The movie Gladiator centers around the fictional character, Maximus. However, the movie also has characters who actually existed such as Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. The movie is quite thrilling with amazing gladiatorial fight scenes in the coliseum. Though the protagonist is entirely fictional, the movie still has some interesting insight into roman culture. For instance, the depiction of the coliseum and its layout seemed to align with we know today about the iconic structure. Unfortunately, the film is not without its share of shortcomings, and these mostly appear in various aspects of the roman culture and roman leaders. To a certain degree, the movie is accurate, but it is apparent that our modern culture has in some ways distorted history. One of the most important inaccuracies is …show more content…
For example, the movie in several instances indicates the Maximus is likely a Christian. While this would not be impossible, it is highly unlikely. Rome around this time period largely viewed Christianity as a lesser religious sect. Also, throughout the movie the character Maximus is referred to as “The Spaniard”. This is interesting and potentially nonsense as at this time there was no country known as Spain. To conclude, I would not recommend this movie to someone looking for a factual portrayal of history. While it is an excellent drama, the movie simply plays too fast and loose with historical details. Without doing any personal fact checking, a person could come away with some serious misconceptions about major roman leaders. Moreover, they would likely believe that Maximus was an actual person. Ideally, a movie like this should be thrilling, but people should be unknowingly educated about actual historical events. While this movie does a great job of making history exciting, I feel the writers could have been more honest and the movie would have kept its