The Gladiator gets extended

Gladiator (2000)

The problem with these big Hollywood spectacles is that they are rather one dimentional, they thoroughly entertain and thrill you when you first see them, maybe even leave you with something to think about. But usually the more times you watch them again the worse they get as there's nothing more for them to give and thus you end up paying too much attention to the small details, which usually tend to not work as well. I've seen this movie now about 5 or 6 times and even though none of those times has topped the first time I saw it at the theater, I still find this one working surprisingly well. The reason I watched this one again was because I updated my old DVD to a Blu-Ray which had the extended cut on it and I hadn't seen that before. I must say these Universal 100th Anniversary Collector's Edition Digibooks are absolutely brilliant. You can find good deals on them with less than 10 euros and with that you get the movie beautifully remastered on high definition and a ton of extra material in a nice book cover. Like I said the movie worked surprisingly well even though I've seen it often enough. Though of course the small things caught my eye a bit too much, like the problems with the background action in the war scene where people are just standing around there in middle of the battle and quite a few other small issues. But really I didn't mind them that much as the movie is still a great action packed drama with brilliant performances by the cast. Nowadays I don't see Russell Crowe's performance as great as I used to, it's still not bad by any means, but it's hugely overshadowed by Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris. So pretty much every supporting actor does more or less a better job than Crowe. Another thing which has changed during the years are the visual effects, back in the days they looked amazing, but now not that much, especially on Blu-Ray some of the CGI shots stand out quite clearly. But luckily there aren't that many of them and otherwise this movie looks and sounds amazing in HD. And about the sounds Hans Zimmer's score is a classic already so that of course works great. Anyway, most of the extended cut material was actually not that great. I mean it was very interesting to see the scenes and at parts they brought a bit more depth to the supporting characters, but to be honest those scenes were rather nonessential and well worth leaving out. So in the end they only dragged the movie a bit too much. This rating is for the extended cut, the theatrical cut, and acording to Ridley Scott that's the director's cut as well, would be a few points higher.
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