Spartacus The 2004 Mini-series

I happen to like the Spartics move/mini-series as much as I liked the quasi-fantasy move "Gladiator". Maybe even more.

While not realistic in it's details (no one now living can know what exactly went on in the Spartacus camp) it does weld historic accuracy with a better touch than many other extant movies of the genre.

Spartacus...the name is Spartacus.

No....I'm Sparticus.

No....I'm Sparticus.

No I'm Spartucus!

Anyway.. was this the movie that was made for the TNT studios? If so, I didn't think it was bad although my memory of it is fairly scant. However, I'm still partial to the Kirk Douglas version simply for sentimental reasons, despite its numerous flaws.

No I'm Spartacus!

 

Anyway.. was this the movie that was made for the TNT studios? If so, I didn't think it was bad although my memory of it is fairly scant. However, I'm still partial to the Kirk Douglas version simply for sentimental reasons, despite its numerous flaws.

Kubrick's movie with Kirk Douglas is one of my all time favorites. The casting is simply great, with some brilliant performances by Peter Ustinov as Lentulus Batiatus, the greedy lanista and Charles Laughton as senator Gracchus, who opposes Marcus Licinius Crassus's policies in the senate and acts as a mentor to the young Julius Caesar, who is a military tribune under Crassus, but opposed to his politics.

I think Laurence Olivier as Crassus delivers an outstanding performance, particularly in the 'snails and oysters' scene with Tony Curtis, who is a 'body slave'. This scene was censored and cut out originally but restored later. I can't see why they would cut it out. By today's standards, it is fairly harmless and you can well imagine the prudery of the establishment in the sixties, when even innuendo was subject to censorship.

Douglas and Howard Fast twisted the unromantic tale of Spartacus into one about civil rights and freedom, particularly censorship and the blacklisting of people that went on in a post McCarthy era. I think Kirk had real difficulties in convincing Kubrick on his position, who wanted to do as authentic a portrayal as possible. Kubrick spent countless hours in research, even to the extent of choregraphing the fight sequences with moves exclusively practised by the gladiators as depicted in various surviving mosaics and paintings.

The combat between the Thracian style of fighting (Spartacus) and the retarius with the fish net and trident is one of the very best that I have ever seen and if you want to see the original Spartacus, see it for this reason alone, as it is just astounding. The fight took several months to film, with many, many retakes and the final version on screen is a classic and if you want to really know how the ancient Roman gladiators fought, this is it and not the watered down version in "Gladiator". There, we don't see the actual fighting but merely theatrics as Russell Crowe slices his opponents without showing how he was in a position to do that.

I thought the TNT version sucked.

The movie is a classic because of its performances, but Douglas's overly idealized Spartacus seems a bit naive in retrospect.

I happen to like the Spartics move/mini-series as much as I liked the quasi-fantasy move "Gladiator". Maybe even more.

While not realistic in it's details (no one now living can know what exactly went on in the Spartacus camp) it does weld historic accuracy with a better touch than many other extant movies of the genre.

is this the one with the croatian(i think) guy out of E R? if so then yes i've seen it and i thought it was pretty poor, i thought the acting was wooden and the fight scenes were lame, to say the film lasted about 4 hours the storyline was pretty erratic

as far as i'm concerned the original spartacus film is an absolute classic and the fight scenes will never be bettered

but thats just my opinion

oh and by the way................ im sparticus

"corpulence makes a man reasonable. pleasant and phlegmatic" quoth Charles Laughton as Gracchus in the film.

"Xenobias put some weight on since I saw her last" (Ustinov appreciativley)

"yes , yes, I like it!" (Laughton complacently)

"so do I" (Ustinov lasciviously)

I though the TNT movie was pretty lame too. Spartacus looked like some wounded puppy throughout most of the series, and the fellow who played Crassus was a scenery-chomping ham.

And, no, I'm Spartacus!

I agree with much of Skarrs post regarding the "original" but would like to add that the cinematography is truly outstanding. I have a restored "oysters vs molluscs" copy and despite some hammy villany (Marcellus and the wonderfully oily Tigranes Levantus ( great name casting)) I think Laughton and Ustinov are personally responsible for an entire generation's moral perception of Rome .

I am Lentulus! Therefore I regret I shall have to sell you all.

Was the TNT version a two-part film? I saw it on the History channel and cried at how bad it was. It was a big love story with super human slaves flipping legionairs around in the air, lol, the Romans looked like pansies. It was a bad film...

No....I'm Sparticus.

I'm Sparticus and so is my wife...

