This movie isn’t completely terrible as some reviews say, especially Rolling Stone’s biting remarks. However it isn’t a 5-star movie in my opinion. Definitely not Braveheart or Fight Club caliber, those movies had originality. Gladiator wasn’t a bad idea, but used many cheap emotional scenes to try to sway the viewer.

Plot
The movie is about a General Maximus, who finds himself in trouble as his family is killed by the new emperor. He gets enslaved and becomes a gladiator where he lives for revenge, hoping one day to kill the emperor. That’s the simple gist of it, and some slight moments of romance, hatred, family issues are thrown in. It’s really too cliché, I’m sure we’ve all seen this happen to Braveheart; the whole, you kill my family prepare to die thing. Russell Crowe plays his part strongly, he never breaks his character or loses focus, and the film comes together wonderfully. But he doesn’t really say too much either, being more of a silent, tough guy. The plot is really dependent on the viewer. I actually liked the ending quite a bit, and I would say it redeemed the movie’s otherwise boring attempts at political intrigue in between the battles. You may like or not like this movie, it sort of depends on how many movies like this you’ve seen and so on.

Soundtrack
Han Zimmer’s stuff doesn’t get any better than this. Gladiator is moving, thrilling music, and most of all, IT’S ORIGINAL. Unlike Titanic, which sounds unusually sounds like Braveheart, Gladiator has its own original music. Not to say that Titanic wasn’t good, but it sure didn’t sound unique, Horner just grabbed a similar music theme from Braveheart and reworked it. Zimmer doesn’t do that quite as much. Crimson Tide, the Rock, are all great movies with music by him. In Gladiator, he uses very traditional eastern tunes during Maximus’ time as a slave, lively battle music, and then finally moves on to a sweeping Celtic theme at the end. The end of the movie has incredible music, and buying the soundtrack is well worth it.

Cinematography
I put a separate section, because any movie buff will be pretty impressed by the filming for this movie. It’s really well done with many sweeping camera angles, great shooting locations, and so forth. There’s a lot of artistic scenes placed in the movie, to illustrate Maximus’ thoughts as he proceeds, and I think this is where the movie really shines. The filming really conveyed the ideas really well, which I won’t go into since I’ll ruin the movie. But overall, there’s a lot of great filming in this movie, and coupled with the music, it is no surprise this movie got Golden Globe nominations for directing and music.

DVD Extras
This is where you find out whether or not you should get this movie on DVD. Well, let me say this. I was disappointed. The Making of Gladiator is very, very bad. All you get is a commentary about the directors saying what an amazing movie this was, and how the tigers were really dangerous. They never go in depth about how they filmed it, or how they might have pulled off some of the more difficult scenes. They simply praise their own movie for being amazing again and again. There is some good inside footage, showing how they filmed the Coliseum and how they filmed the first battle in the movie, all pretty good stuff, but not as deep as the Behind the Scenes stuff found in the Matrix DVD. There’s all Gladiator – A Bloodsport, something suspiciously like a PBS production on gladiator fighting. But it really has nothing to do with Gladiator the movie, but focuses on the actual gladiator fighting with a very educational tone to it. However it doesn’t teach the viewer anything at all, and it turns out to be quite a bore with a ton of cheesy shots of yelling men that is completely unrelated to the movie.
The deleted scenes were interesting, and there are about 9 of them along with commentary. That’s the most worthy part. None of these scenes are really a dramatic change in the movie, other than pacing, and most of the time you feel like, yeah they should have deleted this. However it does provide some insight to the movie, and what they originally intended. In fact, I think they managed to take out some of the good moments to this movie after watching the deleted scenes.
There’s also some storyboards, production notes, but mostly reading material and stuff. Nothing that will really provide any insight on the movie.

Final Score – 8.9

The DVD version was disappointing, other than for the superior image quality and sound. The movie was good, but for the hefty price of $20+ for the 2-DVD set, I don’t think it’s worth it. If the extras were better I’d have given it a 9.2 or something, but they weren’t.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older