In preparation for the next Smackdown Team Experience is traveling back to 2000
One way to confirm a work of art's importance and influence - not necessarily its quality - is to see how much subsequent creations tried to imitate it. How many creators have attempted to capture lightning in a bottle for a second time, whether by blatant copy or freeform inspiration? This is especially true of mainstream cinematic successes. A surplus of movies can triumph at the box office any given year. Not nearly as many can claim to have birthed a string of copycats or revived a genre after decades of obscurity. Say what you want about Gladiator, but that Best Picture champion did accomplish such feats, for better and worse…
The Sword and Sandal genre, also known as peplum movies, peaked during the mid 20th century. However, its origins are significantly older. Usually set in Classical Antiquity, but sometimes reaching the early Medieval period, these productions first came into popularity in Italy during the time of silent cinema. With gigantic sets and innovative techniques, Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria could be categorized as one of the first and most influential epics of the genre. The flick's success was so great it prompted a franchise-like series and, upon reaching international markets, served as an inspiration to many an ambitious filmmaker. It's not too difficult to draw a straight line from Cabiria to the movies of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.
Notwithstanding these silent pictures, the Sword and Sandal genre only reached its full potential during the postwar years. Once again, it was an international crossover hit that did the trick. Instead of Cabiria, Alessandro Blasetti's Fabiola, a 1949 period drama that called attention to the possibilities of its national film industry. Hollywood was quick to notice, prompting a decade-long love affair between American filmmakers and the resources of Italian studios, their artistry, their professionals. A good number of these international projects followed the model established by Fabiola, re-telling melodramatic stories of Ancient Rome and Greece, bedecked in splendorous costumes and opulent sets.
BEN-HUR (1959)
Made by MGM, Quo Vadis was one of the first prominent examples of the trend, and The Robe proved to be a historical landmark as the first released feature in Cinemascope. This last title brings attention to a close relationship between Sword and Sandal action cinema and the pomp and circumstance of the Biblical epic. Ben-Hur is a prime example of these two genres' long-lasting marriage. As the 50s gave way to the 60s, the projects got bigger and bigger. Bloated beyond belief, sometimes stagnant, sometimes exciting, there's a lot to admire about the evident ambition as well as the maximalist lavishness. Even when the Italian-only productions vacillated in budget and production value, there's a kitsch appeal to them, a sense of camp that spells away the self-seriousness that plagued a lot of their American counterparts.
Still, all good things must come to an end, and the Sword and Sandal craze of the midcentury collapsed as the 70s dawned and the era of the big Hollywood studio died. In various ways, these expensive old-fashioned creations got so gigantic that the failure of only one of them could threaten a studio's stability, shake it to the chore. As 1963's Cleopatra almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox, it was apparent that the genre's longevity was unsustainable. For the next 30 years, the Hollywood-made Sword and Sandle epic lay primarily dormant, a sleeping giant that only occasionally showed life signs. These tended to come in the form of B-movies, nostalgic curios, or low-budget TV productions. Until Gladiator arrived, that is.
GLADIATOR (2000)
Ridley Scott's Best Picture champion didn't come out of nowhere. One can pinpoint the inspirations beyond its popular aesthetic and narrative tone to two Oscar favorites of the 1990s. Mel Gibson's Braveheart proved that there was money to be made with historical action epics accoutered with loud battle scenes, much bloodiness, and little in the ways of factual accuracy. On a subtler level, Saving Private Ryan was another important touchstone for Scott's bellicose movie. The gristliness of Gladiator's opening battle is a soft bucolic sight in comparison to Spielberg's D-Day sequence, but they play the same function. Furthermore, Gladiator copies Ryan's generous uses of shutter angle manipulation, a jerky mechanism that confers a patina of jumbled realism to the proceedings.
Even if unwittingly, by following in the footsteps of Gibson and Spielberg, Scott found a way of making the old-fashioned genre modern. Everything old is new again, as they say, and Gladiator proved that such a sentiment could be the recipe for astounding success, both with the audience, critics, and awards voters. Personally, I'm not too fond of it as a piece of cinema, but it would be erroneous to call it irrelevant just because it's not to my taste. After the 2000 juggernaut hit it big, the Sword and Sandal picture was suddenly viable again, prompting several studios to greenlit their attempts at replicating the success of Gladiator. Some of these copycats are only similar in genre, while others go so far as to quote scenes, shots, narrative solutions, and more.
TROY (2004)
Of course, because such big movies take a long time to make, the first descendants of Scott's success would only see the light of day a couple of years later. 2004 marked the start of a veritable torrent of derivative works. Troy followed the ethos of Gladiator to a T, only instead of smearing grime on warped history, it proposed to strip mythology out of myth. Wolfgang Peterson's movie of the Iliad does away with Ancient verse, erases the Gods, and attempts to ground the War of Troy in 21st-century psychology. The results are vile, almost laughably afraid of homoeroticism, and not especially exciting to observe. However, audiences didn't mind, and neither did AMPAS. Despite unfavorable reviews, the film managed to nab a Best Costume Design nomination.
