The Sparticus Pilot

Gratuitous and derivative. In an age of endless, lucrative, and repetitive franchise-based blockbusters, it takes a lot of work to be called ‘derivative’. And in a post-300 world, the bar for gratuitous sex and violence has been set so low that it would take a scanning electron microscope to find the area beneath it that is now labeled ‘too much violence and sex in film’. Its not that I didn’t like Spartacus — I mean it was passable, and things could improve as Lucy Lawless and John Hannah get more airtime — but ultimately it was so obviously gratuitous and derivative that the constant realization of how gratuitous and derivative it was got in the way of actually watching the thing.

Before Spartacus began a little message popped up on the screen reassuring us that what we are about to see seems so shocking only because “that’s how things really were back then”. This was an excuse that I bought in HBO’s “Rome”, which did a wonderful job portraying the period it took place in, even if at times you did wonder whether some scenes absolutely had to be set in the middle of an orgy, and whether the Mad Men-esque ethnograhic detailing would appeal to anyone other than Classicists and randy teenagers. I didn’t care for 300 too much, but I admit that it’s well done, and I get why people like it — and of course they threw realism out the door immediately: if they hadn’t they would have had to call it “300 and their 9000 slaves”.

The idea that Sparticus’s violence is somehow not ‘over the top’ but ‘period’ is ridiculous — unless you think that iron-age Thrace is the kind of place where time suddenly slowed down and people threw buckets of blood in slow motion across people watching pitched battles. Equally, most of the sex was Spartacus-as-dildo: close up shots of his hot wife Liking It ending with an incredibly uninteresting All American heterosexual simultaneous orgasm, missionary position and all. There are certain moments in the show when I wonder “what is the director thinking?” except I already know the answer, which is “I know, let’s end this scene with… cunnilingus!”

Ultimately this is the real problem with Spartacus: its not the amounts of sex and violence, it’s how poorly its done. The balletic ultraviolence of 300 has been replaced with gory, by-the-numbers action scenes. Rome’s scene of James Purefoy au naturel getting dried off with a strigil — carefully designed to show off James Purefoy, make a point about Roman perceptions of rank and nudity, and, especially, demonstrate the use of a strigil — has been replaced by the usual large amount of totally naked chicks and just a couple of guys not wearing shirts. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for weird, derivative movies — Brotherhood of the Wolf anyone? — but Spartacus isn’t one of them.

Back in the immediate post-9/11 world people spent a lot of time comparing the US to Rome: imperial ambitious, shared trajectories of decadence, hubris, and decline. Spartacus has some interesting touches (the transitions between scenes through morphing backgrounds and zooming in on maps), but when watching it I can’t help feeling like one of the bloodthirsty, sybaritic bystanders in the show itself. How far we have come from Laurence Olivier hitting on Tony Curtis by talking about seafood. If we keep going at this rate, I shudder to think what is going to go down in the Ben Hur remake.