“At my signal, unleash hell.” For those of us that were alive back in the year 2000 and avid movie fans, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator was an event. While historical dramas aren’t especially rare nowadays, back then, they were relatively rare. Sure, there was the occasional Braveheart or Rob Roy, but they weren’t considered a bankable genre. Yet, that all changed when director Ridley Scott, whose career was at a low ebb following the failure of almost every movie he made in the 90s (1492: Conquest of Paradise, White Squall, G.I. Jane) decided to revive the so-called “sword and sandal” genre with a gritty, lavish redux of the historical epic.
In the fifties and sixties, these types of movies were commonplace, although in movies like The Robe or Ben-Hur, they usually told biblical tales. That changed a little with Spartacus, El Cid, and The Fall of the Roman Empire, but before long the genre was considered a mainstay of Italian “pablum” pics and somewhat trashy. For Ridley Scott, this was a challenge as a modern Roman epic hadn’t been done in a long time. One of the reasons was that studios couldn’t afford the amount of sets and extras needed for a film like this, but cutting-edge CGI suddenly made the creation of sets and animated extras affordable and convincing, so Scott was able to make an epic for a budget that wouldn’t wreck a studio were it to go awry (such as what happened to Carolco with Cutthroat Island).
In the lead, he cast a rising star named Russell Crowe, who was respected following his acclaimed turn in L.A. Confidential and an Oscar-nominated role in Michael Mann’s The Insider. Yet, he was never considered an action hero, but the film’s massive success turned him into an icon overnight. This week sees the release of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, which aims to make Paul Mescal the next iconic big-screen hero and is already earning excellent reviews (read ours here). But, how does the original fare after nearly a quarter of a century? Check out our video retrospective above and find out!