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Post by georgeseurat on Mar 7, 2009 21:56:34 GMT -5
Brilliant series, so brilliant that I actually have to rewatch episodes to taste it. I love how they treat the series as a drama instead of a historical epic. There's a lot of films on ancient Rome in the past that they always talks about the grand history and politics, that I think they are kind of dead to me (Yes, even Gladiator. I still think it's just another grand epic). What Rome has established is talking about domestic life. How humans are influenced under this long river of Roman history.
As Lindsay Duncan says in one of the commentaries, this series leads us to see Rome from the grand historical aspects to the domestic elements to the intimacy between people. It explores human nature through the story in the upstaires and downstaires. The creation of the two main characters, Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus, is the key of the sucess of this series. We can see how soldiers are influenced under the Roman traditions, especially Vorenus who is torn between what he believes and what he feels.
The storyline of Niobe causing adultary behind Vorenus is well-written. You will feel sorry for both Niobe and Vorenus. Vorenus hasn't come home for 8 years, and it's logical for Niobe to think that her husband is dead. Yet, Vorenus, in these 8 years on the other hand, hasn't even touch another woman. We can see that he is a man who really upholds to his standards. He is a man who follow the rules. He is loyal to his subjects. He is a man of honour and coldness. However, because of this, he cannot face his emotion when he is back in his civillian life. He can't do anything besides soldiery. That's why he goes back to the army. He finds a way to climb up the social ladder, and at the end, he becomes a Senate.
But still, there are problems in his family and his personal life. For example, after Vorenus and Niobe goes to Atia's house, Niobe says she cannot see any problem with her dress. During the scene, Niobe hasn't look at her hunsband for one eye, and when Vorenus tries to touch her, she blows off the candle, as if she just doesn't want to be touched. Also, Pullo is accused for murder, and is sentenced to fight to death as a gladiator. We can see how Vorenus tries not to involve in the case, since he is now Caesar's man, but at the end, he did save Pullo due to their brotherhood. How repress Vorenus is.
Another thing is that he still doesn't know the truth of Niobe till the end. I think Kevin did a spectacular job in the season finale, of showing Vorenus' love to his wife. The emotional crash between his anger and pain portrait by Kevin blows me up in front of the screen. He loves his wife more than anything. We can see he doesn't even have the determination to kill her. When she kills herself, Vorenus realizes that he actually wants her to live, but it's too late. This is brilliant character development!
Pullo, on the other, seems to be a cheerful guy. Yet, he is also a very sad person, since he doesn't have a family, and when he sees Vorenus becomes farther and farther from him, he becomes messy. Pullo's characters, even though is not as important as Vorenus imo, has a very effective purpose on reflecting Vorenus' character. Pullo is a guy who will always be lonely. Yet, because of this, Vorenus' loneliness will have a company.
Okay. End of season 1. I used so much lines to only talks about one line. Anyway, for season 2, I am going to talk about another aspect that I think most of you might missed it (of course, the line between Vorenus and Pullo will still be discussed).
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Post by MarryMeOwen on Mar 7, 2009 23:26:11 GMT -5
Some people have argued that specific historical figures were inaccurately depicted and are ill-served, but I think it's important to recognize the way the writers have taken historical licence and to ask the questions 1) does it enhance our understanding of the time period? and 2) does it move the drama forward in a convincing way? The answer to both of these questions in my opinion is a resounding yes. As someone who had numerous, possibly pointy-headed, issues with the historical accuracy of "Gladiator" for precisely these reasons, I'm happy to say that the writers, producers and directors of "Rome" have done an excellent job being true to the historical period in terms of historical detail and "feel".
People have raved about the art design and I concur. It is a visually stunning peice of work on a cinematic scale. The acting is also first-class. Particular favorites are Kevin McKidd as Lucius Vorenus, Ray Stevenson as Titus Pullo, Ciaran Hinds as Gaius Julius Caeser, Lindsay Duncan as Servilia and Nicholas Woodson as the unflappable Posca. Notable performances also by Polly Walker as Atia, Indira Varma as Niobe and Kenneth Cranham as the world-worn Gnaeus Pompey Magnus.
