Gladiator, Versionen

Der Artikel über verschiedene Antiken-Versionen im Hollywood-Format im Times Literary Supplement ist in jenem herablassend-neckischen Ton geschrieben, den etwa auch der SPIEGEL als deutscher Meister der Dummfrechheit kultiviert, aber ein paar interessante Fakten gibt es doch. So etwa über die zwei Versionen von "Gladiator", die verfilmte und die nicht verfilmte. Und jetzt raten Sie mal, welche dem Autor mit Abstand besser gefallen hat:

Reading the extant drafts side-by-side is a dispiriting education in the Hollywood process. Franzoni’s script is characteristically wordy and often ponderous, but has a satirical edge and a surreal, Felliniesque heightening of historical strangeness entirely lacking from the later versions. In one astonishing early sequence, the hero and his fellow slaves are unloaded from their shuttered wagon in what they chillingly believe to be an execution spot in a Central European forest, only to become aware of unearthly lights and sounds between the trees: they emerge to find themselves in the Colosseum in Rome, planted with trees to resemble a forest, and "looking back at them are fifty thousand fans – and as one, like some surreal canned sound track, they all laugh". By contrast, Logan’s version is a miserable, pedestrian parade of Hollywood clichés, with a risible ending in which the hero literally rides off into the sunset with his surrogate son, the (historically solecistic) younger Verus.

[via Perlentaucher Magazin-Rundschau]