I Watch Films: Demetrius And The Gladiators

 

Demetrius And The Gladiators

Demetrius, a supporting character in very religious film The Robe, about Jesus’s robe, becomes the lead in this somewhat religious film, also about Jesus’s robe. Caligula wants Jesus’s robe, which he believes will make him immortal. Sending soldiers to the Christian community, they arrest Demetrius for obstructing them and he’s condemned to be a gladiator. Initially he refuses to fight as he won’t kill a man, but he loses his faith when Lucia, the woman he chastely loves, is apparently killed.

After some exciting arena scenes with cool gladiator duels and tiger fighting (in helmets so the stuntmen do it) he comes to the attention of Messalina, Caligula’s aunt by marriage, priestess of Isis and wife of Claudius [SPOILERS: Caligula dies and Claudius becomes emperor by the end of the film]. Taking Demetrius as her lover she gets him made an officer in the Praetorian Guard, the troops who keep the emperor in power. Caligula gets progressively more insane, to the point where she has to tell him she had a vision from Isis that he would become a god.

All of this swings wildly between more-or-less historical; Christian stories; just made up; and anachronistic. For example everyone is fairly well informed about Christianity, which history suggests hadn’t yet been codified in this way, and wasn’t well known in Rome. Caligula’s persecution of Christians is modelled on Nero (Caligula’s nephew, aged approximately 3 at this time). Messalina is unfaithful to Claudius, which agrees with reports, but then there’s a whole other layer of weirdness.

Anyway, a fun gladiator film that occasionally dips into portentous Christian apologetics.

Watch This: Sword fights and action, plus some interesting looks at how Hollywood thought about early Christianity
Don’t Watch This: The fights aren’t that spectacular, and the history is quite poor