License:
Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike

by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

There are quite some differences between the Scott brothers ( Ridley and Tony ) and the Maximus himself Michael Bay. You can read Troler's observations and then my rant in the comments to see why they aren't quite the same. But specifically Tony Scott films sometimes feels almost like Michael Bay movies. Especially early Tony Scott and early Michael Bay, before both of them knew how similar they are and before they started trying to develop each other into opposite directions. Which happened roughly in time with the 21st century. And yet with all this the Ridley Scott epic Gladiator which was shot at 20st century and released at 21st, bluntly steals one of the shots Michael Bay is known for.

When making Bad Boys ( which was his first, kind of, test picture ) he didn't have a lot of money and the line-producer ( who's job is to keep an eye on the budget ) constantly was messing with Bay and his decisions. There were 2 big moments that Michael Bay fought for. He payed 25 thousand dollars of his own money to make the final explosion in the film. Because "fuck the line-producer, this is important". And then he fought for and won to make a rather complex shot in the middle of the film, that he thought would be perfect for the trailer ( which ended up in the trailer ).

The shot has Will Smith and Martin Lawrence epically get up from a crouching position, as the camera goes around them in a majestic beautiful and epic way. Michael Bay will end up using this shot in every single one of his movies. And for the sequel Bad Boys II he was withholding showing it anywhere until the movie met its emotionally lowest point. And where the main characters are met with the situation that is very fucking serious. That's when he Michael Bay goes for his signature shot. And that hits like a train. The goosebumps are there even when I'm typing this sentence.




So you know I was rather intrigued to see Ridley Scott trying to do a similar shot in Gladiator. He does it a bit strangely. The characters don't seem to do the exact same motion. Even more, the shot in Gladiator is kind of random when it comes to the movements of the characters. While Michael Bay shots are precise and on point. Also Ridley is moving the camera in the other direction. And doesn't put it as low. So it isn't looking up at the actors as much. But that is probably because the coliseum is not as high up as some of the structures Bay is using. I've seen examples of the same shot being imitated by people who don't know shit. And they just use a clear sky as their background. This is not how the shot works. You have to have a background moving real fast, to make the impact. But that is not a problem with Ridley Scott. Ridley does know that. He is fucking Ridley Scott. So he aims the camera such that the coliseum itself is the background.

The only time I've seen Bay having the camera pointed down instead of up, when making his signature shot, was in the film The Island. He didn't have any clouds in the sky and so he took a big helicopter and made a few shots pointing down at the actors as they run around in the desert. Having the vastness of the desert be the background. Which worked fucking amazingly.

Actually, from the imitators of this shot, the best example I've seen is not from Ridley Scott ( you can see it is not quite the same shot in Gladiator ) but from Edgar Wright in his own bloody hilarious cop bromance film Hot Fuzz. The movie even has a scene where the two cops are watching that very shot in Bad Boys II first. And then, when the ultra-hilarious action scene starts, Wright puts on his Michael Bay hat and does a banger of Bay-imitation. Including a perfect recreation of the signature shot. Using the English village architecture as the background.

But still, why did Ridley do that? Well the obvious answer is that he didn't mean to invoke any references to Michael Bay. He was just making whatever seemed right for the moment. And at that moment Maximus ( Russell Crowe ) and Juba ( Djimon Hounsou, who later will be in Bay's The Island ) are met with a crowd of people that cheers for them. And that is a kind of moment where they notice the crowd, so to speak. And since the crowd is everywhere around them, to show it cinematically, a good choice would be to rotate the camera around the actors to show said crowd, while also having our heroes in the frame.

And yet due to the whole drama I discussed between Michael Bay and Ridley's brother Tony, and due to both Scott brothers and Michael Bay working for Jerry Bruckheimer at the time, I kind of feel like there could be a direct reference to Michael Bay. Like it is possible that the Scott brothers were messing with Bay a little on purpose.

Maybe Ridley designed the shot for storytelling reasons, but then realized that it would be kind of what Michael Bay is doing all the damn time. So he thought something like "Hell yeah. Tony would love it. Let's go!".

Speaking of Ridley Scott's directing, I am kind of at odds with myself. I cannot seem to read Scott's style at all. Like I did enjoy the movie. And other movies he made are also fantastic. But something about his directing style is kind of slightly strange. I can see a method in what Tony Scott is doing. I can see a method in what Michael Bay is doing. I can see a method in what Edgar Wright, or Steven Spielberg or even Michael Mann are doing. There is a clear technique in the work of Lars Von Trier. There is a very strong style in the work of Nicolas Winding Refn. There is a method to Brian De Palma or Alfred Hitchcock. But there seems to be no method what so ever to Ridley Scott. He kinds of just wings it and it works.

The most method I've seen from him was on his Black Hawk Down. Where the picture kind of looks like what Tony Scott will end up doing on Man on Fire. But the entirety of Gladiator dictatorially speaking seems to be really random. There are sequences in different styles. And sometimes the style changes throughout a sequence. There are sequences with naturalistic, realistic light. And those that are heavily color-corrected to look either very brown-like, or in other places, very sickly blue-like. Ridley's other movies seem to be at least consistent when it comes to their style. But Gladiator isn't. And the funny thing is, it works.

I mean there is one place the style-madness makes sense. Maximus's family was killed and he is looking to meet them in the afterlife. And so shooting the afterlife shots differently than the real life kind of makes sense.

Here is an interesting thing. The movie is very political. Like, yeah, sure, it has epic battle scenes and Gladiator fights. And it delivers on those. But the plot of the film is about democracy and tyrants and stuff. Basically our villain Commodus ( Joaquin Phoenix ) kills the emperor ( his own father ) to get the throne. And he has an immense insecurity about himself. So he turns Rome into a dictatorship, to try to force people into loving him, or something. There is even a psycho-sexual plot where we learn that he is fantasizing of incest with his sister Lucilla ( Connie Nielsen ). That whole tyrant thing, obviously, destroys the economy and while the people are enjoying his flamboyance now, if he will not stop, they will soon gonna start dying from food shortages and stuff.

