Cinema of Swords

#34, It's Oscar Time!

Cinema of Swords

A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes)

By Lawrence Ellsworth

Welcome to the Cinema of Swords Substack! This series is a companion and expansion to the Cinema of Swords hardcover (Applause Books, 2023), which collects over 400 tasty mini-reviews of screen swashbucklers from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.

This Substack builds on that foundation, continuing forward with reviews of swordplay movies and TV shows from the ‘90s to the present. Every week I’ll present two to four illustrated reviews on a common theme written both to inform and to entertain.

If you enjoyed the contents of the book, this weekly series will give you plenty more of the same. (And if you haven’t seen the book, look for it wherever you do your book shopping!)

It’s Oscar Time!

Sword-slingin’ historical adventure films don’t often get the nod at the Academy Awards, where the Oscars usually go to prestige dramas, so 2001 was a banner year for swashbucklers, with bunches of golden bald guys going to both Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Scott’s Roman epic was nominated in twelve categories and took home five awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Russell Crowe), while Lee’s wuxia romance was nominated for ten awards and won four, including Best Art Direction, Best Original Score (for Tan Dun), and Best Cinematography. In an amazing achievement for a Chinese-language film, Crouching Tiger was nominated for Best Picture (losing to Gladiator), but it did win Best Foreign-Language Film. (Personally, not to take anything away from Gladiator, but I’d have given Crouching Tiger the Best Picture prize as well.)

Gladiator

Rating: *****

Origin: USA/UK, 2000

Director: Ridley Scott

Source: Universal Blu-ray

After making several films with indifferent success, Ridley Scott, a director of striking visuals but inconsistent storytelling, decided to take a chance on a movie that was almost pure action. The result, Gladiator, about a weary warrior forced to fight for both the right and for vengeance, depicts warfare and combat in ancient Rome from the mass scale to the personal, in a string of bloody battles tied together by a relatively simple story. It shares its basic premise with The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964): wise but dying Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) decides to appoint as his heir the noble and compassionate General Maximus (Russell Crowe) rather than his cruel and increasingly deranged son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). When Commodus learns of this, he murders his own father, commands the death of Maximus and his entire family, and declares himself emperor anyway, so there.

However, Maximus survives the slaying of his wife and son and, delirious from a near-fatal wound, is captured by slavers and transported (apparently by the power of hallucination) to a Roman province in North Africa, where veteran fight impresario Proximo (Oliver Reed, in his final role) picks him out to train as a gladiator. In the Roman Colosseum, Commodus has revived the cruel games that Marcus Aurelius had suppressed, and Proximo dreams of returning to the stage with a world-class team of fighters. Maximus, himself determined to get to Rome to take his revenge on Commodus, and fighting incognito as “The Spaniard,” becomes the leader of Proximo’s gladiators and his ticket back to the big time.

Inspired, in part, by the opening scenes of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), Scott kicks off his film with horrific violence in a battle in the forests of Germania between the Gauls and a Roman legion led by Maximus. Unlike Ryan, which showed the chaos of war almost entirely from the viewpoint of a single soldier, Scott moves the POV in and out from Maximus to the entire battlefield, establishing the general’s personal fighting prowess as well as his strategic mastery of his troops and their morale. It’s so good that it elevates Scott into the pantheon of great action directors, so we’re willing to put up with the forty minutes of exposition that follow, in which we learn that Commodus’ sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) was a former lover of Maximus, another reason for Commodus’ hatred and jealousy, as he has an unhealthy attachment to his sister. To be fair, this sequence of betrayal, murder, grief, and rebirth as a gladiator moves right along, and Scott’s unerring visual sense keeps it compelling even when there’s a lot of talk. It certainly blows away the turgid plodding of Anthony Mann’s Fall of the Roman Empire, its closest cognate.

The scenes of gladiatorial training and combat draw upon a much superior model, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), which also focused on a stoic and near-silent warrior stricken with grief, but Scott moves much more quickly through the stoic grieving to get to the swordplay. And let’s talk about that. From The Duellists (1977) on, Ridley Scott has always danced around the audience’s vicarious participation in violence, a fraught issue for us at Cinema of Swords, but here he addresses the matter directly: a gladiator exists to entertain through violence, and after playing to the crowd through slaughter, Maximum waves his bloody weapon as the camera circles around him and famously asks, “Are you not entertained?”

Not subtle, but Scott’s breach of the fourth wall does force watchers to ask themselves if that’s what they came for, to consider the issue for at least a second or two before inevitably answering, “Well, yeah, I guess so. Duh.” By which time Maximus and company are already on their way to Rome as the story sets up the next spectacle of violence.