I watched this twice, to make sure I really got it and to test my perceptions of it. The first time, I watched it in big blocks of three hours over consecutive days and got very tired of it, kind of waiting to get to Caesar's assassination for it to end. The second time, I watched each episode separated by a few days, and it was much much better that way. Like all good films, I saw much more and am sure that it will get even better with subtleties and nuance on repeated viewings.
The plot follows Caesar as he ends the Gallic War, crosses the Rubicon as a revolutionary (or demagogue or psychopath or whatever), and becomes dictator, ending with his murder. However, rather than a single character, such as Claudius in I Claudius, the story omnisciently follows several lives of those revolving around Caesar. You have aristocrats (supporters and opponents), soldiers, and the normal riff-raff of Rome. In many ways, the main character really is Rome itself, as Caesar is at best a shadowy figure, while the others appear and reappear suddenly.
The principal characters are the honorable Centurion Vorenus and his troublesome sidekick, the brutal legionnaire Pullo. They are entirely fictional, and while the actors that portray them are very good, they came off as a bit of a plot device, to get the viewer into certain places and to illustrate things that were occurring. They pop up in Caesar's last major Gallic battle, scramble for work in ROme, join Caesar's civil war effort in Greece and Egypt, then return to seek new careers in Rome. They stumble across Pompey, Cleopatra, and Octavian (the future Augustus), all the while rather oblivious to the true meaning of events unfolding around them, even though Vorenus becomes a Senator. That being said, the intrigues that weave their way through the story are quite fun, and while embellished as all historical fiction must be, accurate in the outline of events as we know them. You also have the aristocrats (actual historical figures, though with added fictional details) of Atia and Servilia; they are mortal enemies, both connected to Caesar and intriguers that are as cold as they come.
I did not need to watch this to learn the history, though it would definitely be good for that. For me, the greatest pleasure is the painstaking accuracy of the portrayal of Rome and life at that time. The viewer is served a host of wonderful images, vivid colors, and very well drawn characters. You can not only smell Rome, but feel the chaos and fear that convulsed the city at this time. Then there is the manner in which people lived, evocations of their non-Christian religious beliefs and rituals, the conditions in which slaves lived, and the character of the Roman aristocrat, who would resignedly accept death for the sake of honor or as the price for risking political gain. It is truly wonderful, and the bonus disk has excellent mini-documentaries that explain much of it. (I did find inaccuracies, such as the claim that "anything goes" sexually - the Romans were notorious homophobes, for example - but these were very few.)
There is a debate floating around the internet about whether "Rome" is "better" than "I. Claudius" and I think it's time to take a look at the larger issues which have made "Rome" deservedly famous, but why any comparison of these two titanic depictions of Rome during the decades around the time of Christ is really rather silly.
"Claudius" suffers more than a little by comparison with "Rome" as indeed "Rome" probably will with a series made 30 years in the future: There will undoubtedly have been massive changes in technology and in technique, not to mention aesthetic values that will make what is now remarkable seem dull, plastic and dated to audiences in the year 2037 - if we haven't destroyed the underpinnings of civilized existence by then.
As far as Claudius goes, for television it was much closer (particularly in period peices) to stage acting and the camera work and demands of the audience were also markedly different. If "Claudius" comes off as mannered and "Shakespearean", that is because that is how it was intended to be. (By the way, people who throw around the term "Shakespearean" as a term of abuse are almost never actors. Shakespeare is a set of texts and an approach to drama not a manner of acting).
Anyone who compares Larry Oliver's work (Henry V, Othello and Julius Caeser spring most readily to mind) with anything on the screen today might be forgiven for asking why he was seen as such a great actor but at the time he spoke to people and to understand why one has to look a little harder at what he was trying to get across and how he did it.