Strangely enough, originally the writer of the film David Franzoni pitched the idea of Gladiator to Steven Spielberg. Same David Franzoni wrote the screenplay for Amistad which Spielberg directed in 1997. And which is also starring Djimon Hounsou. Spielberg at the time focused on his production company Dream Works and Amistad was the first film he himself directed for Dream Works. Gladiator even though was not a Spielberg project after all, was still produced by Dream Works so Spielberg was sort of involved.

Then in 1999 George Lucas ( Spielberg's friend ) released Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace which was all of a sudden a strangely political movie. One year after that comes out Gladiator which is also a strangely political movie. And then in 2002 George releases Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones continuing the political saga of Star Wars, but this time including an epic action scene on a Gladiator arena.

Meanwhile Spielberg is making Minority Report where he is adding a reference to Michael Bay's Bad Boys. And then by 2005 Michael Bay makes The Island for Steven Spielberg and Dream Works where a major role is played by none other than Djimon Hounsou. The same year Spielberg takes Dakota Fanning from Tony Scott's Man on Fire and pairs her with Tom Cruise ( another actor who got famous by working with Tony Scott ) in War of the Worlds ( a strangely similar name to Star Wars ). But it isn't all.

In the 80s when George Lucas approached Spielberg with a possibility of him directing a sequel to the original Star Wars, Spielberg declined stating that he likes the aliens to come to us, rather then for us to go to them. But in 2005 something changed.

You may have noticed that the action scenes in 2005 film Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith are much better than the action in both Episode I and Episode II. That is because Lucas realized that he isn't good enough to figure out the action. So he asked Steven Spielberg to figure out the action with him at the storyboard stage. You can say that Spielberg somewhat directed the action scenes in Episode III. Technically speaking he directed the little lowpoly cartoons called "animatic-storyboards" from which, later, George directed the movie itself. And George did throw away some of the stuff the crazy action mind of Steven Spielberg came up with, because let's be honest Spielberg is a bit crazy. For example there is an animatic of the Utapau Chase which was mostly cut, which looks like something Spielberg would have directed. It is full of little shots and other techniques that you can see Spielberg uses over and over again in his own films.

It seems like Spielberg and co were doing political activism through their movies at the time. Probably greatly inspired by the success of Schindler's List Spielberg decided to double down. Amistad is an anti-racism movie, which would later grow into Lincoln from 2012. Minority Report, Tony Scott's Enemy of the State and stuff, were anti surveillance. ( Surveillance in particular was probably on Steven's mind at a time because of one individual who's name is Jonathan Norman. He was a Stalker that tried multiple times to enter Spielberg's home with a "rape kit" on him. And you know Stalking and Surveillance are synonyms. Also a few years after Jonathan Norman, he was then stalked by Diana Napolis. Who was a conspiracy theorist that went insane. Poor Steve, OMG. )

Even War of the Worlds is kind of about Surveillance. There is a scene in a basement, where the heroes are hiding from the aliens. The scene is full of paranoia that the aliens can see everything. And then during the night a probe, which has an ominous eye at its end descends down into the basement. This is some unambiguous symbolism. And the characters need to avoid being seen by the eye to survive.

By Amistad Spielberg even adopted Theo and Mikaela, two black kids. And Michael Bay's Bad Boys despite being rather unserious, are kind of pro-black movies. The main characters are black, and the second film even starts with them busting a KKK group. The Island is about anti-slavery. And sort of almost about anti-surveillance. So it fits that a project related to Spielberg at the time Gladiator would be a political movie, kind of like Episode I.

Interesting that Spencer Treat Clark who played the royalty child in Gladiator, that same year also played the son of the main character in M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. And M. Night Shyamalan was working at the time with the same producers as Spielberg. And even was seen as "the next Spielberg". The lead in Unbreakable is played by Bruce Willis and the villain by Samuel L. Jackson which probably prompted Quentin Tarantino to love this movie so much. Quentin worked with both actors on Pulp Fiction and with Jackson on nearly everything. Which kind of makes me think of another movie...

A year before Unbreakable M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense was nominated for both Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars ( one year later these nominations would be given to Gladiator, which would actually win Best Picture ). The Sixth Sense even did the impossible. It gave an Oscar nomination to Haley Joel Osment who was 10 years old. The fact that Dakota Fanning didn't get a bloody nomination for Man on Fire probably starts to smell like sexism. But Spielberg snatched both of them for his next movies. Haley Joel Osment for his 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence and Dakota Fanning for War of the Worlds. But that's besides the point.

The lead of the movie was the same Bruce Willis. The same Bruce Willis that was in Luc Besson's film The Fifth Element. The same Bruce Willis that played a small role in a Tarantino related project Four Rooms. The same Bruce Willis that made Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 in the same decade. ( Okay technically the first Die Hard is from the 80s, but he did plenty of number 1 movies in the 90s ). The question is: what is Bruce Willis counting to? And even better question: why wasn't Bruce Willis in David Fincher's Seven?

Happy Hacking!!!

0

Find this post on Mastodon

Find

  Troler c:0



Of course he does, that shot is just so cool. Extreme example was in Bad Boys 2 in the shootout scene, where the camera spun between two rooms.


As you said it, I noticed it. Woah.


In the same article there are 2 links to different reviews of the same movie.


Somehow after watching an animatic of the Utapau Chase, I ended up Denshi's site, that lead to another site. Where was I?


How is Besson in almost every review you write!

Post