i call dem period pieces usually

Added Alien as recommended first watch.

That's the issue I have with Scott. His disregard for history seems perplexing because of his attention to detail in some areas and also because many of his choices don't make the film more enjoyable in terms of narrative or action set-pieces.

If he wants to pretend that he creates history then I wish he would fuck off and write non-magical fantasy films. His retarded choices would then be less offensive and pointless.

I think a "Dear Ridley Scott Please Only Make Films About The Future" petition is necessary.

I swear you're the kinda person who would call Wizard of Oz a travesty because of "scientific inaccuracies" like why The Witch never melted before from the moisture in the air.

Anyone who actually thinks Gladiator was even supposed to be historically accurate is a goddamn idiot, it's an action drama, not a historical piece, the historical setting is just a back drop for the story. Seriously, everyone is speaking in english accents ffs.

Probably the most retarded reason to write off a whole movie in like ever.

why? fiction and realism have no correlation. why can't he create a fictional narrative while staying true to certain realistic elements of the time? (im not sure which details you are talking about specifically though.) do you have the same problem with Amadeus?




i dont know how to counter-argue without specifics. what choices? many of the choices that were made in terms of story/plot did make the film more enjoyable (at least in my opinion).

and once again, i dont see why its offensive and pointless to create a fictional narrative in a historical period. he'd be far from the only person to do this, and many have been extremely successful. Macbeth for example has all the same issues in terms of blurring the facts. stories like this aren't meant to be history itself, but are used to capture certain themes (in this case: death/killing as mass entertainment, personal desire vs political/social responsibility, etc) as well as providing a sense of the "epic" (same reason Shakespeare wrote about the fall of kings).

Gladiator's problems are found elsewhere in my opinion. a fairly cliche, even if excellent cast/acted (as if it was that easy to create a three-dimensional character that we could simply slap on a vague jealousy motivation and hope it carries us through the whole story), antagonist; a pointless romantic hinted-backstory (although in some ways it did help ground his struggle to have an emotional attachment to somebody that he could actually have dialogue with, as his only emotional attachment otherwise is to a memory of his family).

but whatever the problems are with the narrative, i dont see how it has anything to do with historical accuracy.

haha... another good thing about Gladiator vs Robin Hood. at least in Gladiator, Russell Crowe's accent is consistent.

I think Forgie just gets offended whenever people create a fictional story in a historical setting. If it's gonna be considered a "historical" film it should only portray actual historic events. Why he's leveling this criticism towards a film that wasn't even attempting to be such a thing is beyond me.

Is Gladiator revisionist history? You bet your fucking ass. It's fiction, part of that means you CAN just make shit up. Is it a "historical" film? No.

No one with an IQ over 25 considers the film an actual attempt to make an accurate account of real historical events, it's completely besides the point and seriously makes as much sense as bitching about the lack of scientific probability in Warner Brothers cartoons.

People get emmersed in films like this and Braveheart because of the story and action, NOT because of it's historical accuracy. I'm not saying they should avoid getting as many things right as they can, but if things have to be compromised for the sake of a compelling story than so be it. Because people shouldn't bother expecting history lessions from a work of fiction.

You might as well consider all of Kurosawa's films set in Edo period Japan to be complete failures if this is the kinda logic you're gonna use.

i love you boobs, but...

for the record FS, please keep boo boo and my arguments separate even though we agree on certain things.

Because he's shit at it. When I'm engrossed in a film only to be wrenched out of that believing by retarded, implausible Hollywood cliches I get pissed off. It's not that I'm averse to historical fiction. I'm a pretty big fan of Bernard Cornwell, who's hardly the most high-brow of writers in that genre. Compared to Ridley Scott, though, he's frigging Tolstoy.

Take Robin Hood for example, I was starting to get into it when he goes and pulls one of the most shockingly contrived, bullshit twists I have ever seen. "Herp! I knew your father and he was a revolutionary who wrote the Magna Carta. Derp!" That is one egregious sin amongst many in that film and others.

What irks me especially is that events and characters develop into these ridiculous cliches only in films his films that are set before the 20th Century, as if the history of earth is really the work of a third-rate Tolkien knock-off. What is it about Ancient or Medieval times that bring this out in Scott? He's perfectly capable directing realistic characters and storylines in films set far far in the future...in space. He's perfectly capable of making the history of a few decades ago come alive without plagiarising Terry Brooks. Does he seriously believe that the fiction of such periods are true reflections of how people acted? Clearly not because he gets the backdrops to these films so right.

There's nothing wrong with historical fiction...if you do it well. What is the point of spending so much time getting the general feel of a particular historical period, only to waste it on cheesy storylines and, when you get called on your bullshit, claim that you decide what's history or not. This is my main problem with Scott. He's very capable of making a relatively historically accurate film, he just wilfully chooses not to. He doesn't - Gladiator excepted - make good historical fiction. I don't think, based on his other films, that he's incapable.



Wizard of Oz is fantasy. I'm a massive fan of fantasy if the world created is somewhat believable on it own terms. I don't the Wizard of Oz, not because The Witch melts when she's exposed to water, but because it's pretty crap.



Then why set it in Ancient Rome? This is what I don't understand. The whole point of historical fiction is to portray past socities, events and real life people. Ridley Scott has shown that he can do the first, but I've seen little or no evidence of the others. There are two options he can go for, either of which would make me happy as a clam.

