ANCIENT WORLD MOVIES
& TV SHOWS
RELEASED IN 2014
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| The Red Tent, a 2-part miniseries based on the bestselling novel by Anita Diamant, premieres December 7, 2014 on Lifetime. DVD releases in March 2015. From the original 1997 Library Journal review: “Skillfully interweaving biblical tales with events and characters of her own invention, Diamant’s sweeping first novel re-creates the life of Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, from her birth and happy childhood in Mesopotamia through her years in Canaan and death in Egypt. When Dinah reaches puberty and enters the Red Tent (the place women visit to give birth or have their monthly periods), her mother and Jacob’s three other wives initiate her into the religious and sexual practices of the tribe.…” Rebecca Ferguson, Minnie Driver, and Iain Glen star. The director is Roger Young, helmer of many an ancient world/biblical TV movie (Hercules, Barabbas, Joseph, Jesus, Augustus, Moses, Solomon, etc.). |
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| Psssst! Yahweh is headed this way…and boy, does he look pissed! Director Ridley Scott (who won an Oscar for Gladiator) joins the religious movie bandwagon with Exodus: Gods and Kings, starring Christian Bale as Moses, calling on the power of the god of the Jews to free his people from Joel Edgerton’s authentically depilated Ramses. Is this another movie where our rugged hero makes stirring speeches in an American accent, while our slightly effeminate villain has an English accent? See all the Plagues of Egypt, now in 3D! Release date: December 12, 2104. See a trailer here. |
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Perhaps taking advantage of all the advance publicity for Exodus: Gods and Kings, another movie with links to ancient Egypt, The Pyramid, releases on December 5, 2014. Storyline: archaeologists attempting to unlock secrets of lost pyramid find themselves hunted by an insidious creature. Something tells me this horror movie has very little to do with the ancient world…but isn’t the poster pretty? (Now streaming from Amazon or iTunes.) |
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Somewhere in the US, the long-delayed Sinbad: The Fifth Voyage, directed by and starring Shahin Sean Solimon, played in a theater for a week, which makes it a 2014 release. The movie is streaming at iTunes and Amazon, and a DVD is promised for February 3, 2015. For the monsters, the movie uses old-fashioned stop-motion effects (here called Super Animotion) pioneered by the late, great Ray Harryhausen. See the trailer here. |
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| The Italian animated feature Gladiators of Rome was first released in Italy in 2012, but debuted in US cinemas on November 11, 2014. Orphaned by the eruption of Vesuvius, young Timo is adopted by a general and raised in the most famous gladiator school in Rome. Carefree Timo is more slacker than hacker—until he meets his new personal trainer, the lovely Lucilla, and decides to make himself the word’s greatest gladiator. If you missed the very limited theatrical release, don’t worry; you can catch this extremely silly movie at iTunes or Amazon. |
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The bumbling misadventures of young Romans Marcus and Stylax and their lazy slave with an attitude problem, Grumio, continue in Season 2 of Plebs, which leapt out of the gate with a splashy cover story in The Guardian. (Click on image to see it larger.) The 6-part comedy series started September 22, 2014 on UK’s ITV2. Highlights include a Roman stag party in episode 2 (picture above), just as described by Livy! (Or perhaps not.) Preview here. (Season 1 is now available on Region 2 DVD; and yes, there will also be a Season 2 Region 2 DVD.)
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| First shown on BBC on October 16, 2014, the documentary Swallowed by the Sea: Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Lost City follows a team of maritime archaeologists as they uncover artifacts from Heracleion, a major coastal city lost to a mysterious subsidence in the second century BCE that was rediscovered in 2000. The official BBC page is here. If you know of any DVD release, or TV broadcast in the US, please let Steven know! |
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It’s been a long, rocky road—one that would try the patience of a saint!—but Katherine of Alexandria has finally made it to the screen…sort of. It will be TV, not movie, screens for this 2014 straight-to-DVD release, and the title has been changed to the nondescript Decline of an Empire. Katherine is gone not only from the title, but from the cover art as well—it’s just a bunch of old geezers now! And she’s vanished entirely from the trailer, which suggests that the movie may have been re-edited to focus on the wars of the emperor Constantine.
As originally pitched back in 2010, the drama about the legendary Egyptian martyr was clearly intended to be a Christian reply to Agora, with the same setting (Alexandria) and many details in common (a library is destroyed, and the heroine must brave a terrible fate). If this sounds suspiciously like Agora, consider that some historians (see Harold Thayer Davis, Alexandria: The Golden City) believe that Katherine may not have existed at all, but was invented specifically to serve as a Christian counterpart to the pagan philosopher Hypatia, the heroine of Agora.
