begob The infant emperor of Rome turns to a faithful legionnaire to rescue him from captivity and assist his flight to a far off land ...The story is based on a novel, which I bet was plenty fat. There is a huge amount of history and incident packed into a very slim 105m run time, to the point where our heroes survey a snowy Alpine pass for a moment before a map-montage of Transalpine Gaul flashes up to represent their epic journey to Britannia, where they conveniently step to shore from a boat. And it turns out this is a prequel to a very famous myth, promoted to the status of legend by its Roman associations.So the story is hugely ambitious but with only a fraction of the resources needed to deliver a satisfying production. At least that's the way it feels, yet it has a stellar cast and a huge budget. And the script is by a renowned playwright, and some of the locations are interesting (especially the recreation of the Isle of Capri). Something doesn't add up.It's not just that the dialogue is painfully plain, but the editing and writing keeps hurrying us along through what should be a fascinating land of oddities and magical encounters. For some reason the story is coy about magic, only hinting that it's anything more than a clever hoax, and the climactic battle is extras in a field spinning and kicking and roaring, while the showdown with the nemesis opens with a "startled!" sound effect as a little girl looks around and ... he's there! Just bizarrely bad. I imagine the screenplay came in at 180 pages, and the producer said, "Great - cut it in half. With a sword."The cast do OK with stiff lines, and the actress with the amazing blue eyes has less difficulty convincing us she's the unlikeliest all-action knife twirler than that she enjoys any chemistry with the glum leading man. The music is lavish orchestral stuff, but no big deal.Overall: Interesting concept, underwhelming delivery.

Alex Vega Absolutely dreadful. Boring, trivial, immature, ridiculous dialogues, terrible narrative, every single game of thrones episode beats this nonsense with ease. How could Kingsley, Firth, McKidd, Glen, Hannah, Siddig, Mullan, Cosmo fall for this? What's the world coming to? Fantasy costumes in a fantasy world, a ridiculous simplification of historical context, chuck norris grade fight scenes and what's that girl doing with swords? Utter waste of time. It would have been so easy to weave in the Arthus legend in a more interesting, mysterious and less predictable way. Too brutal for 12 year olds, too simple for 18 year olds+. And those goths? Sure...20 guys wearing fur..must be goths.

vincentlynch-moonoi I typically don't add a review when there are already more than 100. But in this case I'm going to because I think this film is overrated. Oh, I'm not saying this is a great epic about the Roman Empire. It's not. I don't think it's too faithful to history, but good enough to be called historical fiction. What I do think it is, is a good adventure film. Just don't take it so seriously. What made me laugh was that in the blurb I read about it, it said it was a "cut rate" adventure film; apparently only spending $67 million in 2007 was "cut rate"; only in America.You have a decent cast here. Colin Firth plays Aurelius, a military leader charged with the responsibility of protecting the young Romulus. He's good here, and it's nice to see Firth in a different kind of role than we usually do. Thomas Brodie-Sangster does fairly well as the young Romulus Augustulus. Ben Kingsley is decent as a druid who also protects and teaches the boy. Perhaps most interesting is Aishwarya Rai -- my favorite female Indian actress -- as a female warrior.The plot is decent. The young Romulus has been crowned the new head of the Roman Empire, but shortly after that his mother and father are murdered and he is kidnapped. Obviously, a rescue is needed. Thereby the action.What's wrong with this film? Well, I think for many it's the idea that any film about the Roman Empire -- even a fictional story -- is supposed to be filmed in great grandeur. This is filmed well, but not on a grand scale.This won't end up on my DVD shelf, but it's a good film (not a great film). I'm glad I watched it. Might watch it again some day.

alphacentauri-945-738849 I read the book and it wasn't that bad either. Sure it had quite some clichés and was very predictable...we could say Hollywood-ish, but was decent enough fun.Seeing the movie i'm quite disappointed. It's not just that the plot is almost entirely different, many parts changed, a lot of them discarded. What is much worse than that, is that it has quite poor directing. Events just hope around with very little intermezzos, the story is poorly shown and it has even more clichés than the book. Many times it just gets annoying and confusing. The whole move feels extremely rushed forward.The acting isn't bad, in my opinion it has lots of potential, but it's just a shame how badly executed it was.I'm really disappointed by this movie, it had potential to be a decent piece on par with gladiator and king Arthur, but it falls very short.I highly recommend you get the book first and watch the movie after.