In a similar fashion the production team of "Rome" are marked by their own time. We have the modern concern for meticulous versimillitude in visual terms. No peice of furniture or accessory is not researched and detailed down to the lavatory sponges which people used instead of toilet paper. We have the emphasis on tight, fast camera-work in the action scenes, and the attendant quotient of realistic gore (what does it look like when someone is actually decapitated - my suspicion is that there actually isn't quite enough spouting blood or screaming but that might have been a bit much for HBO.)
Characters are realistically emotional, witty and directly brutal. This not only serves the ancient Romans well, but it's also part of what we would like ourselves to be as well. Gone is the emotional restraint found in "Claudius". Absent too the Mel Gibson-style histrionics of Hollywood (a definite improvement for me personally: can anyone imagine anyone in "Rome" saying "At my signal, unleash Hell!" ?). The scripts for Rome are writing for our own grim, somewhat self-consciously decadent, anxiety-ridden times.
As a passing thought I want to defend the use of British slang particularly by the lower classes (e.g. the massively charismatic Titus Pullo). This might be a little jarring for some Americans but try to be a little more broad-minded about it: If a British actor wants to connect a Roman motivation with his own, the odd colloquialism might be useful. If it's unfamiliar to a modern US audience then they'll have to figure it out, or let it go as something they didn't understand at the time but can look up later. There is far too much pandering to simple-minded literalism in television and cinema these days and one of the great things about "Rome" is that it doesn't treat it's audience as if they were cretins.
On the subject of language, the linguistic medium for this production is British Standard English not American Standard English just as the linguistic medium in Battle Star Galactica is American Standard English (subclass Military Speak). English itself is increasingly better-understood as a family of distinct dialects each with their own idosyncracies and poetics. The creative possibilities that are opened up when we think of English this way are immense. The down side (if it is that) is that we will have to get used to translating other dialects of English and getting used to missing some things in translation the first time. The upside is that we will be able to coceive of the world in vastly richer terms. There will be more possibilities for nuance when we understand the full cultural and psychological weight behind these dialectical differences. Sure it's a bit more work, but the benefits are obvious to anyone who is mildly fluent in more than one language. For the rest of you, intellectual laziness has its own consequences, but they won't be nearly as benign in the future as they are right now.
I often wonder whether our imaginations are best served by only focussing on what is out there right now. Don't get me wrong. I love "Rome" but I also think we lose depth of understanding and a true sense of humanity when we neglect older versions and genres or re-tellings of the same story from other perspectives.
Let us have both "I, Claudius" and "Rome", they both teach us something about the ancients, about the human condition and about ourselves. A world without both would deserve to have to watch Speilberg re-runs for all eternity.
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Post by georgeseurat on Mar 7, 2009 23:56:54 GMT -5
I thought Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo were historical figures, weren't they? Just that they didn't have sufficient background in historical documents, so they the writers can develop their own characters, same as Atia.
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Post by MarryMeOwen on Mar 8, 2009 0:22:03 GMT -5
That's correct, they were soldiers mentioned in the historical/personal writings of Ceasar , De Bello Gallico Book 5 chapter 44. I am just referring that the Rome writers/producers took some liberties in how the characters of Pullo and Vorenus were developed since not much was known about their personal lives except what Ceasar wrote about. Basically in Rome most of the political activities we see Vorenus and Pullo doing are partially depicted in Cesar's writings but their personal lives were a mystery which is what I mean by embellishment in their case.
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Post by Leanne on Mar 8, 2009 6:03:33 GMT -5
Thanks guys these were interesting reads I never saw I Claudius I think because I anticipated it being to heavy (to school work orientated if you know what I mean) I should try and find it now to compare....Rome is a much more modern interpretation and definitely appeals more to people of this day and age...detail as you say are well researched but they do from time to time make errors Like Vorenus's hammer from episode 3......Latin on the doors of Atias house all very cleverly used....and pertinent daily issues like the origins of the stars etc...makes it all really personal and not just historic I look forward to your ideas about Season 2.... George : Yes they were real people heres' a link to the article posted on this board kevinmckidd.proboards76.com/index.cgi?board=rome&action=display&thread=802
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