So, did those who hated Agora hope to have the last word with Katherine of Alexandria…er, Decline of an Empire? Early production notes claimed that this “true story” was “inspired by the recent discovery of the 4th-century diary of St. Katherine”; if you know anything about this purported (bogus?) document, please let Steven know. Peter O’Toole now gets top billing (expect a cameo), with newcomers Nicole Madjarov as Katherine and Jack Goddard as Constantine. The production was plagued by charges of non-payment to cast and crew, but the movie (or one version of it) was completed as early as 2011, if the catalogue entry at this page can be trusted, and there’s still an official web site that features the original title. Perhaps the real drama here is the decline of Katherine of Alexandria? |
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| The sumptuously staged student film Imperator, about the ill-fated Roman emperor Otho, is entirely in Latin (with Polish and English subtitles). Made it Poland, the 40-minute featurette debuted in 2014. Watch it here. |
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| In the ITV documentary series Secrets From the Sky, historian Bettany Hughes and aerial archaeologist Ben Robinson share a bird’s-eye view of various historical sites in Great Britain, including (in episode 6, broadcast November 21, 2014) a fresh look at the little-known Antonine Wall, the vast series of Roman walls, trenches, and forts built after Hadrian’s Wall and even farther north. More info at this page. If you know of any DVD release, or TV broadcast in the US, please let Steven know! |
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| More aerial archaeology: the always telegenic historian Michael Scott also took to the skies, along with the equally telegenic Christine Bleakley, to have a look at Roman Britain from the Air, a 60-minute documentary broadcast December 23, 2014 on Britain’s ITV. More info at this page. If you know of any DVD release, or TV broadcast in the US, please let Steven know! |
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| The UK series Time Scanners debuted in the US on PBS on July 15, 2014 with an episode about Petra, the Nabataean city in Jordan with fabulous buildings carved from sandstone. Using new laser technology, our hosts (Dallas Campbell and engineer Steve Burrows) sought to demonstrate some new ideas about how the structures were built. Another episode trained new tech on exploring the pyramids. DVDs are available of both the Petra and Egyptian Pyramids episodes, and the whole season of the show is streaming at Amazon. |
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In Prisoners of the Sun, an archaeological expedition discovers a lost city beneath a pyramid and re-awakens the gods of ancient Egypt. On the shelf since 2008, the movie finally went straight to DVD on July 8, 2014. Director Roger Christian, who won an Oscar for Star Wars art direction and a nomination for Alien, says the film was mired in legal problems despite interest by distributors. “It has huge production value; we shot some really great stuff and had a really good cast too.” The movie is also streaming at Amazon Instant Video, where you can see a trailer. (So how come this movie went straight to DVD, but the very similar-sounding The Pyramid—see item elsewhere on this page—got a theatrical release?) |
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| First Ancient World movie out of the box for 2014, with a January 10 opening: Hercules: The Legend Begins, with Twilight star Kellan Lutz in the title role. (Lutz previously ventured into Ancient World territory to play Poseidon in Immortals.) The story appears to be a mish-mash of recent movies and TV shows, not drawn from Greek myth—something about the demigod’s love for a princess of Crete who’s been promised to his older brother despite her undying love for Hercules, and Herc is enslaved and has to fight as a gladiator, and then he breaks his bonds like Samson and realizes he’s a demigod and starts lashing a really cool CGI whip made of lightning, and then…huh? Watch the trailer here. (Now on DVD.) |
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| Joanna Lumley’s Greek Odyssey came out on DVD in the US on January 14, 2014. The Ab Fab star shows her brainy side on a grand tour of Greece, exploring the fascination of ancient sites. Intrepid, inexhaustible, and ever curious, Lumley is like the travel companion of your dreams. A previous series, Joanna Lumley’s Nile, came out on DVD in the US last year. |
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| Presenter Alastair Sooke took BBC viewers on a dazzling tour of Treasures of Ancient Egypt, a three-part series aired in the UK in January, 2014. The official BBC page is here. If you know of any DVD release, or TV broadcast in the US, please let Steven know! |
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| Professor Joann Fletcher explores life as a woman of power in ancient Egypt in Egypt’s Lost Queens, a one-hour documentary first broadcast on BBC on September 4, 2014. The official BBC page is here. If you know of any DVD release, or TV broadcast in the US, please let Steven know! |
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| Ooops! Here a left-over item from last year that Steven missed—the US DVD release on November 15, 2013 of Restless Heart: The Confessions of Augustine. The movie was first shown on Italian TV (under the title Sant’Agostino) in 2010 as a 2-part mini-series. The title role is split between Alessandro Preziosi (photo above) and Franco Nero (who plays the Roman African saint at age 75). It’s from the same production company that made Augustus, Nero, and St. Peter. (In 1972, Roberto Rossellini made a move for Italian TV, Agostino d’Ippona/Augustine of Hippo; if you know of any English-language release of that film, please let Steven know!) |
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Thanks to the huge success of 300, watch for a sequel...er, prequel...300: Rise of an Empire, scheduled for release on March 7, 2014. Rodrigo Santoro will return as Persian king Xerxes, taking on heroic Greek commander Themistocles, played by Sullivan Stapleton. Seen here: unidentified Spartan warrior on the set. (Photo credit: Bleu at JFX Online.) (Now on DVD.) |
