Roman Empire

Ok, so after watching season one and starting season 2, I have a few nitpicks.

Even though the story of the first season was amazing. Of course, it did help that it might be the most interesting emperor of all time, and despite all the bad things I'm gonna write here, the sets of the actual important story elements looked and were quite good.

So, firstly, I must say, the battles they show in the beginning of S2, with scesar, were very inaccurate. Romans fought in organised lines and formations.definitely not in a large battle, without shields in a huge chaos of 1on1 fights. I mean, it's the minimum. You get experts, which aren't so insightful to be frank, and sell this to me as a almost science docu and get that wrong? Idk.

So yeah. Like I said in the title, for some reason all the long shots are weirdly bad In a way that just doesn't make any sense, In any context.

I mean, the regular scens look great, but you just feel your watching two different productions.

One made in India on Redmi 6a and the other, well, an actual film studio. It's confusing and got me really un immersed in scenes switching back and forth. There is litterly no reason. Put a stock photo instead. Anything. It's not complicated .You can get much better phootage in the 50s.

I don't get it.

It is generally entertaining, but the depictions and descriptions of the battlers are not accurate and miss some of the pivotal details. But worse is the depictions of Roman fighting style - Roman infantry fought in tight formations and stabbed with the Gladius! They really needed a military historian on this show. Instead you see Roman infantry hacking and slashing like some Hollywood depiction of ancient warfare - groan.

At first I thought this gives game of thrones a run for its money and I wondered why people gave it bad reviews. It seemed normal people give it 1 for not being more exciting while history buffs give it 1 for not being historically accurate. I don't care if they added in a vase, good looking women, or a mountain since going into this show you need to understand its going to take some liberties. If you think it's boring than I doubt there is any version of this that could make you happy. What made me not like it as much is after watching the first episode where they had history experts on and built up this whole thing complaining about commodus being a untrained loser is the fact that he was only 13 years old at the time! The part is being played by a 28 year old man! It's much harder to blame a 13 year old not being ready to be the king of Rome than it is a 28y/o man. Also Commodus's mother either got some sickness and died or committed suicide. The show makes it look like the king killed her with wine. Historically there doesn't seem to be anything to back that up and some people disagree that she even had anything to do with the uprising. After not even hearing the alternate views of these events where Netflix seemed to choose the most extreme version for extra hype this really is making me skeptical about the rest of this show.

I'm not really a history buff so I can't comment to the legitimacy of the reports, but I can say it's a fairly enjoyable docuseries. The re-enactments are good quality and add to the series, the interviews at least appear knowledgeable.

A dramatized documentary on the Roman Empire, focussing in each season on one of its most famous, or infamous, emperors.

This series had some potential: a dramatized documentary on the Roman Empire - sort of The World At War meets Rome or Spartacus, right? An edifying documentary mixed with realistic, gritty, action-filled dramatizations.

Well, no. It doesn't even come close.

The documentary side is pretty basic. Sean Bean is no Laurence Olivier when it comes to narrating: he really doesn't have the gravitas or accent for it. The facts presented in the documentary are then sometimes distorted to make for better drama (though some of the original facts were interesting enough, so why change them?). So, as a documentary it is mediocre.

The drama itself is pretty bland. There's a few good action scenes but it is mostly pretty dull. Performances are at best passable and nothing more. Some of the minor actors are quite bad.

So history got rewritten for the sake of drama, and the drama largely sucks. Seems like they should have just stuck with the facts. And got a better narrator.