Acta 3 Gladiator Reflection
For this Acta, I decided to watch the movie Gladiator. I thought this was fitting to watch as my previous acta focused on the Colosseum, Roman amphitheaters, and gladiatorial fights as a whole. I believe that watching this movie helped me have a better understanding of how gladiatorial fights in Rome worked, even though the movie glamorized much of what ancient Rome was like.
The movie follows Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius and his experience as Commodus, the son of emperor Marcus Aurelius, betrays his trust and kills his father in order to gain political power. The movie follows the story of Meridius as he is sent into gladiatorial practice in order to avenge the death of his family.
Given my past acta on the colosseum and gladiatorial fights in Rome, I wanted to compare and contrast what I saw and learned in the documentary and how well it is portrayed in the movie. At the beginning of the scene the movie depicts many gladiators tightly packed with their weapons in the areas below the arena. In the documentary, they mentioned that gladiators were often kept down here until their time to fight, and stage workers and staff also stayed down here during the “show”. In the movie, I believe they did a good job accurately portraying what these under passages looked like. The scene looked very similar to what you would see at the real colosseum given the building structure and architecture. When the gladiators walked out into the arena, the shape of the colosseum seemed off to me. While the scene did a good job portraying how many people the arena can actually fit, I feel like the shape of the colosseum itself was lacking. The movie depicted a very steep seating area for people that made the arena seem taller than it actually was. Furthermore, there seemed to be some sort of covering or shade towards that top of the arena that seemed unrealistic to me. However, I do believe the movie did a good job accurately portraying the decoration which included heavy marble and a lavish design. When showing the actual fight, I question the realisticness of who was fighting. It seemed as if the gladiators were fighting more important individuals as they were dressed in gold armor and had chariots. From what I understand, these gladiators usually fought each other or fought wild beasts. Finally, the movie does a good job accurately portraying the armor worn by gladiators as it often was not nevey effective and different based on where the fighting gladiator was captured from. The movie did a good job of demonstrating this through the costumes in the scene.
