However, historians also have the right to point out differences. This is not nit-picking; it is the communication of actual historical science, which is as important as the film itself, if not more so.
Not everything is about making the most money. Sometimes, your legacy is about accurately recounting events based on the best available research.
No - some people's legacy is that. It's not sometimes that for everyone.
Bret Devereaux isn't wrong. He's also not in the film business.
Ridley Scott thinks "acceptable" means he may at least ask a historian to suggest things. He won't give Russel Crowe a raygun, he may misuse ballista freely and reinterpret gladiator school freely. They didn't die usually? Pshaw.
"nitpick" is the kind of pejorative he'd use I think. I don't think Devereaux is nit-picking, the battle scene and a shitload of other stuff is about as a-historical as you can get without Kirk Douglas and Ray Harryhausen.
"The Duellists" which is Scott's movie of a Joseph Conrad story is beautiful, "Barry Lyndon" (by Stanley Kubrick) levels of attention to detail. I have little doubt Historians of Napoleonic era rip it to shreds. Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine .. just wonderful.
I'm hoping the days where movies show the Romans forming testudo, moving up to fur clad enemies and then breaking up to do one on one gladiator style individual battles are gone.
He absolutely tore into Rings of Power, but that only makes me like him more.
He does get a bit worked up, understandably, when the Romans attack with an M777 howitzer firing napalm shells. Rome wiped everything that stood in their way for a long while, but not like that.
In fact, since I got curious, it seems nobody fires napalm out of howitzers, it's non-trivial to combine the thin easy-to-break shell skin needed by napalm with something tough enough to be fired from artillery [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M777_howitzer#Ammunition
[2]: https://www.quora.com/Was-napalm-ever-used-in-artillery-roun...
However I would be interested in seeing someone put to the test his thesis that a more historically grounded battle scene would be even more epic and visually interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_Wood#Location_for_filmi...
They didn’t have them, and thus, couldn’t really fight well, from horses.
Stirrups are one of those “silly little ideas” that changed the world.
I’m pretty sure that stirrups have been crucial to cavalry tactics since they showed up in Europe (I think around the Dark Ages). Being able to stand up in the saddle was certainly important to lancers.
Of course, horse training was also important.
I couldn't remember the idiot's name at the end of the movie.
My only detailed memory the next day was "My name is Biggus Dickus Dorkus Maximus. You keeled my {long list}. Prepare to die.". Except played straight. Oh, and some kind of stupid solarized heaven.
He does that all the time. Usually at the end of the series. Like down to "you can't film these tactics because it would be unsafe to have people holding the weapons realistically".
But if you're not going to depict Rome, why call the setting Rome?
Not that the movie wouldn't have sucked set in the Galactic Empire or whatever.
The Roman armies didn't dress as uniformly as this? They did in contemporary depictions (Trajan's column) so this is only as much artistic license as real Roman artists would take, and for the same reason - it's more visually impressive.
A Roman army wouldn't have this mix of units, or at least, it would have them in different proportions? Well, this wasn't typical, but you fight with the army you have - maybe your light infantry took heavy losses in a previous battle but you were able to cobble together a load of extra archers.
The tactics weren't typically Roman - or maybe they were, but not in 180 AD, because that specific period happens to be well-documented? Mixing some patterns from different eras is again allowable artistic license, one of the things that makes this art rather than an exact reproduction of a specific battle. And also, a good general adapts to the conditions: he had more archers than typical, so needed a different battle plan.
Comparing the weaponry anachronisms to having tanks at the Battle of Gettysburg is unfair: the American Civil War lasted 5 years, while Roman campaigns in Western Europe (Gaul and Germania) lasted at least a few centuries. It's closer to having an ironclad show up at Fort Sumter and complaining that design wouldn't exist until a year later.
The title literally says it's nitpicking, so I'm fine with that. But the introduction oversells it a bit more: "such a deceptive historical mess", etc. Like I said, big fan, but I was expecting inconsistencies more on the scale of "they seem to have marched 30,000 troops 100 miles in two days to relieve Minas Tirith, with no sign of any logistics to supply them".
The point is that Trajan’s column was propaganda. So this depiction is second-hand fiction (rehashing ancient propaganda with modern values).
The whole point of the series is that the scene is completely wrong from a historical point of view.
> Well, this wasn't typical, but you fight with the army you have
He makes the point that this was way outside the normal composition of a Roman army, not slightly off. And that as a result it would be terrible for Roman tactics and would have no hope to survive such a battle. Also, medieval siege engines in a pitch battle is just silly, there is no defending that.
I enjoyed the movie but I think that we can completely drop the assumption that it has any grounding in historical reality. It’s fiction, just slightly more realistic than Games of Thrones. Then we can appreciate the movie for the silly entertainment it is (and he does not dispute that).
As for "why pick 180 AD then?" it's clear that this was chosen in order to have Commodus as a villain. Commodus is shown mostly historically accurately: he really was with his aging father Marcus Aurelius in Germania, he really was a teenage emperor who was seen as immature, vain and capricious (if the historical record doesn't explicitly support "downright evil") and he really did love staging ever-greater gladiator games.