Movies about Ancient Rome

Guess who's behind these posts...

I'm not
Dubbing/making characters speak in your native language is logical when action takes place in an environment in which all characters speak the same language

That way you feel immersed and not like a foreigner

Tom and Felipe made those posts.

>"FORM TESTUDO!"
>enemy isn't even using archers
youtube.com/watch?v=Ae9Pj2JIero

The Romans in The Eagle all had American accents, to the pointof it almost becoming an Iraq war allegory.

Same with Keifer Sutherland in Pompeii.

Just watch Rome, it avoids all your peeves aside from:
>everyone speaking in British accents
I don't mind that one btw. In the end it just means that the whole cast is using one accent instead of a different one for each actor, because brits are picky about that unless it's a modern day setting.

>Statues are unpainted

Why do people keep recommending HBO Rome when I, Claudius is far better?

There are exceptions.

I'm not dissing American cinema, don't get me wrong.

>because brits are picky about that
What are you even saying?

>Could you imagine a Roman emperor with a thick New York accent? It'd be ridiculous. Also, Brits tended to make more high-brow shows than Americans, hence the accents.

It's not so much about the accent as much as the general demeanor of Brits extending their imperial character of stoic and disdainful. I expect Romans to give rousing speeches, banter, holler, bicker and vocalize naturally, not feel out of place when they do it. In that sense American accents sorta work better unlesd you go full chav gibberish.

Also they were disciplined... To a point. Romans in war are also made too "British" by showing them as mechanical and restrained instead of rowdy and hyper-aggressive, when historically they were far more of the later than the former. The legions killed emperors for not letting them go to war fast enough. Honestly, despite their civilizing task they were quite barbaric on their own and that duality is their defining trait.

Also, when most Americans hear a 'posh' Shakespearean British accent it implies to them intelligence and antiquity (although not necessarily the case). The Queen, for instance, sounds like she's from the middle ages. It's helpful when making an historical drama.

Very few people actually talk like that in England.

I, Clauduis, is the way to go, short, neat and historically accurate. It even has Brian Blessed, he plays Augustus.

>>movie about Ancient Rome
OK so far, but noting the word "movie," as opposed to, say. "historical reconstruction."

>>legionaries in lorica segmentata regardless of era
Just googled up 'Roman movie armor," you seem to be mistaken, I see a pretty wide variety of armor depicted in a wide array of movies. Since I don't know most of the movies on sight, I'm not sure how anachronistic any of it is -- but your complaint about a specific sort of armor being the only one shown seems to reflect more on how few movies you've seen.

>>everyone speaking in British accents

What would you prefer? Some number of them are British actors, of course. And British accents sound "classical" to audiences. Again, circling back to noting the word "movie," as opposed to, say. "historical reconstruction." Maybe if they all talked like they were on Hee-Haw you'd like it better?

>>gladiator matches are mindless and gory slogs to the death using unwilling participants

>>no obscene graffiti on the walls or color on the architecture

You need to see more of the movies, I guess.

>>indicating favorable/unfavorable with thumbs up/down

Yeah, that's a movie convention. Again, you are watching a movie.

Not OP and I totally see your point but these big budget films are made with at least one or two experts as consultants. The least the studios could do is be accurate.

Production values on "I, Clavdivs" render it almost unwatchable to anybody not raised on crappy BBC production values of that era.

The books are fantastic.

>The least the studios could do is be accurate.
Being accurate is not the point of a movie -- naming it entertaining, and making the production elements into a unified whole, and at the end of the day making shit-loads of money, are what is important.

Movies are fiction, even those inspired by history.

>everyone speaking in British accents
This. If anything, if you want to appeal to people in a wide demographic using the English language have them speak with American accents. At least "Yank" English sounds closer to the flatter tones of Latin than "British" English accents.

YOU WUZ A MADE MAN

>At least "Yank" English sounds closer to the flatter tones of Latin than "British" English accents.
Kek, no.

The way y'all speak with constant adenoids would be way too distracting.

Fyi, it's Garage, not Garaaaaaaage

These fucking things are everywhere and I don't understand why

Like said previously it's both due o the productions being with in the U.K. Or Americans associating thick Posh English accents with Classical times. Very few in the U.K. sound anything like we do in films. I don't mind though don't really expect Augustus to sound like some miner from Doncaster.

You forgot: people with blue eyes.

Because they're cheap and can be easily modified to fit many different body sizes and shapes.

>historically accurate.
Well yeah, if you only read Tacitus and literally ignore any sort of extra-Roman sources and the last 100 years of research.

Don't get me wrong I love both book and show. They are however just a retelling of senatorial historiography and hardly "accurate".

JUPITER'S COCK

>Kek, no.
No.
>y'all
90% of the US is not the Mid-West or Deep South, Britbong.
>it's Garage, not Garaaaaaaaaaaaage
And its knife not "n'ife".
And its cooler not "kowler".
And its counter-clockwise not "anti-clockwise".
And its cookie, not "biscuit".
And its train, not "trolley".