The combat, as choreographed by Nick Powell, is more theatrical than realistic, as you might expect: at one point Maximus uses a gladius in each hand like giant freehand scissors to snip off an opponent’s head. (Sure.) The arena fights are undeniably exciting, and avoid repetition by having Maximus employ his general’s leadership skills to organize Proximo’s men into a coordinated team. As in Spartacus, on top of the romance there’s a political subplot involving the emperor vs. the Roman senate, included to give the arena fights broader significance, but it’s dealt with handily enough and doesn’t slow the movie much. (And the plot includes Derek Jacobi as an intriguing politician, cannily invoking I, Claudius into the bargain.)

The dialogue is nothing to write home about, frankly, being mostly quippy clichés and badassery we’ve heard before, but the actors are fully committed and declaim it like it’s Shakespeare, wringing the juice out of every line. There’s not a bad apple in the extensive cast, and the leads, Crowe, Phoenix, Nielsen, and Reed, all provide memorable performances. In a last-minute surge, Gladiator took the Academy Award for Best Picture, and though it’s perfectly fine I would argue that it isn’t quite a film for the ages—but it sure as hell deserved the Oscar more than Braveheart.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Rating: ***** (Essential)

Origin: China/Taiwan/Hong Kong/USA, 2000

Director: Ang Lee

Source: Sony Pictures Classics DVD

This is a top-notch film of adventure and romance, possibly the finest wuxia movie ever made, in which director and co-screenwriter Ang Lee draws on the best aspects of both Chinese/Hong Kong and Hollywood cinema. It’s based on a novel by Wang Dulu, the fourth of a five-volume series, so as the story begins there’s already a lot of unspoken backstory between romantic leads Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) and Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). However, the script respects the viewers’ intelligence and gives them time to understand the depth of their relationship as events unfold.

Meanwhile, a whole lot of stuff happens, because this is a movie chock-full of incident that never lets up. Set in an unspecified period of the Qing Dynasty, when swords and spears had not yet been made obsolete by gunpowder, Li Mu Bai is the exemplar of the Wudang school of armed and unarmed martial arts. After many years of knight errantry defeating evil rogues, Li is ready to retire after one final mission, finding and slaying the woman who murdered his master, the ruthless Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei—yes, the Golden Swallow herself). But first he gives up his enchanted sword, Green Destiny, because he doesn’t want to sully it with Jade Fox’s blood; Shu Lien, a woman warrior and head of a security agency (and Li’s long-time unrequited lover), agrees to take it to Beijing for him.

That’s the basic setup, but beyond that trying to summarize the plot would be a mistake, and anyway, if you haven’t seen this yet, you really must. After Green Destiny reaches Beijing, it’s stolen by a masked and black-clad martial artist whose aerial kung fu enables her to glide over the city’s rooftops, and suddenly we’re in a world of spectacular and balletic wuxia combat, as legendary fighters contend with each other in various hyperbolic face-offs. But unlike many (if not most) martial arts-heavy films, none of these combats are gratuitous, every one is in service to the story, each fight significant in context. And some of them are just flat-out drop-dead beautiful, such as the dreamlike confrontation between Li and the masked sword-thief high in the swaying canopy of a bamboo forest, where the law of gravity is suspended by the mystic uplift of peerless kung fu.

On top of Li and Shu Lien’s heartrending mature romance, there’s even another full love story of passionate youth between second leads Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), a willful and independent daughter of the nobility, and “Dark Cloud” Lo (Chang Chen), the dashing outlaw hero who robs her desert caravan. And the character of Jen brings us to this movie’s theme, because in addition to romantic adventure, it has something serious to say about the confines of gender roles in traditional societies. Young Jen feels most trapped by these strictures and fights hardest against them, but they also constrain Shu Lien, Jade Fox, and even Li Mu Bai, causing untold harm that ends in tragedy for most of them. Kudos to Lee for addressing the subject in a thoughtful and sensitive way, yet without drowning the film’s countervailing sense of the love and beauty of life.

In short, this is an outstanding film, a genuinely moving love story about people who can punch their way through walls and who fight colorful opponents with names like Iron Eagle, Flying Cougar, and Shining Phoenix. Who needs more than that? Don’t miss it.

Next Week: The Last Labor of Hercules. Don’t miss it!

About Lawrence Ellsworth

Lawrence Ellsworth is the historical fiction nom de plume of Lawrence Schick, author of The Rose Knight’s Crucifixion and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. See my website at swashbucklingadventure.net.

My current ongoing project is compiling and translating new, contemporary editions of all the books in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, a series that when complete will fill nine volumes. Book 8, Shadow of the Bastille, is currently being published in serial form on the Substack platform, and Book 9, The Man in the Iron Mask, is forthcoming. Check out the series at musketeerscycle.substack.com.

As Lawrence Schick, I’m a writer and game designer primarily associated with narrative or role-playing games, a career I’ve pursued for over forty years, starting in the late 1970s working for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, moving into video games in the ‘80s and then online role-playing games in the ‘90s. I was lead writer and “loremaster” for The Elder Scrolls Online for over nine years, and most recently I returned to D&D as Principal Narrative Designer for Larian Studios’ smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3.

Copyright © 2024 Lawrence Schick. All rights reserved.