They Didn't Have Flattops In Ancient Rome!

I've never seen a movie about ancient Rome that didn't suck (except for Centurion, which was passable, I guess). Some of these celluloid atrocities are marginally accurate, but most of them get everything wrong and the big budget Hollywood productions are the worst, especially the old "classics" which are incredibly cheesy. The modern movies usually do a better job with the costumes and sets -- usually -- but their scripts are laughable and they almost always mangle the actual history, something I've never been able to understand because the real history is always a thousand times more entertaining than the Hollywood version.

Take the "classic" Spartacus with Kirk Douglas, for instance. The movie's loosely based on real events, but it's a typical overblown Hollywood extravaganza with melodramatic dialog, stereotypically sadistic Romans and a truly moronic ending where Spartacus' wife shows him their baby while he's hanging from a cross. (Never mind the fact that he was actually killed in battle and his body was never found; this scene's so insipid that it makes me laugh just watching it again). The real story would make a fantastic movie if someone would take the time to research the period and actual events.

Spartacus may be world-class schlock, but it looks like a work of careful scholarship next to Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. This movie is so ridiculous, its suck-factor so extreme, that it's almost impossible to describe. Cleopatra's grand entrance into Rome is so comically overblown that it has to be seen to be believed. The Hollywood of the period seemed to think that the ancient world was a gigantic Cecil B. DeMille spectacular and things haven't improved much since.

The massive amount of sensationalistic gibberish and misinformation these movies squirt into the soft, quivering brains of their audiences is truly mind-boggling. Just to list a few minor examples, how many people think that the Romans used slaves to row their galleys because they saw it in Ben Hur or that the Egyptians used slaves to build the pyramids because they saw it in 10,000 BC, a movie so bad that its entire cast and crew should be scourged and crucified?

As for Gladiator with Russell Crowe, the less said the better. I liked it when it first came out, but I find it unwatchable now, partly because of its inane Shakespearean dialog which is supposed to make everything sound "classical" and partly because of its mega-extreme level of historical inaccuracy, but mostly because it has one of the most ludicrous endings I've ever seen in a movie, and I've seen a lot of crap movies. Read my review of Gladiator for more details.

Quo Vadis is another mind-blowing suckfest, but it's been decades since I watched it and I think I was drunk at the time, so I can't remember much about it except the loud slurping sound that came out of my TV while I lounged around chain-smoking and guzzling cheap beer. I do remember the scene where Nero feeds the Christians to the lions, however. It has to be one of my favorite bits of crap cinema.

I could go on about more of these big-screen atrocities, but why bother? I'm not even going to get into all the idiotic low-budget gladiator movies the Hollywood machine has spewed out over the decades like projectile vomit. HBO's great series Rome may have played fast and loose with the history (out of necessity), but the writers made some effort to get the details right, so why can't Hollywood do the same thing? As Ralphie said in The Sopranos, "They didn't have flattops in ancient Rome!!!"