Somewhere in the North of Britain, AD117. A rain-sodden band of Roman soldiers from the infamous Ninth Legion bemoan their lot while keeping guard at midnight in a fort. It's the start of Neil Marshall's Ancient-era action movie Centurion, and the hero, Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) grumbles, "I know this enemy well. They will not be drawn into open combat. This is a new kind of war!"
Suddenly, the soldiers are snapped to attention by a noise from the darkness outside. It could be the dreaded savages from the local Pict tribes. It could be a Boadicea-style female assassin who is lurking in the shadows. Or it could, given the right timings and locations, be the sound of the cast and crew from another competing Ninth Legion movie, which is gaining ground near by. This one is called Eagle of the Ninth, and stars Jamie Bell, is directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), and is coming soon to a sword'n'sandals-filled cinema near you.
There has never been a better time to make a movie set in the Ancient era. Besides these two high-profile Ninth Legion films, we are also about to witness a big-budget Clash of the Titans remake that features Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and $100 million worth of special effects. We've already had the Greek gods and teen heroes in Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Mickey Rourke, meanwhile, is starring in Dawn of War, a mortals-versus-gods adventure from the director Tarsem Singh (The Fall). Plus, the TV series Rome is being revamped for the big screen, and the hottest story in US TV right now is the explicit raunch and violence in the Gladiator-inspired series Spartacus: Blood and Sand.
So what's behind this resurgence? And why is it happening now? And what, for that matter, have the Romans ever really done for us? They've given us great stories, says Spartacus's executive producer, Robert Tapert, who sees the renewed interest in all things Ancient as a timely confluence of primal storytelling archetypes and movie-making technology. "What all these stories have in common is a great heroic central figure who sets out on a hero's journey. But the technology has evolved so far that it can allow a new generation of film-makers to bring these journeys to life in ways that were unthinkable before."
Basil Iwanyk, producer of Clash of the Titans, agrees, and says that the intention with his film was to "marry old world David Lean-esque film-making with the visual effects seen in modern movies, so that the world is so intense and so specific that audiences can immerse themselves in it." He also puts the sword'n'sandals resurgence into a historical and commercial context, saying that although the genre died out after the high-water mark of movies such as Ben Hur and Cleopatra, Ridley Scott's Gladiator in 2000 was a game-changer.
"When Gladiator was being made, it was seen as very brave," Iwanyk says. "The subject had become one of the great Airplane jokes: 'Do you like gladiator movies?' But then the movie came out, and it was fantastic. Commercially, it opened up a lot of eyes in the studios. And in the film business, if one type of genre works then it has a knock-on effect."
Movies such as Troy and Alexander followed. But the former performed less successfully than expected, and the latter was an outright disaster, the makers of both movies having failed to comprehend the secret to Gladiator's success. The genius of Scott's movie, Marshall says, was that it had played every single scene "straight down the line, and without a hint of camp". Marshall, who agrees that it has been something of a "foot race" to get his Ninth Legion movie out before Macdonald's, says that a lack of camp is essential to the modern-day depiction of the Ancient era.
Even 300, the thong-and-pecs party that bristled with homoerotic tension, never resorted to the ironic wink or the comedy nod. "On our set, of course, there were a lot of Life of Brian gags, and certainly when Dominic West walked on in his full costume someone did say, 'He wanks as high as any man in Wome!' But that just helps to get it out of your system, so there's none of it left in the film itself."
Iwanyk says that the producers and writers of Clash of the Titans went through their movie "over and over again, making sure there wasn't anything goofy or that would make people roll their eyes. We didn't want audiences laughing at our hero, Sam Worthington, who is a man's man, because he's wearing a skirt. Or that we've got men with beards and braided hair. Or even the fact that we have gods talking. So, yes, camp is a big thing we tried to avoid."
Even Tapert, who previously worked on the high camp of Xena: Warrior Princess (his wife is the Xena star Lucy Lawless) and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, says that the mood had changed by the time Spartacus came along. "We wanted the characters to play it 100 per cent straight, and to allow the dramatic flourishes - the sex and the violence - to be the things that would provoke the audience. We never wanted to acknowledge to the audience that they are in on a joke, which we did periodically on Xena and Hercules."
Tapert says that he is aware that the sex and violence in Spartacus - which runs the gamut, respectively, from orgies to on-screen dismemberment - is regarded as controversial. The British pressure group Mediawatch UK is so offended that it is trying to block Spartacus from reaching our TV screens. Tapert dismisses the group, saying that its members are using the show to "fuel their own popularity and promote their own agenda". He says: "Although we've pushed the boundaries of what one would normally see on television, there are ancient plaques from the houses of prostitution in Pompeii that are also pretty explicit."
And yet, there must be more to the rebirth of the sword'n'sandals era than special effects, heroic storytelling, stiff wrists and sex? Well, yes, and it's called subtext, says Natalie Haynes, part-time Classical scholar and author of the forthcoming book The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. "The reason that we keep coming back to these stories and characters is partially because they are crisp and clear in dramatic terms," she says. "But they are also sufficiently sparsely drawn for us to insert our own subtext."
Such as? Centurion, for instance, depicts an imperial occupying army bogged down in guerrilla warfare in mountainous Scottish terrain not unlike a soggy Afghanistan. "This is a war without honour and a war without end," muses Quintus Dias.
The parallels with modern warfare are deliberate, Marshall says. "I didn't want to ram it down the audience's throat, but the analogy is certainly there. I'm not trying to make a political film, but it's obvious nonetheless." Spartacus, too, Tapert says, through its depiction of a lusty Roman upper class, "is consistently and absolutely addressing ideas and social mores, such as homosexuality, that are pertinent to modern society."
That is surely the key both to the genre's power and its sudden resurgence in popularity. At a time when mainstream films address the issues of the day only with anodyne drivel such as the action-thriller Green Zone, it is up to the ancients to redress the balance. These tales explore urgent modern ideas about the end of empire, the effects of globalisation and the battle for natural resources that would be regarded as unseemly if delivered in a contemporary setting. It's as if we can see ourselves clearly only by looking through an allegorical mirror that is 2,000 years old.
Haynes says that we are more like "them" now than we ever were. "At pretty much no point in history between then and now did things look so similar," she says, referring to parallels in our societies, politics and cultures. "We are drawn to the ancients because they are exactly like us. And there is a temptation to be very grown-up about it, and say, 'No! Now is now, and then was then'. But really, it's just too tempting to pin the two together."
Clash of the Titans is released on April 2
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