Rome
released 2005-2007
www.ink2quill.com

“Rome” is an American, British, historical drama series that straddles the fence on being classified as historical fiction due to the fact that some of the events and characters had been changed to meet budget and time requirements. This does not diminish the quality of this production in any way. “Rome” is unique to most other series because of the army of talented people that went into its making. You have the army of what they call the transportation department, music department, location management department, editorial department, costume and wardrobe department, casting department, camera and electrical department, stunts department, visual effects department, special effects department, sound department, art department, production management department, makeup department, editing and cinematography departments, production department and more. All of these departments have staffs numbering in the 10-20-30 people. The amount of talented people this production put to work was ginormous. The long list of actors include Kevin McKidd, Ray Stevenson, Polly Walker, Kerry Condon, James Purefoy, Ian McNiece, Coral Amiga, Lindsay Duncan, Tobias Menzies, Nicholas Woodeson, David Bamber, Chiara Mastalli, Manfredi Aliquo, Indira Varma, Suzanne Bertish, Lee Boardman and Max Pirkis among many others. “Rome” was created by Bruno Heller, William J. MacDonald and John Milius.

Rome IMDb webpage

“Rome” is the story that centers around the time of the death of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44B.C. This is a time some historians call the final days of the Roman Republic. The tale tells the story from the point of view of Rome´s elite, like their senators, wealthy citizens and the top men in the army and the regular people, like Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo played by Kevin McKidd and Ray Stevenson respectively.

“Rome” is an ambitious series that delivers mostly what it promises by making a few changes to historical characters. It has two parallel stories that show this period in history from the point of view of the everyday roman and elite citizen. We get to see the worries and struggles in their lives from their ranks in society as well as the struggles everyone deals with irregardless of societal rank. For example, when the city of Rome was under martial law everyone was worried and most people, irregardless of their rank in society, hid away in their homes.

I loved the way they showed the fear and outrage toward Julius Caesar from the elite class but I wished they would have shown things like how Caesar forged the signatures of wealthy people and senators on documents to get bills passed and how they were forced into silence over it. I also wished they would have included a scene where a member of the wealthy class bought a piece of land through fraud and replaced all the workers with slave labor that belonged to him. We were told of this but we were never really shown it well enough. It would have been more powerful to show us instead of telling us.

Another thing that just about all movies and series miss about this point in time was to show exactly how Caesar was well liked. You need to show how the man was loved by the people. Like when his signature went directly on a law that blocked a fraudulent land sale and how the people working on that land and earning wages had their jobs saved. Having him show up personally to block a group of poor farmers from losing their land and the people that worked that land keeping their jobs and happy that Caesar showed up in person would have been a master stroke for the story.

Having said all this, I have to say that “Rome” is a really good series. One of the best I´ve seen and I´ve seen quite a few. It´s definitely a fun watch. To see the wealthy misbehave was shocking and, truth be told, funny at times. The script, talent, costumes and sets are excellent. I was captivated by the characters and their struggles. The scene when Titus was in the arena had a good friend of mine in tears. She loved Titus.

So check out “Rome” folks because it´s such a good series and I only wished they had continued it for a few more seasons. It´s true that “Rome” paved the way for so many other quality series with realistic character arcs like the hugely successful “Game Of Thrones”.

John

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