Spartacus

We now enter the Roman Republic with Spartacus.  This was yet another movie that I broke up into two viewings.  I did not find Kirk Douglas as Spartacus to be very appealing.  I found myself a lot more interested in Antoninus.  I was completely bored by the Spartacus/Varinia love story/  The costumes were generally pretty accurate.  The climactic fight scene was ridiculous.  It looked a lot more like a medieval battle than a Roman one.  Roman soldiers did not march forward in a single line, and they had a man called an Optio standing behind them who held a big stick so that the soldiers couldn't back up like they did in the movie, where the Optio was completely missing.  Altogether it was pretty entertaining, even if the main character was a jerk who got a lot of people killed unnecessarily.