Movies on ancient rome

[Jeroen Pelgrom]

never saw it i dont really go for OLD movies haha

*sigh*, nobody understands me... to get an idea see these couple of clips from the movie:

[url:1hxts3dg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggtgv5_kVCc[/url] (a real historical correct religious Carthegan ceremony to Moloch) :wink:

[url:1hxts3dg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypU9f2oNuO8&NR=1[/url]:
- the first 2 min. is Hannibal crossing the alps
- 20.37-25.00min. is he Roman siege of Syracuse with the deathray (funny the the device is almost the same as the one from mythbusters).

[marvises]

never saw it i dont really go for OLD movies haha

*sigh*, nobody understands me... to get an idea see these couple of clips from the movie:

[url:3rerdtt2]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggtgv5_kVCc[/url] (a real historical correct religious Carthegan ceremony to Moloch) :wink:

[url:3rerdtt2]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypU9f2oNuO8&NR=1[/url]:
- the first 2 min. is Hannibal crossing the alps
- 20.37-25.00min. is he Roman siege of Syracuse with the deathray (funny the the device is almost the same as the one from mythbusters).

oh ok yeah it looks decent

what about the HBO Series Rome?

For example the Battle of Philippi

[url:3rerdtt2]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4xq_-zABMc[/url]

[john m roberts]

Movies like Cabiria are time machines - windows into the past. The most amazing thing is realizing that you are seeing people doing something 95 years ago.

[marvises]

Movies like Cabiria are time machines - windows into the past. The most amazing thing is realizing that you are seeing people doing something 95 years ago.

yeah it would be better if it want a silent film

[Magnus]

ROME was very well done...it has it's historical "oopses" but I think most people here thought it was pretty good.

[Jeroen Pelgrom]

oh ok yeah it looks decent
what about the HBO Series Rome?

Rome was a nice series. But what i personally find amazing of old movies - especially the ones before 1950 - is that the special effects have not been done with a computer. Nowadays i you want a large battle/ spaceship/ monster/ big city in a movie you start up a pc and voila. Back then - you had to build something. The massive set of Babylon in Intolerance (a 1916 US movie by G.W Griffith) was build on a 1:1 scale:
.
The hunderds of people you see ARE hunderds of people, not some computer animation. People like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had to ask Fritz Lang how he did some special effects in his epic Metropolis from 1927 because they had no idea how to do it without modern stuff (Fritz Lang claimed that that was something he was really proud of).

What i find interesting is the development of scpecial effects that you see in these movies. When you compare a movie like Cabiria to Ghost in a Shell its amazing how far the TV-industrie has grown.

But its also funny that a 1950's monster by Ray Harryhausen is sometimes more convincing then a 2009 PC animation is some movie....

[M. Demetrius]

yeah it would be better if it want a silent fil

That's all they had in those days. If they remade it today, you'd hardly notice the real history in it, odds are. And there would be a romance involved, probably between some Roman lower officer and a Carthagenian noble girl to complicate things...he'd likely commit suicide rather than enter into the battle against his girl's people, but only after he'd found her for one last kiss. You've seen it before, no doubt, in twenty historical movies/songs. But it didn't happen, is the thing.

Hollywood, listen up! You guys can make a good, historical movie without wrecking the history. Sometimes just the story itself is better than the glamour!

(Are they listening??)

[marvises]

ROME was very well done...it has it's historical "oopses" but I think most people here thought it was pretty good.

it was a good series but i didnt get to see to many of the episodes since i never knew the schedule they were airing ^_^

[Marcus F.]

Last week they showed an old French-Italian movie from 1951 called "Messalina", where the Roman armour of the Legionaries was remarkably realistic looking as compared to films that were produced much later (only their shoulder segments were outdated).

[M. Demetrius]

Wow! Even the helmets are not bad.

[Graham Sumner]

Interesting pictures there Hadrian!

The third one down looks like it illustrates the very tiny brush like side crest in the helmet side tubes which later made an appearence in 'Masada'!

Some movie researchers actually do their research! As I have pointed out elsewhere, you can compare the legionaries in Judaea in 'The Robe', with an illustration in A Forestier's book 'The Roman Soldier' published in 1927 but still available on Amazon. The legionaries are dressed in blue tunics, red cloaks, have yellow brown pteryges, coolus type helmets and have leg wrappings exactly like those illustrated in the book.

In 'The Fall of the Roman Empire' 1963 you will see a couple of reconstructions of the two famous Heddernheim helmets. Both of which were correct for the period as well!

What tends to Happen is that the researcers show their results and somewhere along the line the decision is made that the public will expect such and such a thing and the research tends to get diluted so we end up with the usual state of affairs. That is why I like 'The Fall of The Roman Empire' because neither of those helmets would be regarded by the public as typically 'Roman' but they were kept in.

Graham.