Ancient World Review

Movie Review: The True Story Of Alexander The Great from the History Channel

The story of Alexander the Great is one of the most exotic adventures to come down from the ancient world, mostly because of its sheer scale and the larger than life, quasi-mythical personality of Alexander himself.

Alexander's conquest of Asia took him across the Hellespont, past the ruins of Troy through western Asia into Egypt and then on to Babylon and the Hindu Kush. He fought through the Punjab to the outer ocean, traveling on foot and by ship--a fantastic journey into the unknown.

Alexander's army fought Indian war elephants, massive Persian armies and laid siege to the fortified island of Tyre, building a mole across a half-mile of water in the face of fire ships and relentless attacks. His forces marched through almost every kind of climate--deserts, jungles, mountains--creating the largest empire ever seen, an empire that quickly disintegrated when Alexander died at thirty-two, the victim of war wounds and disease (or he was murdered--take your pick).

Movie Review: Gladiator

Gladiator tells the story of a Roman general with an Australian accent who becomes a Hollywood gladiator and saves the Republic in one of the most idiotic conclusions since the third act of Starship Troopers III. The movie won a bunch of Oscars and everybody seems to think it's the greatest film ever made, but if you ask me, its big-deal stars and special effects can't save it from its brain-dead conclusion. Gladiator's a good movie--sort of--but the ending is pure crap and that tends to crapify the whole thing. It's entertaining crap, however. I'll give it that much.

Decisive Battles Of The Ancient World

Might makes right, but might and brains don't always go together and "fortune rules all things; she raises to eminence or buries in oblivion from caprice rather than principle." (Sallust)

If you don't believe that, you should check out Decisive Battles of the Ancient World from the History Channel. This fantastic documentary covers thirteen major battles ranging from Ramses II fighting the Hittites for control of Syria to the Spartans standing off the Persians at Thermopylae to the Gothic invasion of Rome and Boudicca's revolt in Britain. "Chance rules all," according to Virgil, but after watching Decisive Battles, I'd change that to "chance, hubris, ambition, greed and stupidity."

Movie Review: Kingdom of Heaven

I've got mixed feelings about Ridley Scott's Medieval epic Kingdom of Heaven. On the one hand, it's a great movie and I've probably watched it half a dozen times so far. On the other hand, it seems like just another Hollywood propaganda film loaded with the same old "progressive" drivel we've been hearing for decades now. In this case, the message is pretty simple: organized religion is bad; multiculturalism is good. Luckily, the movie's good enough to make it worth watching despite the propaganda.

Briefly, Kingdom of Heaven tells the story of Balian, a blacksmith in France who joins his crusader father in the Holy Land, seeking forgiveness for murdering a priest and redemption for his wife who committed suicide. Knighted by his dying father, Balian enters the service of Baldwin, the leper king of Jerusalem, and ends up defending the city from a siege by the Muslims under Saladin after Baldwin dies and the Templars start a war under the new king, the evil Guy of Lusignan.

Movie Review: Ice Age Columbus

According to the traditional and now obsolete history of the Western hemisphere, the Americas were originally populated by Asians who crossed the Bering Strait land bridge during the last Ice Age. These Paleo-Indians were the ancestors of today's "Native Americans" and Europeans didn't come onto the scene until Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492. That's the story, anyway.

Blood On The Deltoids: Conan The Barbarian

In the interests of improving my mind, I just watched Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer again, plus I've been reading the original Robert E. Howard stories, the later books by Robert Jordan, and the Dark Horse collections of the Savage Sword of Conan comics. This is all great stuff, even the second movie, which is generally panned as "campy" and too light for serious barbarian action. The Destroyer has its dopey moments, true--quite a few of them, in fact--but I've always been a sucker for stories about evil queens who try to bring ancient gods back to life so they can take over the world. Something always goes wrong, naturally, and they end up releasing monsters which turn on them and run amok. This same general plot was also used by Robert Jordan in his excellent novel "Conan the Triumphant," by the way. It never gets old.

Movie Review: 10,000 BC

10,000 BC wasn't all that bad. All right, yes it was, but I managed to sit through the whole thing, which is more than I can say for a lot of movies these days. It was entertaining in a mindless, drooling sort of way and the effects were good enough to keep me borderline conscious from start to finish. The geography in this thing was seriously confused, to say the least. The main characters, apparently northern European mammoth hunters, cross a mountain range which appears to be the Alps, emerging in sub-Saharan Africa, at which point they head back across the desert to find themselves in Egypt, where woolly mammoths are being used to build the pyramids. Now, I'm too lazy to actually look this up, but I was under the impression that there were no mammoths in Ancient Egypt and everybody knows that shape-shifting reptilian aliens actually built the pyramids, not that it really matters. I don't want to give away the plot, so I'll just say that it's basically the same as Apocalypto, a truly great movie, proving once again that no concept is immune to recycling by midgets. The grand finale of 10,000 BC is almost as stupid as the ending of the TV version of The Stand, one of the dumbest scenes ever filmed, but the body count was high enough to keep me amused for a couple of hours, so I'll give it a broken thumbs up. Is it worth watching? Hell, no, but if you're determined to stare blankly at something, dribbling all over yourself, it might as well be this.

Movie Review: The Last Legion

The Last Legion is loosely based on the King Arthur legends and the story of Romulus Augustus, the young boy who became the emperor of Rome only to be deposed by a Gothic invasion in 476. Romulus turned out to be the last Caesar and his reign is generally considered to mark the end of the Roman Empire in the West and the beginning of the so-called Middle Ages.

The real Romulus was just a kid. As emperor, he served as a proxy for his father Orestes, who made all the decisions. In The Last Legion, Romulus is 12-years-old and the Goths overthrow him the day after his coronation. The historical Romulus actually "ruled" for 10 months before he was deposed, but it doesn't really matter. The movie had to compress the time-frame for dramatic effect.