knowing which ones you are referring to in particular.