WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO CRY ... By Lindsey Davis

"When we saw The Fall of the Roman Empire, the chariots ran over our feet and Lindsey had to be carried out weeping." (Mary Cutler; Archers writer and Classicist's mother)

Now that was History -the Sixties, dazzled by wide-screen colour cinema, crazily sitting on the front row... Now I've seen Gladiator for you, with Mary again, at a Birmingham fleapit with muzzy sound, then again at the NFT which was better (NB only in CA News does the film critic provide details of ambience). I did not cry. Have I finally grown up? Hardly. I was really embarrassing, shrieking at Babe.

Everyone expected me to hate Gladiator because of the historical gaffes. Philip Howard crows over the anachronistic stirrup reference; we all point the finger at the 'thumbs up' error; I can't speak lowly enough of the costumes - Cornmodus would have boiled in that ludicrous layered white uniform, and his sister's personal shopper should bar pale pink numbers held in with curious bandages... Yes, it's fun to be the nit-picker for once.

My real gripe is creative. This film brazenly reworks The Fall... (without Guinness, Loren, Boyd and Plurnmer) but achieves no improvement. The earlier film was recently shown on TV; it still holds up. Gladiator is technically brilliant -well, its computer enhancing is. Structurally the film is a mess. Skeletal plotlines, for both heroics and romance, ruin the characters' motivation and destroy any power to move. I guess they shot far too many hours and continuity was lost on the cutting room floor. So logical inconsistencies ( eg why crucify and bum the wife and son in Spain, if Maximus is supposed to be dead in Germany and should never know?) are followed by narrative nonsense. "Take this tonic !" purrs Lucilla, dispensing Roman liver salts to Cornmodus as he premeditates brotherly clinches. Much later he conveniently sinks into slumber -by then in a different country and nook of the plot.

Ridley Scott can create brilliant suspense; I can't sit through the Alien films. Here, although each scene has internal tension, especially the fabulous extended battle, the overall action is just a lineal string of fights. Only one scene has real shock value: when the escape plan goes wrong. By the time Maximus fights Commodus, it has been so firmly established that the gladiator is invincible, there is no tension and no fun. He dies; historically, he has to. His suffering should leave you wrung out; it doesn't. The creaky politics reach their lowest point; the megalomaniac is slain -to leave in charge a pretty kid steered by a mother who has shown herself both cowardly and duplicitous in the pursuit of power. Oh think, Agrippina, please!

The film has good points. Russell Crowe, built like a wall, smiles once -to show how devastating he could have been if required to act as well as fight. Initially -cold, brutalised by war, wanting to go home -he is really convincing; later he sinks through heartache to ...well, fighting a lot. There are a few jokes, one about queer giraffes reputedly written in by Oliver Reed. There is Olly, glorious after death. There are various ex-Birmingham Rep actors effortlessly acting the togas off Hollywood. I watched the technology with keen interest (believe me!); I liked the model of Rome, loved the replicated armies and crowds. Some camera work was heart- tugging.

But I was angry. Angry that so much money was spent on spectacle, yet they could not pay for a historical adviser with clout, nor a Mills and Boon hack to ghost-write the love stories. I hate the waste of ideas -all that ponderous agonising about the father/son/daughter relationship when simply mentioning Momma would have added muscle. Faustina n had not two but 12 (or 13) children; there cannot have been any quality-time spent with the Marcus Aurelius offspring. Anyway, I thought the problem was not neglect of Commodus but ill-placed favouritism -a much more interesting avenue to explore. Why drag in incest if you then run scared? (All right -this is Hollywood, where one tigerskin rug has to cover for thousands of slaughtered beasts, lest you offend.)

The spectacle is fabulous. But I wanted believable history and strong story-telling too. When the chariots stop running over my feet, I really would like to find myself in tears.

From CA News No.23, December 2000.