Oliver Stone's Alexander wasn't as lucky, even though the finished product is far more interesting. While the picture is somewhat a failure, the parameters of its disgrace are fascinating to witness, from the sheer excess to the wildly erratic structure. A snake-obsessed Angelina Jolie, a cornucopia of absurd accents and bad wigs, Babylonian couture, warfare as an explosion of fuchsia, this movie has it all! Unlike Troy, Alexander didn't even come close to Oscar glory. The same can't be said about the other child of Braveheart and Gladiator that hit theaters in 2004. Hailed as torture porn by some, a spiritual masterpiece by others, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was a massive hit. Remember what I said before about Sword and Sandal flicks and Biblical epics always walking hand-in-hand?
If its predecessors were gristly, this dramatization of Jesus' final hours was of such brutality it rivaled most horror movies, gore-wise. Scorsese portrayed Christ's sacrifice by highlighting the humanity of doubt, while Pasolini found transcendence in the political ideals of the messiah's revolution. Gibson had no such lofty ideals in mind, choosing to convey the importance of martyrdom through the pain it entails. In The Passion of the Christ, the sacrifice isn't psychological or spiritual. It's physical, fleshy, sinewy even. Performed in dead languages, shot with a silent film's attention to visual storytelling, it's difficult to argue against the picture's formal value. Fittingly, the Academy recognized the craft of its makeup team, composer, and cinematographer with Oscar nominations.
KING ARTHUR (2005)
The following entries in the Sword and Sandal canon wouldn't be nearly as lucky. Just as Troy tried to ground Classic mythology in superficial historical stylings and a notion of pseudo-realism, so did Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur. Transposing the Arthurian legends to Roman Britannia isn't a necessarily bad idea, but the blue-tinted mess of a movie does nothing interesting with the concept. Not even the director's cut managed to improve the disaster. The same wasn't true of Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott's epic set during the Crusades. While the theatrical cut is rather shoddy and incoherent, there's much to appreciate about Scott's extended version, including an evenhanded portrayal of Muslim-Christian conflicts during the retaking of Jerusalem by Saladin as well as an excellent performance by Eva Green. The juiciest bits of the actress' work, her character's tragic arc, were originally left on the cutting room floor.
Indeed, those 2005 flicks aren't strictly Sword and Sandal films, but I think it's safe to include them in this trend of Ancient World epics. They wouldn't have existed without Gladiator, not in the form we currently see them. If you're looking for more traditional examples of the genre, there's plenty of those too. The Last Legion, Agora, Centurion, The Eagle, and others are right there, blood-thirsty and with bared teeth, grimy snarls, and dirt covering every surface. Alternatively, some movies resisted the demystification of the past while keeping the hyper-masculine appeal and love of violence. Some even threw away the pretense of realism, embracing a kind of feverish stylization that bears little resemblance to the midcentury classics. The 300 flicks are the more famous examples, but my personal favorite has to be Tarsem's Immortals.
Maybe it's the combination of anti-naturalistic effects and golden beefcake. Maybe it's Eiko Ishioka's unbridled creativity. Whatever the reason is, I've always had a special place in my heart for that 2011 flop and wish more people talked about it than they do about other, less exciting calamities like Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia. Not that mediocre cinema doesn't have its appeal when studying a genre's evolution. 2014 didn't include a single triumphant Sword and Sandal movie amidst its releases, but the failures make for a great case study. If nothing else, one can see the sweaty despair of Hollywood hacks in the way such movies as The Legend of Hercules and Pompeii quote Gladiator. The last film is so blatant in its "homage" that it practically steals an entire action set piece from the Ridley Scott movie. I'm referring to an arena-set recreation of a grand Roman victory over barbarian hordes that goes wrong for the warriors playing Rome's heroes.
EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS (2014)
That same year saw Scott return to the genre's paradigms in Exodus: Gods and Kings. Only, this time, he attempted to take the fantastical out of the Old Testament while also turning the Bible into the starting point for a lot of CGI-heavy carnage. The movie's sluggish pace and muddy cinematography are already bad enough before one acknowledges the whitewashed casting. Watching Joel Edgerton pain his face with tanner and heavy eyeliner to appear Egyptian is something I didn't need to see. To add insult to injury, the cast is inept, stuck in a po-faced register that does no one any favors. At least in that same year's 300: Rise of an Empire, Eva Green's on hand to contradict the weightiness of it all with a good dose of unhinged drama. Maybe that's the solution. Possibly every Ancient World epic should include Green in its cast.
The genre hasn't gone into hibernation again, but one can feel it start to abandon the big screen in favor of the small, at least when it comes to expensive productions. Series like Rome, Spartacus, The Bible, Tut, and others, have shown that there's an audience for this TV in the 21st century. It will be interesting to see how much Gladiator's influence continues to exist within this genre as the movie ages. I hope I've made it apparent how much Ridley Scott's Best Picture champion was a game-changer, how it resurrected and reinvented a model of filmmaking. This is, by no means, an exhaustive history of the Sword and Sandal film, in the new millennium and otherwise. Like many genres and subgenres, this kind of cinema is a complicated beast, encompassing such extremes as the Biblical epics of yore and the porno peplum craze of the 80s. Mostly sexless but bathed in blood, viscera, and wine-flavored adrenaline, Gladiator exists somewhere in the middle.