Another film, another one as the Romans as the bad guys....
How about one with the Americans or Israel.... or the British Empire.
about time.
Eat the Neocons.
Yes, it's SO unfair of Hollywood to use people who owned slaves and watched death matches for fun as villains! Hollywood should celebrate slave-ownership, and lethal abuse of slaves, prisoners, and minorities!
And the scary thing is, there are people who would think I'm being serious, and who would agree with me.
It is kind of unfair, actually. All of these ancient people did those things, it wasn't just the Romans. And they were hardly the most savage of the bunch (they had an especially high number of victims strictly because they were more successful than the other groups around them). Their repeated portrayal as something akin to Nazis, on film and television, however, gives a misrepresentation of history and further pushes an untrue narrative that the Roman Empire were the evil bullies who were taking over, slaughtering, and enslaving otherwise peaceful, hippy-esque people around them (which none of these places were). In fact, it could be argued that the Roman Empire was actually less savage and cruel than other places at the time, as they were often more educated and civilized, contributing significantly to law, governance, engineering, architecture, and culture.
This is a very common thing in films and it's consistently "unfair". The portrayal of Europeans when compared to Native Americans first comes to mind. Or, keeping to Ancient Roman times, Christians were repeatedly portrayed as innocent little angels who were being persecuted by the evil pagans. Never mind the fact that they went on to become the persecutors of the pagans once they had the power to do so and, even before then, many of them were causing trouble left and right, behaving like a culty ye old Antifa.
So maybe the Romans were more civilized and less cruel than some of their neighbors. Sure, they watched the odd gladiator or political prisoner die in the arena for fun, but they didn't burn babies alive as part of their religious ceremonies! So the Carthaginians did, but did that give the Romans the right to burn their city to the ground, enslave the surviving population, and sow the fields with salt so nobody could ever establish an agricultural base there again? Hell no!
But the truth is that we consider the ancient Romans to be good movie villains not because they were the worst people who ever lived, but because they remind modern people of their own worst tendencies.
It's just a matter of the false perspective that audiences acquire over time is all. There's obviously nothing wrong with portraying Rome's less flattering aspects, just as there's nothing wrong with portraying the bad aspects of Europeans who colonized America, but when we repeatedly hone in so hard on the negatives of only one group it can have the tendency leaving an otherwise uninformed audience with the false impression that this group was some sort of evil anomaly in an otherwise kind and gentle world. It's just my opinion, of course, but I personally feel like it's better for us to have a better context of history when it comes to things like these and would appreciate if films didn't repeatedly show things in such a black and white way.
shareYeah, well, today's Hollywood loves anything "pre-sold", and the ancient Romans could be said to be pre-sold as villains! And they're so useful to both good writers and bad, they're similar enough to modern capitalist "civilization" that a good writer can use them as a mirror to reflect modern society, and a bad writer can let a twisted imagination run wild in the colosseum. And BTW one of the reasons that it's so easy to portray Romans as bad guys is because they were unrepentant empire-builders, and anyone who sets out to conquer the known world is automatically a bad guy, and that's certainly something modern humans need to be reminded of!
Anyway, I'd be very happy if Hollywood started greenlighting projects from less-known historical sources, like how about the rise of Theodosia of Byzantium, from enslaved prostitute to Empress? But until that happy day, who doesn't like a good swords-and-sandals movie.