I think the blowback on it winning Best Picture is fairly ridiculous. It has a great soundtrack, great sound design, immense attention to detail.
The scenes with Richard Harris and Oliver Reed were poignant as it was Reed’s last and one of Harris’s last. And frankly the scenes with Harris are fantastic. I don’t even need to defend those.
A Best Picture film doesn’t HAVE to be bait featuring the Holocaust or a gripping biodrama or some immense physical disability overcome.
You’ve been waiting 14 years to tell us that? 
It seems to me that 2000 was a fairly week year for best picture nominations.
Chocolat – Foreign Oscar bait. Haven’t actually seen it, it’s probably good.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – Genuine Foreign Oscar bait, but was it really that good or was it nominated on technical achievements?
Erin Brockovich – Typical Oscar bait
Traffic – Like Gladiator, a very good film, but also like Gladiator, kinda pulpy/potboilerish
I was going to say earlier that the bigger complaint should be Crowe’s win as Best Actor, but I read that either through hubris and arrogance or genuine talent…he’s responsible for a lot of what appears on the screen. Apparently the script was horribly underdeveloped, so he and Scott had to sit down and figure out what would happen in this or that scene or what these people should say…etc…that’s not usually what you give people credit for in ‘acting’ but I’ll throw it in.
Also of note, the film ‘only’ cost 103 million.
It was an entertaining movie but it’s not really what you would call thought provoking. The story was a good man betrayed by a evil man and fighting his way back to defeat his enemy. It’s not like there was a lot of depth in this movie.
I thought it was 3/4 of a good movie and the last quarter was horrible. One of the worst endings I’ve ever seen.
Yeah, I agree. But I think the devil is in the details.
Really?? I agree there’s a point about at 3/4 where we start to go in circles…but I thought the ending was very appropriate and good.
I liked Gladiator perfectly well as a big-screen action drama, but was amazed that it won the Oscar. Even more amazed that Russell Crowe, who is an excellent actor, won the Best Actor award. Crowe probably deserves to have an Oscar, but i can think of at least five movies where he’s been far better than he was in Gladiator.
There are historical inaccuracies and then there are historical inaccuracies. I don’t in the least mind that the movie shows Marcus Aurelius bringing the Marcomannic Wars to an end with a victory in the beginning of the film ( didn’t happen ). I don’t mind Marcus Aurelius being shown as being murdered by a jealous Commodus who was going to be passed over ( didn’t happen ). So far they’re dealing in the realm of reasonable fudging of the historical record for the sake of dramatic license. S’okay by me.
But having Commodus die in the arena while this Maximus guy waxes triumphant? Yeah, no. It takes my suspension of disbelief as a history student, craps on it, sets on fire, dries it up, then disperses it to the wind with a building-sized powered fan :D. Can’t take it.
Inglourius Bastards is an entirely different sort of thing ( love it, by the way ). But Ridley Scott doesn’t get a pass from me. Nor does Michael Hirst for Elizabeth for that matter. Some things are just beyond the pale ;).
I’ve never understood people’s unhappiness with historical inaccuracies. At no point did I ever feel I was supposed to be watching an accurate film. I’m sure you already know that Commodus did actually fight in the matches…but besides that they already set him up as being a loony.
But back to historical inaccuracies in movies, a couple of examples people have cited: U-571…Saving Private Ryan…who cares??? It’s a work of fiction. No one is trying to steal the British’s thunder. Great, it was actually the Brits who captured Enigma. BFD. This (U-571) is a movie with a frigging German cruiser running around all by itself in the SW Atlantic. Do people believe The Enemy Below actually happened?
Sorry for the rant. Tamerlane that wasn’t directed at you.
I would have actually developed Commodus a little more. Make him less mustache twirling, more credible as a fighter. Keep that he didn’t become a soldier, but show him to be reckless…crazy…and someone who doesn’t have to poison Maximus to win.
Not a problem and I’m totally good with your general criticism. But it is a reasonable question really. It is just a movie, so why get even mildly incensed about stuff like 300 say? I honestly get the same way when my physicist father starts mocking the science on sf films - just shut up and enjoy it for Christ’s sake :D!
At least for me ( and I suspect my father for physics ) it is simply that if I know the subject well enough and so many details are real enough and it is being played as straight historical drama ( not a black humor-laden setting as with Inglourious Bastards ), I just can’t help from twitching when it gets too far out of whack. I just try not be as obnoxious about it as my father ;).
It doesn’t help that these films are usually publicized by the studios as historical biopics and the like, which just causes the “No! It didn’t happen like that!” reaction to be even stronger.
ETA: A favorite science example that doesn’t bother me really, but I like to bitch about anyway happened in the first season of Buffy. The protagonists are watching video on hyenas to learn about there behavior. The first video clip they watch is of Spotted Hyenas - no problem. The next which is supposed to be the same critter is of totally unrelated African Wild Dogs - not acceptable!!! 
My biggest problem with the movie is the quick-cut fight scenes. I mean, you make a movie called ***Gladiator ***then you’d better make the fight scenes really, really good. But they sucked. At the moment two combatants make contact with each other, all of a sudden it’s incomprehensible fraction-of-a-second cuts flashing on the screen. Every single fight scene was like this. If the rest of the film had more substance, then it *might *have been forgivable. But it seemed to encourage the growing trend in movies of shooting action scenes this way. A horrible development that’s ruined many films for me.
I appreciate its mise en scène (yes, I hate me too for using that pretentious phrase): it wasn’t supposed to look as Rome did, but rather as 19th C. history book illustrations of how Rome looked. I grew up with those books, and have been disappointed with reality ever since.
As far as historical distortion, consider the play-within-the play: how the Trojan War was distorted in the arena to appeal to the audiences appetites. Is that a hidden smirk at us? (OK, I may not want to give a Hollywood blockbuster more credit than it deserves).
Are you not entertained?
Some of the most electrifying fight scenes I’ve ever seen. Bear in mind, there are a half-dozen melees all occurring at once in the arena. Should we sit through each one in its entirety then rewind the battle for the next in line?
THIS! IS! SMARTER!
Made me laugh, anyway.
That’s a bit of an odd response. The complaint was that the editing on the fight sequence was so rapid he couldn’t follow what was happening. That’s a pretty common complaint about a lot of modern action movies, regardless of how many combatants are involved in a particular scene. Batman Begins used a similar editing technique in the one-on-one fight between Batman and Ra’s. The Avengers, on the other hand, had a massive battle scene between half a dozen protagonists and hundreds of enemies, and never lost the narrative of the battle, culminating in a great, ~2 minute sequence that included each of the heroes doing something badass, without a single camera cut.
The quick edit technique has it’s place, mostly, as Tangent implied, if the point of the movie is not to be a big action spectacle. That sort of quick-cut action is great if you’re trying to communicate that violence is scary, or show the chaotic and confusing nature of real armed conflict. But for films that exist primarily to show off awesome fight scenes, it’s a really bad choice.
Crouching Tiger was the best picture that year, but it won for Foreign movie and that pretty much ruled it out for winning again for Best Picture.
Gladiator is OK, but not much more than OK.
Personally, I wasn’t especially impressed by Crouching Tiger or Gladiator. Nice technical feats, to be sure, but the stories were lackluster and in the case of Tiger, sleep-inducing.
I would’ve voted for Traffic.
2000 was a poor year for mainstream movies. Traffic, I thought, was pretty overrated although the hype for that one faded quickly.
Memento was the best movie from 2000.