1) He could stick pretty close to a period of history, bringing to life not only the social and geographical landscape of that period but also the people who actually lived during that time, treating them as the real human beings they were. This does not preclude the inclusion of fictional characters, but their place in the storyline should be realistic and believable. I understand films need to leave our or change certain aspects of history when creating a film, but this does not mean you should cobble together the events from several periods of history, whack in afictional, all conquering hero who's a driving force behind the progression of this hodge-podge of events and still claim its set in a period of the world's history.

2) If he won't do that, and his contempt for history suggests he lacks any inclination, then he can set his pick n' mix of historical events and his fictional badasses and put them somewhere made up, with no direct reference to the history that inspired him. This is perfectly doable. GRR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series is clearly heavily influenced by the Wars of the Roses. R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing is heavily influenced by the Crusades. Both are excellent sets of books. If you want to take massive creative license, don't be a lazy pussy, do what these guys did. Of course setting his films in a fictional world doesn't give him license to do anything he wants. It still has to be believable.



I'm actually pretty fond of Gladiator, though I'm not sure how I would react to it if I watched it now.

I actually agree with this.



You have no soul. But you're british so I expected that.



Because the film is about a guy who becomes a gladiator? The setting makes perfect sense then.



Meh. One way I've always dealed with movies like this that rewrite history is imagine that they're in an alternate timeline, as that's essentially what it is anyway.

I just prefer you judge a movie based on the merits of the story and characters themselves and not based on things that are only relevant to you as a history buff and not relevant to the story itself.

You actually do make a good point, making Gladiator a fantasy would have been a good idea, but nonetheless I still think it's a very good movie. It's an old fashioned story but I like how it's excecuted and the action and visuals are mesmerizing. That's really what this movie was meant to be, a throwback to old hollywood popcorn but with Ridley's visual flaire, I don't hold it against movies for not trying to be high art, I merely judge them by how successful they are at being what they were meant to be. I still have to decide weither or not I like it of course.

I admit I really know fuck all about roman history. I am a amatuer fiction writer, one of my story concepts was originally set in the 1930s, but realising I couldn't get every detail of this time period correctly I decided to change it into an alternate timeline, and since then it evolved into a more steam punk type of deal.

Alternate history is such a great literary device, I have no fucking idea why more people don't use it.

Why does he have to set it in a recognisable period of Roman history and have the fictional protagonist interact with real, historical figures. If he really wanted to make a film about a Gladiator it would be easy to do without taking a steaming dump all over history.



I'm not a huge fan of alternate history, and when I do like it tends to those works of fiction which ask questions of history i.e. what would have been the result if X had happened rather than Y, as opposed to simply changing the actors and events. The latter is offensive on two levels. It suggests that the creators of such fiction can't be bothered to use their imaginations to come up with their own story and that they don't have sufficient knowledge of or respect for events of the past, themselves as gripping as any fictional novel or film.



I think I am judging these films based on their merits. It's because they're bad that I'm offended that they purport to represent a time in the world's history, not the other way around. If the storylines and characters were believable I might mention the historical inaccuracies, but I would consider doing so little more than an academic tangent.

I enjoyed Gladiator, inspite of its myriad of faults. Robin Hood could have been pretty damn good if it weren't for the events in last hour and the poorly written antagonists. Ridley Scott could make good historical films but chooses not to, seemingly to spite historians for some unknown reason.



I would have little problem if Ridley Scott simply did this, but he gets halfway toward making a decent historical film and then makes it veer off wildly into the realms of the aforementioned oldschool sword and sandal epics of the 50s and 60s. If it were completely over the top throughout I'd probably regard it as camp fun, but there's clearly an attempt at seriousness there to which I can only respond with serious analysis. It's for this reason I'm more critical of Scott's historical films than their swashbuckling predecessors. I'll judge Gladiator more harshly than something like Ben-Hur, Kingdom of Heaven more harshly than The Crusades and Robin Hood more harshly than Prince of Thieves.

Pissing off history buffs like you is a lot of fun?



This is a strong enough point I won't argue with. Still, films set in these periods still deserve some credit for getting people interested in history in the first place. In hindsight that's actually a good reason to get as many things right as possible.

I love alternate timeline fiction for the reasons you stated, laying out things as they could have happened if so and so events did or didn't take place.

In the case of Gladiator it was more about taking a familiar era and slapping a story on it without doing all the research that could have tied it all perfectly together, I admit it's lazy and I consider it a major flaw in the movie.



I liked Black Hawk Down, even though your criticisms apply there also especially in it's depiction of the Somalis, people will understandably take those inaccuracies more personally as it's based on a more recent event in history.

I really do wish Ridley would return to science fiction films like Alien and Blade Runner or fantasy films like the very underrated Legend. I dunno why he hasn't taken the hint that historical fact constantly gets in the way of telling stories the way he wants to tell them, and if he stuck to sci fi and fantasy he wouldn't have to worry about that shit.

Scott is a super talented director and yet he has a fustratingly inconsistant filmography and he often makes the same mistakes over and over.



I was never too enthusiastic about Robin Hood, it's like he simply took one of the most iconic heroes of folklore and turned him into yet another "rugged tough guy" type you see in every action movie now. Russell Crowe is a good actor, but Scott has latched onto him too often.

I agree with pretty much everything you've said.



Black Hawk Down is another one that I quite enjoy. Despite his treatment of Somalis - excellently satired in this Monkey Dust clip - he portrays modern warfare incredibly well. From this standpoint it's one of the best war films I've seen.

Scott is also pretty good at present-day escapist stuff. Thelma & Louise and Matchstick Men can't compare to his future/fantasy stuff, but they certainly shit all over any of the historical films I've seen from him.