By ROBERT WARD
It has been 40 years since Hollywood producers attempted a sword-and-sandal epic. Maybe they shouldn't have waited so long.
The genre is gloriously revived in Gladiator, which took only three weeks to recoup at the American box office the $US103 million it cost to make. So far it's made $US379 million worldwide.
And it has made a marquee star of Russell Crowe.
Director Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma and Louise) joked even before the movie came out that he wouldn't be able to afford to hire the New Zealand-born actor for another film.
Gladiator is moviemaking on a grand scale, with spectacular battle scenes and bloody hand-to-hand combat in the Roman Colosseum between gladiators and opponents ranging from archers on chariots to exotic animals.
Computer technology multiplied the cast of thousands tenfold, and also helped to prolong the screen life of a star who died on location.
An English forest standing in for the Roman Empire's German frontier was burned down. A gladiator arena was built out of mud bricks in Morocco.
And huge sets recreating landmarks of Rome in AD180 were erected on the island of Malta, including a Colosseum partly constructed on the ground and finished off in the computer.
Crowe stars as fictitious Roman general Maximus, who falls from grace when the Emperor, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), dies and his jealous son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) takes power.
Maximus becomes a slave, is sold to a gladiator trainer in North Africa, and then finds his way to Rome as a starring attraction at the Colosseum.
Oliver Reed, who played the gladiator trainer, died in Malta during a drinking binge before his scenes were finished. But computer-generated imaging (CGI) enabled director Scott to marry existing shots of Reed and new footage of a body double to complete the actor's performance a little earlier in the story than planned.
Four other performers were even more unpredictable than hard men like Reed and Harris.
After Maximus wins his first fight in the Colosseum the stakes are raised and he finds himself up against not only Rome's most successful gladiator, a giant (Sven-Ole Thorsen), but also four tigers.
They're magnificent creatures, says Crowe, "but they don't follow direction very well."
The animals make their appearance one by one out of trapdoors in the arena floor, each restrained by a chain held by three men.
"Now that's a really good device assuming the tiger's always gonna go forward," says Crowe. "One day these three blokes were a little bit specific in pulling the tiger back and the tiger went, 'Well, if you want me so much, I'll come and see you.'
"The first two blokes stood stock-still as they'd been told to do and they didn't move a muscle. They just held the chain and put their heads down and stayed still.
The third bloke lost his water and he took a couple of steps, mate, and that tiger was on him, bang, on the ground. But he was only playing."
The film starts with a bloody battle between the technologically superior Roman legions and fiery German barbarians. Scott flew to Bratislava, Slovakia, to scout a forest location for the battle and then baulked at the logistics of moving a huge crew over there.
So he returned to England, went to the British Forestry Commission and asked: "What have you got that you want to get rid of?" The answer was: Bourne Wood in Surrey.
Sixteen thousand flaming arrows were fired by Scott's Roman soldiers and burning clay pots were launched from catapults at the Germanic tribesmen in the trees. An aerial camera system with a track speed of 15 metres a second followed the flight of the arrows.
Underneath the barrage, actors, stuntmen and extras fought each other at close quarters with swords, axes, spears and crossbows, and the cameras were right in among them.
CGI magnified the effects by multiplying both the arrows and the human players.
"It's like the Gulf War," says Scott. "I only had about a thousand troops. But with careful shooting, you could what they call 'tile' - just keep moving this same group of Roman soldiers across the shot and, panning several times, blend it with CGI so it looks like there's 20,000 troops there."
The biggest effect in the film is the Colosseum itself, built on Malta at a 17th-century Spanish fort that had been converted to a barracks by Napoleon's troops.
The film-makers couldn't afford to create a complete replica of the three-tiered Roman landmark so they built a fragment of the first tier and computer imaging completed the structure, as well as creating 33,000 spectators to sit and cheer with the 2000 extras.
The real sets and people were blended with CGI so seamlessly that when the camera pans around the stadium you can't tell what's real and what's not.
But the technology, the sets and the scale of the film haven't upstaged the acting and the story. It's a compelling tale of a good man who, through no fault of his own, loses everything except his dignity and earns a crack at redemption.
Crowe says that when he was approached for the role he was attracted by the concept, not the initial script, which was "too modern, too cynical. It had gags about advertising. It just didn't make sense to go to that place with such a facile set of dialogue and scenes."
In the reworked script, his character is offended by having to kill to entertain the crowds. But are today's audiences in multiplexes and sports stadiums much different from those in the Colosseum?
"Oh, I think a lot of things have developed over the years," says Crowe. "The vehicles have changed: we've gone from the chariot to the Ferrari ... and we've got a bit more efficient in piping violence into our homes. We don't have to go out for it now.
"But human relations and the broad range of what human emotions and human desires can be, I don't think they've been adjusted at all, mate."
A quick word with Russell Crowe
Gladiator Review
Roman epic slays box office
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