Gladiator II: Fact vs. Fiction

Reality and Fiction in Gladiator II: These Who Are About to Lie Salute You

Keep in mind when Ridley Scott’s 2023 biopic Napoleon set off a firestorm amongst finicky French historians? How shocked, shocked they had been by the movie’s factual inaccuracies (zut alors, Bonaparte by no means led the cost at Waterloo!). Nicely, it seems just like the 86-year-old Oscar-winning director is at it once more (see web page 56), solely this time it’s students of historical Rome who’ll be storming Scott Free Productions. Though Gladiator II has been warmly obtained at early screenings, the 150-minute film, which opens Nov. 22, is clearly chock-full of historic whoppers — like that scene during which a flooded Colosseum is crammed with sharks. “Complete Hollywood bullshit,” snipes Dr. Shadi Bartsch, a classics professor on the College of Chicago who has levels from Princeton, Harvard and UC Berkeley and has written a number of books about historical Rome. “I don’tthink Romans knew what a shark was” (although naval battles had been held within the enviornment, she notes). The scene with rhinos charging into the Colosseum is form of true — “Martial wrote a poem in 80 A.D. a few rhinoceros tossing a bull as much as the sky,” Bartsch says — however not the two-horn breed proven within the movie, solely the one-horn kind, and there’s no proof that gladiators really rode them, as they do in Scott’s film. Some of the eyebrow-raising anachronisms includes the scene during which a Roman noble is proven sipping tea in a restaurant whereas studying the morning newspaper … 1,200 years earlier than the invention of the printing press. “They did have each day information — Acta Diuma — but it surely was carved and positioned at sure areas,” says Bartsch. “You needed to go to it, you couldn’t maintain it at a restaurant. Additionally, they didn’t have cafes!” So far as Scott is worried, historic nitpicking didn’t trouble him with Napoleon, and it doesn’t trouble him now. “By the point you get to 2024,” he admits, “it’s all hypothesis.” — Jordan Hoffman

South Pole Doc Makes use of AI to Convey Explorers Again to Life

Greater than a century in the past, legendary polar explorer Ernest Shackleton understood the internet-age precept of “pics or it didn’t occur.” Endurance, the brand new Nat Geo doc by Academy Award-winning husband-and-wife filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Free Solo, The Rescue), showcases beautiful movie footage that Shackleton’s males took throughout his 1907 expedition to Antarctica — together with photographs of his vessel being crushed by ice and leaving 28 males stranded on the backside of the world. Not surprisingly, there have been no images taken throughout Shackleton’s 800-mile lifeboat journey throughout the South Seas to hunt assist. To depict that harrowing a part of the documentary, the filmmakers relied on a mixture of re-creations — filmed with actors in Iceland and Los Angeles — and synthetic intelligence. Utilizing state-of-the-art software program to synthesize audio recordings of the survivors, long-dead crewmembers posthumously “learn” their diary entries aloud. Given the controversy stirred utilizing AI to carry Anthony Bourdain again from the useless in 2021’s Roadrunner, Chin and Vasarhelyi had been taking some dangers. However, like Shackleton, they’re explorers in their very own proper. “It’s an ideal device, [but] you need to be thought of and aware and moral about how you employ it,” says Vasarhelyi.

How Star Trek’s Jess Bush Turned a Bee Actress

On Star Trek: Unusual New Worlds, Jess Bush performs Nurse Chapel. Right here on twenty first century Earth, although, the 32-year-old Australian moonlights as an artist — generally known as ONEJESSA — and her newest exhibit is creating fairly the thrill in New York. Bush has entombed 1,000 useless bees in orbs of resin and strung them collectively in a floating sculpture hanging within the Glass Atrium foyer of Manhattan West, the brand new growth on Ninth Avenue and thirty second Avenue. “The inspiration was my very own sense of surprise and gratitude for Earth’s magnificence,” she says. As for the place she bought her arms on 1,000 useless bees: “Sadly, it wasn’t that tough. I’ve just a few beekeepers in Australia that I go to, and I decide up useless bees from the grass across the hive.” THR bought an early have a look at the exhibit, which opened to the general public Oct. 30, and can report that it’s undoubtedly a honey

This story appeared within the Oct. 30 subject of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.