LogFAQs > #977402109

meralonne posted...

Thats fair, I havent been overwhelmed by any of his movies for a while now.

And I fully acknowledge that Gladiator was, as another poster in this topic already pointed out, a Roman-era fanfic but everyone knew that going in from the trailers at release.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. People do take in more serious movies, well, seriously. That one famous scene in HBO's Rome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7MYlRzLqD0
Read the comments, people actually believe this is how the Romans fought despite being an invention of the series. In truth Polybios describes Roman units rotating in battle, not individuals as the scene suggests. So, movies and shows can seriously influence the way people perceive the past and what looks "right" in a period piece, even if it's wrong, a concept called "historical verisimilitude" by Professor Bret Devereaux.

Sometimes it can be "harmless" so to speak. Maybe not the right type of costume or cultural norms and the like. Movies are a form of entertainment and film makers are most likely going to push for something more dramatic and flashy rather than reconstruct the past. But other times it can be used to push negative stereotypes. A good example is Oliver Stone's Alexander from 2004:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B40fgE2ZpNo

The Macedonian army is portrayed very nicely here, and it sports the most accurate depiction of the Macedonian pike phalanx in film to date. The costumes are nice too, you can tell the difference between the Macedonian pikemen, the Macedonian hypaspists and even the Thracian peltasts with their phrygian cap, cloaks and crescent shields. The Macedonian forces are portrayed as pretty organized and professional even if the battle scene devolves into the chaotic free for all melee hollywood loves to portray between the film's heroes. Overall, it's clear that while the film takes some liberties in the depiction of the battle Oliver Stone clearly listened to Robert Lane Fox, the film's historical advisor.

However, when it comes to the Persians their depiction falls back to racist orientalists tropes, framing the battle as one of professional "Western" forces vs the Eastern "Asiatic horde". First before the battle you can clearly see Darius III wearing eyeliner which Achaemenid kings never wore, it's an effort to play up the "orientalist" angle and to make Darius appear more effeminate. Second the Persian infantry is all lightly armored, wearing no body armor nor helmets, in contrast to the Macedonian infantry. We know that the infantry core of the Persian royal army, the so-called immortals, wore scale armor, so it makes no sense to depict them that way. Third the Persians infantry makes a mad charge towards the organized Macedonian formation which runs contrary to Xenophon's description of the Persian army at the battle of Kounaxa of an organized Persian army, which he contrast the professionalism of the Persians to the rowdy and loud Greek mercenaries, and you see Persian warriors commit suicide by Macedonian by willingly impaling themselves on a wall of pikes. In fact that sort of charge and depiction is more accurate to the Greeks than it is to the Persians, these crude tactics are what historians like Thukydides and Xenophon tell us about the tactics of most Greek hoplites, Thukydides stops his narrative to explain the Spartan practice of marching in step and Xenophon spent a good deal crying to his readers to adopt Spartan formation drill in the 4th century.

These stereotypes are hurtful because they incorrectly shape up our perception of the past. Dan Carlin in his podcast about the Persians made the claim that the Persians were unable to deal with the new Greek war of war which is plain wrong. Persian armies pretty much wrecked Greek armies up to the battle of Marathon and the Persian were familiar with the way the Greeks fought seeing as they had experience fighting the Ionian Greeks as well as the various heavy infantry cultures on the Eastern Mediterranean. If anything the Greeks were the ones behind heavy infantry development in comparison to the states of the Eastern Mediterranean, while almost up to the Greco-Persian wars the Greeks were fighting with mixed warbands of ranged and melee infantry led by rich men the Sumerians thousands of years earlier had mastered the art of separating heavy infantry into separte formations. The Greeks came late to that party and the concept of a "phalanx" may have been evolving even up to the Peloponnesian War. All these negative stereotypies push the image of the Persian military as one of a lightly armed disorganized horde that used it's massive numbers to win the day but in reality, the Persians had a world conquering army semi-professional army, even before Alexander III of Macedon invaded the Persian empire the Persians had come hot straight out of re-conquering Egypt, showing that the Persians were not militarily weak nor was the empire in decline.