The only people who say y'all in the midwest are niggers. Midwestern English is the type of language you hear from newscasters, it's default American English.

>Midwestern English is the type of language you hear from the newscasters, it's default American English.
Are you from the Midwest? Because that's neither how we sound here in the Mid-Atlanatic/Eastern seaboard here.

Yes I am from the Midwest. Nobody says y'all here.

Not a movie but this documentary series was p good. Really wish they made a second season.

>The Queen, for instance, sounds like she's from the middle ages
no she doesn't. The closest we have to Medieval English is in the West Country, parts of the East Midlands and other small rural areas

>Roman patrician
>talks like a stereotypical 19th century British lord
>Roman pleb
>OI M8 SPARE A SESTERTIUS OR I'LL SHIV YA WITH ME SICA I SWARE ON ME MATER
Doesn't help that fucktarded Americans do the same for medieval or early modern period regardless of setting.

>kowler
What?
>trolley
We don't call trains trolleys. Oh sorry, I forgot that I can't use the internet in my motorised rollingham

Colonel should be pronounced co-lo-nel, not "kernel".

>movie
its not art you HACK get some taste what did you expect?

All of cinema is dogshit.

Incorrect, but there are only three good films ever made. La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc, Strasty po Andryeyo, and Batman v Superman.

>segmentata
Late principate was the time period where they were most widely in use
>British accent
Technically it's called "transatlantic" and is no more British than Texan is. It's a made for tv "posh sounding" accent to distinguish them from the common rabble.
>gory gladiator slags
The games were different things at different times, but during Commodus's time they were at the the height of their extravagance and depravity.
>unwilling
For most of them (except a privileged minority) that was the case. Seneca writes about a gladiator who committed suicide by choking himself with a lavatory sponge. Imagine how bleak and desolate your life would have to be for you to seriously consider jamming the thing everybody wipes their ass with down your throat, and then doing it because the lavatory is the one place in your life where you're allowed privacy.
>hollyRome
HBO did a much better job
>flaming arrows
Rule of cool. It's not completely out of bounds to think that they might be engaging in psychological warfare against the literal forest apes
> battle tomfoolery
The biggest offense are all the one on one duels that broke out.
>thumbs up/down
We don't know the exact gesture made but there was at least a "yes, do it!" And a "no, stop!" Gesture

Those are trifling reasons to hate the movie Gladiator. Hate it for fucking with history by having a fictional Gary Stu protagonist and a Bush era parable about republics verses empires, something the Romans never fucking debated. The real Commodus had all the legless crippled in the city rounded up and tied together so that they resembled a giant, and after Commodus went around clubbing them all to death one-by-one, he proclaimed himself a giant-slayer. That's the kind of shit that should have made it into the movie.

>battles not employing the famed front-line rotation tactic

How did it worked? Ive read about it several times in some novels, but i cant imagine how could they replace their mates without breaking the formation.

Look at Rome for a good representation.

Basically, men were in a checkerboard pattern with some spacing instead of a straight wall of shields, after the guys in front got tired they'd move aside for a fresh legionary to pop out like a PEZ candy and they'd keep rotating in chain until the enemy had sustained too many casualties to resist a charge.

>no MENA characters even though MENA made up 50% of the Roman Empire

AY GAIUS WATCH ME BREAK DIS CARTHAGINIAN GUY'S FUCKIN KNEE CAPS

It's expensive to be accurate and only historical autists give a fuck about shit like segmentata.

Even cheap aluminum strips could be done efficiently and look better than those leather fagjackets.

Seriously they look godawful.

Its highway not "motorway".

My point was she sounds old, from a different era. It's an accent nobody in the real world uses unless you're Camilla Parker-Bowles style rich.

It's "boot", not "trunk". "Rubbish", not "Trash". "Americlap", not "Americunt".

Oh wait, that last one...

Passion of the Christ is art partially because Mel had the Jews speak Aramaic, pray in Hebrew and had the Romans speak Greek or Latin.

there were germans in the roman empire and a lot of them were military

Kek

>Gets ambushed in Teutoburg Forest
Ayyyy OOPSADISILIANO

this is highly disputed and the specifics are unknown. Legionaries were assigned a spot that they were always in, the centurion for instance was always in the top left, this stuff definitely didnt happen when they were still using the phalanx. It could have happened, it wasnt always like that if it did, it was probably less of a consistent, organized thing and more of a personal "take my spot" sort of thing, as actually organizing that over the noise of a battlefield would be impossible. The hastati would retreat behind the principes and so forth but they opened lanes and it was a massive, drilled situation rather than a natural tactical move that would just happen willy nilly .There's no mention of the whistle they showed in the show in any historical records, seems like it could be exploited once the enemy realized what was going on and decided to push hars
d right when they were trying to switch. Its not like you can just effortlessly pull the whole front line off in unison.

>Lost legion

FUHGED ABOUT IT

>everyone speaking in British accents

It's always better to have an actor speak in their natural accent then have them try to speak in a foreign accent and butcher it. Also, you forgot that there should also be shit fucking everywhere on the roads.

