If you consider yourself a movie fan and have never seen www.moviemistakes.com, you’ll find it fascinating. They pick apart movies’ errors with meticulous care — to the point that it might ruin a film for you. ![Gladiator[1].jpg](http://catholiclight.stblogs.org/archives/images/ericpics/Gladiator[1].jpg)
This is great fun for a crap-fest like “Titanic,” which, among, other atrocities, invented the stinking lie that the men on the ship were all cowards, except Leo the man-child. If you’ve ever sat through any movie, bewildered at the liberties Hollywood takes with real events, places, and objects
(“Hey, did Picasso’s ‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’ really sink to the bottom of the Atlantic? I swear I saw it when it came to the Met”), you’ll enjoy rifling through the entries.
“Gladiator,” one of my favorite movies from the last few years, has more “mistakes” than almost any other. Some of them are examples of criticism gone too far, like:
Factual error: The snake with red-yellow-brown skin you see in a night-shot in Rome lives only in deserts in North America.
Ooooh! Ridley Scott must be ashamed! Then there are the mistakes that aren’t mistakes:
Just before the battle with the germans begins, while the germans are taunting the romans [sic], there are many arrows in the trees and in the ground. Twice we see this. Problem is that the disciplined romans had not fired a single arrow at that point and no skirmishers, which could have been authorized to shoot before the order to “loose”, can be seen in the open area in front of the defensive position.
Maybe they’re right and the filmmakers didn’t intend it, but there’s an easy explanation for this. The Romans had ample time to prepare the battlefield before that scene, and one thing they would have done is to test the range of certain parts of the battlefield. Archers would have loosed a few arrows to gauge the distance, and so they’d know how to shoot when the battle began. The technique is used today by professional machinegunners, who will fire bursts to test the distance of objects on the battlefield, if possible.
One of the worst aspects of the Web is that people can get too carried away with all the scoffing and debunking, because there’s nobody to reign them in. On the other hand, it’s good to have a medium with which to take down the proud a notch or two.
P.S. If you get the DVD of “Gladiator,” you can see two deleted scenes with explicit Christian references, including a Christian family about to be devoured by lions.
One wonders why the scenes were deleted. I suspect that there were several reasons–some attached to agendas, others not.
Ridley Scott has a commentary over each of the deleted scenes, and he said he removed them because they were extraneous to the plot. That’s a defensible move, because Christianity didn’t have anything directly to do with the plot.
Gladiator has a sequel coming
You need to correct the link to moviemistakes.com.
The period of Septimus Severus (198-211) is the time when it dawned on the pagans that Christianity would have to be smashed or it would eventually become the dominant ideology of the empire.
I fixed the link — Movable Type apparently prepends the hostname to an external link if you don’t begin it with “http://”.
A semantic point: Christianity isn’t an ideology, as the Holy Father has said, it’s a faith. An ideology is a detailed collection of theories about the way the world ought to be. There’s nothing wrong with ideology per se, but it’s not equivalent to the faith.
OT: With respect to “Titanic”, there was an exhibition of artifacts and such that came through Houston a while back. One of the most touching things was simply a roster on the wall of each passenger’s fate. It became obvious just by looking at name, hometown, and age that many men had put their wives and children on the lifeboats and let themselves go down with the ship.