Russell Crowe will play the title role in Noah, a $125 million epic directed by Darren Aronofsky of Black Swan fame. Entertainment Weekly quotes producer Scott Franklin as saying “We stayed very true to the story and didn’t really deviate from the Bible,” but also says that “reports suggest the film reimagines Noah as a wandering warrior who encounters six-armed fallen angels.” Release is set for March 28, 2014. (Now on DVD.). |
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The new movie version of Hercules directed by Brett Ratner and starring Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson (photo at right) was based on the graphic novel Hercules: The Thracian Wars. (After the muscular success of 300, it was inevitable that Hollywood would turn to more comic books to give us visions of the Ancient World.) The cast also includes Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell, Joseph Fiennes, Irina Shayk, and John Hurt. Release date: July 25, 2014. (Soon on DVD.) |
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| Hey, what these guys staring at? From the looks on their faces, they’re probably watching the movie they’re in, Hercules Reborn—a low-budget “mockbuster” released on July 15, 2014 to piggyback on the hype for Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules flick. TV wrestler John Hennigan plays the title role. This turkey is available on DVD, but if you’re really curious, you can watch the whole thing streaming for free (with ads) at YouTube. |
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| Comin’ at ya—a second season of the BBC series Atlantis. Steven thought Season One was a yawner, but the show scored big ratings in the UK. Expect more mythological malapropisms, wasted opportunities, and shirtless Jason. |
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| Are you ready for more of The Bible? In 2013, History Channel debuted the 10-hour dramatic mini-series last year to huge ratings and massive sales of the DVD and Blu-ray—and even a tie-in novel for those too lazy to read the original. 2014 saw theatrical release of a pared-down movie version of the series, Son of God. Next, look for a “sequel” mini-series, A.D. Beyond the Bible, sold to NBC. |
Before we move on to 2015…2014’s Pompeii may have been dud, but it did prompt Steven to take a look back at previous depictions of the doomed city. These movies & TV shows come from different countries and decades, but all have two things in common: a volcano…and gladiators! |
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| In the new movie Pompeii (release date February 2014) the spectacular eruption of Vesuvius is almost as impressive as Kit Harington’s abs. Holy Isis, what a six-pack! The synopsis bubbles over with pot-boiler clichés—something about a gladiator whose best friend is a slave, who’s in love with his master’s daughter, who’s betrothed to a corrupt Roman senator…but who cares, because everyone knows the volcano is about to blow its top! (Now on DVD.) |
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| From the Golden Age of the mini-series comes The Last Days of Pomepii. This 253-minute extravaganza boasts an amazing cast: Laurence Olivier, Franco Nero, Brian Blessed, Ned Beatty, Olivia Hussey, Nicolas Clay, Lesley-Anne Downe, Anthony Quayle, and Duncan Regehr as the gladiator Lydon. Steven says: “I remember watching this mini-series when it was first broadcast in 1984, when shows like Dallas ruled the TV ratings, so it’s not surprising that this version finds the oft-told story done in all-out soap opera mode. Watching is like eating popcorn: you just can’t stop! The melodrama and villainy and pathos are totally over the top, but why not? Vesuvius is about to blow!” (Update: there’s a new DVD release for 2014, but it appears to have a shorter runtime that the older DVD.) |
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| Last Days of Pompeii (1913) Italian silent based on Bulwer-Lytton’s famous novel. Intrigues and gladiator combats come to a halt when Vesuvius unleashes its molten fury! |
Last Days of Pompeii (1935) The team behind King Kong recreates the eruption of Vesuvius. Preston Foster is a good guy turned gladiator; Basil Rathbone plays Pontius Pilate.
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Last Days of Pompeii (1959) Italian sword & sandal version stars Steve Reeves and Fernando Rey. Includes bonus print of the racy, super-rare 1926 silent (mislabeled 1913). |
Pompeii: The Last Day + Colosseum: A Gladiator’s Story Two superb docudramas on one DVD. Hunky Robert Shannon scores as Verus the gladiator!
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Doctor Who: Complete Fourth Series includes “The Fires of Pompeii, ” in which the Doctor (David Tennant) makes his second visit to the Roman Empire.
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Pompei, ieri, oggi, domani (Pompeii: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow), an Italian mini-series starring Victor Alfieri, was first broadcast in 2007. Steven watched a Region 2 DVD from the Czech Republic (purchased from a site that appears to be defunct) and reports: “Enjoyed the sets, special effects, and gladiators; the terrible dubbing and melodrama, not so much!” An English-language Blu-ray has been spotted at Amazon, and the mini-series has also been found at eThaiCD.com. There’s also a UK Region 2 DVD under the title Gladiator of Pomeii. If you know of any other DVD release or TV broadcast, please let Steven know! |
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| Holy Isis, there may be yet another Pompeii project in the works, this one a TV miniseries based on Robert Harris’s best-selling novel Pompeii, with a script by Robert Towne (who won an Oscar for Chinatown), and Ridley Scott (director of Gladiator) among the producers. But there’s been no news about this project for a while, and it has a long history of problems. (Once upon a time, Roman Polanski was set to direct, but instead he filmed Harris’ contemproary poltical thriller The Ghost Writer.) If you have an update, please let Steven know! Image: detail from the painting “The Last Day of Pompeii” by Karl Bryullov. |
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