I saw this one today. I had been avoiding it for some time, thanks to the awful trailer, but I finally decided to take the plunge. Within the first few minutes of the film we have a senator discussing how Rome is a democracy - this was a bad start that did not bode well for the rest of the film.

The politics and culture of Rome was portrayed in a inaccurate way, e.g - at one point of the film we hear one man say something along the lines of "There has never been two consuls of Rome!" and at another Crassus and a senator discuss how to win the votes of the ordinary man.

At one point Crassus even discusses 'The Founding fathers of our country' as if Rome was the USA. Crassus himself is portrayed as a cross between Bush and Hitler. He tells his enemies that they are either "with him or against him", and he makes speeches about terror and national security etc.

At another point in the film, he burns hundreds of slaves alive - plumes of smoke rising above Rome as if from some Nazi death camp.

Roman religion seemed to be non-existant. Spartacus is portrayed as an atheist who believes that humans are nothing more than flesh and bones. Varinia (a Gaul, not a Thracian...or Tracean as its pronounced by some characters) tells him that the gods exist within our bodies, that they are our souls. A couple of Romans say things like "My God" and "God help us!" etc. Overall its a poor representation of Roman society, politics and religion.

The costumes and sets are slightly realistic, but only for the first century AD, not for the first century BC. We have Roman soldiers in leather lorica segmentata, and the walls of the villas are similar to those of Pompeii.

Still, one thing that did surprise me was how closely they followed the events of Spartacus' rebellion. He does escape up to mount Vesuvius. He defeats Glabarus by scalling down the mountain side using ropes, as mentioned by Plutarch. It does show some of his battles against enemy legions. It also shows that he attempted to break through the alps to Gaul, and his desicion to turn back so that he could plunder and ravage Italy.

I was also surprised to see that they showed Crassus' attempts to stop Sparatcus crossing to Sicily by cutting him off with earthworks and palisades. I was amazed that they kept in the part where Spartacus crucified Roman prisoners of war to taunt Crassus' army - you would have never have seen that with Douglas's more heroic portrayl - Visnjic's Spartacus is darker and more brutal.

We get to see the division and antagonism between Crixus and Spartacus' forces, and the subsequent defeat of Crixus's own army when he brakes off of Spartacus' main force. The slaves themselves are less heroic than the ones in Douglas's version - they want to plunder Italy, they want to capture Sicily to bleed the Romans dry, they torture and kill Roman prisoners, many of them even want to own Roman slaves themselves. They are much more vengeful and less willing to listen to Spartacus' orders.

Finally, they show that Spartacus gets killed in battle against Crassus' legions -there is no "I'm Spartacus!" and no tearful goodbyes between Varinia and a crucified Spartacus in this version. The film ends with Pompey winning the glory for Crassus' victory, and the two men being made consuls of Rome. This part is more truthful than the Douglas film.

The hammy acting does ruin the film, and the script isn't up too much. One scene that made me cringe was when Crassus yells "For Rome... Spartacus you will die!" to which Spartacus replies "Freedom!"

Overall it was an above average tv movie, spoiled somewhat by bad acting by some characters, and a poor portrayl of Roman society. Yet it managed to be much more succesful in it's portrayl of the Gladiator/Slave Rebellion than the Douglas/Kubrick movie, and if you don't take it too seriously it's entertaining enough.

I'm currently watching this 2004 television miniseries on DVD. There was one scene in particular in this miniseries that I absolutely don't remember reading in the original Howard Fast novel, and I also don't remember reading about in any Roman history accounts.

So I thought I'd ask for the expertise of my Roman history friends here to either verify or debunk this. (UNRV is the Snopes.com of Roman history, if you ask me. )

The scene in question involves a point where the Roman Senate feels it is necessary to "send a message" to the slave army that's running rampant in the countryside. And what they do is this: They pick 200 slaves at random from households in the city of Rome, and then burn them alive in what I presume was the city's forum.

Did the Romans actually resort to this extreme and (by Roman thinking, I should imagine) wastefully expensive measure in an attempt to frighten Spartacus & Co. into capitulating?

Note: I dug up this old topic, because I see that Decimus Caesar here made a comment about the mass immolation scene, and the overall consensus seems to be that this series was pretty lame. So can we dismiss this mass immolation scene as something that historically "never happened"? Or, was never likely to have happened?

-- Nephele

Hi:

I've been following this and beside the Kirk Douglas movie are you talking about the mini series on Starz with the Australian actor playing Spartacus that recently passed away?

Also, I read in a history book that Spartacus' body was never found. Anyone know more about this?

Cinzia