'Spartacus:
Blood and Sand,' gross too
The Starz drama on ancient Rome is heavy on gore
By Tom Conroy
Jan 27, 2010
Ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, Western cultures have pointed to that society’s bloody entertainment and depraved sexual behavior as evidence of their own moral progress.
If a more virtuous culture succeeds our own, evidence of 21st-century America’s depravity will be readily available in an hour of “Spartacus: Blood and Sand.”
The new series, airing on Starz on Fridays at 10 p.m., is an updating of the story of the rebellious Roman gladiator told in the 1960 Kirk Douglas movie, if by updating you mean adding copious amounts of absurdly graphic violence, obscenity and gratuitous sex and nudity.
While fans of all those additional elements should be relatively pleased with the series, fans of engrossing story lines and originality will probably feel short-changed.
Visually, the film is an unashamed rip-off of the gold standard in absurd classical-era violence, the movie “300.” Like that movie, “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” replaces conventionally realistic backdrops with computer-generated ones that often recall the look of comic books.
The battles and gladiatorial contests are slowed down whenever a weapon pierces flesh. That rotating effect familiar from the “Matrix” movies allows viewers to see the spurting arteries and pulsing flesh close-up and from several angles. As in “300,” the colors are muted, except for the red in the blood, which usually jets out toward the camera.
Traditionally in movies and TV, a gory death was reserved for bad guys. In “Spartacus,” the camera zooms in on all of the mortally wounded characters. Whereas in a tragedy, this might be expected to produce pity and terror, the desired reaction here seems to be “Cool!”
As for the depiction of sex, beyond the intimate moments that the virtuous Thracian Spartacus (Andy Whitfield) shares with his wife, Sura (Erin Cummings) — “If one night is all we have left,” she says, “I shall make the most of it” — it’s generally a tawdry affair. Evidently, when rich Romans had friends over for dinner, they would fill the wading pool with naked slave girls pretending to have sex with each other.
When Spartacus’ gladiator boss, Scotus Accentus Miscastus (John Hannah) and his wife, Usetabexena (Lucy Lawless), attempt marital relations, they need to have the servants help out.
The full-frontal nudity is gender neutral: The slutty blonde Slutulus Blondus (Viva Bianca) undresses for us and her husband, Badus Generalus (Craig Parker), the bad Roman general whose betrayal of the Thracians leads to Spartacus’ enslavement.
And while Nastius Gladiatorus (Manu Bennett) is hazing Spartacus in the gladiators’ locker room, he is completely naked. Even back then, wouldn’t Spartacus have eventually offered to hand him a towel?
(Full disclosure: I’m faking some of those Roman names, but in my defense, the show’s confusing assortment of British Commonwealth accents makes it hard to hear them.)
The dialogue is at its most obscene when the soldiers or gladiators are discussing combat, further sexualizing the man-on-man action. Delivering that over-the-top dialogue, the actors do as well as can be expected in a project in which visuals take precedence over everything else.
That said, the second episode, airing this Friday, is far less interesting visually than the premiere, with fewer scenes of combat and only one location, the gladiator school. Like many action series, “Spartacus” may have overspent on its pilot.
If this means that in future weeks, viewers will be getting skimpier servings of severed heads, shaved naked gladiators and strictly-for-titillation lesbianism, it’s hard to feel sorry for them.
Gorging on violence and voyeurism didn’t really work out that well for the Romans, right?
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