Spartacus Blood and Sand. I have a new guilty pleasure. When I say guilty I mean shame faced-never-in-a-million-years-should-I-tell-a-soul guilt. It’s not any thing life threatening so don’t worry. Though it may atrophy a few of my brain cells. Still, despite that I don’t think I can give it up. It’s like an awful accident that you can’t look away from. Once you’ve had that one nightmarish glimpse you have to see it all to its horrible end.
In case you haven’t guessed my latest guilty pleasure is the Starz show Spartacus Blood and Sand. It’s all about a Thracian warrior whose condemned to fight for his life in the Roman gladiatorial arena as punishment for deserting his battalion to go rescue his wife and village. Sounds normal enough on the surface, right? But it’s anything but normal.
Watching Spartacus is like watching 300 on acid with a shank coming at you out of the darkness.The show revels in violence and sex and pushes the envelope so far that its probably up someone’s butt. Chiseled, sweaty muscle men parade across the screen. The women, voluptuous and comely, wear nothing but gossamer wisps of clothing if that. The show even shows full frontal male and female nudity. Starz must have a severe kid brother inferiority complex to put this out there. Even HBO and Showtime would blush.
And that’s just the sex. The violence notches up everything by the tenth degree. Blades spin, heads roll, limbs fly and the blood arcs artfully across the screen like it’s being splashed by a painter’s brush. Spartacus is the bastard child of Rome and The Tudors midwifed by the twisted mind of former Buffy writer Steven S. DeKnight.
The sheer excess of Spartacus is so overwhelming that you might not notice the flaws at first or rather you’ll probably be ignoring them. Though it won’t be long before the clunky dialogue stops becoming amusing and zeroes in on grating. If the characters are going to be talking in modern English then just go with it. Don’t swing back and forth between that and some mauled interpretation of how they must have sounded.
Still for all of that the primary reason I’m tuning in to Spartacus is for the one and only Lucy Lawless. Any show with the foresight to cast the warrior princess has to have some glimmer of promise to nurture. Right?
Have you seen Spartacus? What do you think? Can Lucy save this show or what?
Right! Still for the sheer spectacle it's worth downloading!
I've never understood the use of fake "olde English" for stuff like this. They spoke Latin after all.