The latest in the "classic films" series, and the longest film I've seen with my Movie Pass thus far, "Spartacus" is a great film that fills every minute of its three hour plus runtime with thrills and excitement. It is a shining example of the Old Hollywood Epic, a genre of films I fear we may never see again.
From the moment the film starts, it prepares you for a classic experience. The opening notes of bombastic music over the title card "Overture" is something we almost never see anymore, but the music really helped ease me into the film and it sets the tone nicely. I was surprised throughout the film by how much heavy lifting the music and subtle character moments were allowed to do. For a film about gladiators and rebellion, there were several scenes with minimal or no dialogue, especially early on. The actors (especially Kirk Douglas as Spartacus who, naturally, got the most attention) were given numerous opportunities to convey their characters emotions and desires through wordless scenes of discrete facial movements, and they took full advantage of these opportunities. Most of the early courtship between Spartacus and Varinia (Jean Simmons) is done this way. It makes for some nice character progression for Spartacus. As the film goes on and he begins leading the slave rebellion, his character is literally finding the voice he often lacked in earlier scenes.
The larger scenes, from one-on-one gladiatorial combat to full scale battles, are handled just as effectively as the quieter moments. There is something impressive about watching a film like this and knowing that everything you see happening was done for real. That's a feeling that, in todays age of computer generated effects, we may never get again. Spartacus's fight in the gladiator ring isn't nearly as fancy as some of today's elaborately choreographed fights, but it has much more weight to it as a result. Instead of relying on fancy camera angles and frequent cutting to ratchet up the pace, "Spartacus" lets us see the two men go at it with both their lives on the line. Even having seen the movie before and knowing what would happen, I still found much more tension in this scene than in most of today's fight scenes. Today, those scenes are too often about the choreography and trying to impress the audience with how fancy it can get, but here the emphasis was on the characters who were doing the fighting, making the stakes tangible and the scene exciting. The large scale scenes of battle and even just of Spartacus's army at camp are also incredibly impressive. They stand out today because of the sheer epic nature of the filmmaking. There are frequently hundreds, probably even thousands of people on screen at once. These aren't computer generated armies either, they're literally thousands of real people, each one costumed, armed, and sometimes charging into battle. This also helps to ground the film in a sense of reality, making it easy to connect with the epic story being told and with the characters involved.
The true brilliance of this film is how it balances small scale and large scale scenes flawlessly, knowing the right time and the right way to feature each. The film has a large number of important characters, and each one is given plenty of time to develop so that they don't feel like artificial constructs when it is time for them to fill their crucial roles in the story. There is literally nothing bad I can think of to say about this film. It certainly deserves its distinction as a classic.
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| One of my cats, Spartacus |
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