>Batman v Superman
Logan beat it.

I tried but it pissed me off
>Octavian's character
>His whore mother
>Cuck storyline

Dropped it 4 episodes in maybe I'll try again idk

Segmentata is actually pretty cheap. It costs like $200 for a set of it

I watched Rome when it first came on BBC and loved it. I tried to rewatch it recently and couldn't even manage 1 episode.

Yeah im not sure i buy the HBO Rome scene, i doubt battle was that organised.

They should have given everyone cockney accents instead of RP.

I think my approach of learning about rome before watching the show was a mistake

What a good show

bro it's a fucking movie. art has the right to be as expressive or liberal with interpreting historical events as it wants. are old romantic paintings bad too because of their inaccuracies ?

They should have given everyone scouse accents.

>ey, cccaam down, Julius
>yew feckin tellin mey to caam down??!

>plays and looks the part of the meathead so well it took me a few episodes to realize he was acting

he was also good in Death Race 2050

Rome (the tv show) was just Game of Thrones without dragons.

Or to be precise, Game of Thrones is just Rome with dragons.

>100+ years after the invention of cinema
>still no movie with accurate Late Roman troops
>no documentaries with accurate Late Roman troops
>like one video game
being a late romeaboo is suffering

They hire one or two nerds to say they had historical accurate direction but then disregard everything they say. Just like crime shows who hire tech consultants - have you ever seen any one get computers right regardless? No, they just ignore the nerd because muh aurtistic licnese plate to jizz all over the history books.

This, the way the Romans actually used the tactic is unknown, only conjecture

Could i have some kind of timeline of roman armor? What did they use during the punic wars? what about the wars of the late republic?

What's there to like about late Rome? It's just kinda backward and shitty, filled with people who don't understand the enormity of their situations digging their own graves. It ceases to be a Roman empire and becomes the proxy through which Lombard and Germanic mercenary conflicts are settled.

those Irish accents in Alexander worked so well

This made me laugh way harder than it should have

>>battles not employing the famed front-line rotation tactic
We have virtually no evidence they actually did this, unless rotating the entire unit off the front.

>who were Stilicho and Aetius

>It's just kinda backward and shitty
Yes, using a combined arms force with better cavalry, better light infantry, and excellent heavy infantry is so backwards.

I suggest this book. First half focuses on the Greeks, second is on the Romans. It's excellent for understanding the equipment and tactics of the Greeks and Romans across different eras.

amazon.com/Warfare-Classical-World-Encyclopedia-Civilizations/dp/0806127945

...

Add soldiers and ghosts to that. Required reading.

>mfw Veeky Forums keeps making me buy books because I can never find free pdf's online
I've actually had to clear out a bookshelf in past year. Granted it was all a bunch of shit fiction I had as a teenager, but still.

amazon.com/dp/B00AHITZHE/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

GET THAT WALLET READY FAGGOT

And the leather version costs $50. Which will you get when you need to outfit 300 extras for a one off battle scene?

And it will still look like shit at that price, while also fitting like absolute shit and being horrible to wear.

Bad leather is inherently easier to deal with or even unfuck than bad metal.

If your source for that is Lindybeige, take it with a massive grain of salt. Even in the same video he inadvertently says he acted like a dickhead and then wondered why he wasn't listened to.

At least it has a Kindle version, as much as I despise e-books. My wife's going to kill me if many more books show up at the door.

You'll need a notepad. It's dense. Not hard to read, just very detailed. The man can tell you the EXACT diameter of a dory, and how he knows it.

>implying I don't literally carry a notebook with me everywhere I go, including work
My wife went through it one time to "see what I was always scribbling," and asked me seriously if I was doing drugs, I'm a very stream of consciousness note taker.

Reading the reviews kind of made my dick hard though. I love shit that gets really nitty gritty. I've been known to read Vietnam and WWII era combat manuals just to get a better understanding of how men fought and the reason they did it.

Which brings me back to sort of on-topic for the thread. It makes it a little hard for me to suspend my disbelief with certain movies sometimes. For instance, when I see a WWII film, and a soldier draws a side arm and holds it in a two handed isosceles stance, it trips me up, since they taught a one handed, side face stance to minimize your silhouette, or make you a smaller target. The entire reason the isosceles stance gained popularity over, say, the weaver stance is because of body armor. Things like the black bad guy having his thumb jammed into the bolt of an MAC-10 while "firing" it on a show like The Walking Dead doesn't bother me since my mind rationalizes it as a completely untrained actor in a split second scene, but someone using techniques and training that didn't even exist during the period triggers my autism fierce. The same goes for sword fights in most media, I totally understand why it's much safer for the actors to swing at each other's swords rather than each other's faces, so my mind just sort of ignores it.

That's more /k/ related autism though. Thanks for the recommendation.

Kek

>Aye augustus you wanna head out for a slice afta dis bonehead get his ass wiped

Modern Americans don't get the concept of a classist society. The accents help us figure out the difference between a patrician and a pigfucking savage.