#Spartacus season 1 skin
#Spartacus season 1 series

#Spartacus season 1 series

It is a tragedy to make a CGI series in a country that has perhaps the greatest landscapes available to any film and TV industry in the world. One of the reasons I enjoy Legend of the Seeker is the astonishing locations available in New Zealand they are also part of the reason that I love the Lord of the Rings films and enjoyed both Xena and Hercules (the latter two among my all-time favorite guilty pleasure shows). Visually the film resembles 300, but such films really arenвЂ™t located anywhere at all, but instead belong to the strange neverwhere that CGI can generate. This would not be so remarkable except that the production is based in New Zealand, perhaps the most visually arresting country in the world. One other strange aspect to the CGI on the show is that because all the landscapes are green screened, the natural world is not depicted at all. Even in all its CGI moments there was great dramatic tension and a way of justifying its use on Spartacus there is only the surface of the image, without anything underneath. In that series the CGI was rarely used merely to fill in for the absence of anything else, never simply for ornament. Contrast the use of CGI here to the use of it in Battlestar Galactica. The problem here is that the CGI is used for sheer ornamentation, mere decoration, a means of embellishing what would otherwise have been unremarkable moments. What I object to in Spartacus is the gratuitous use of CGI. Contrast the Romes of Rome and Xena: Warrior Princess and you see how much CGI can enhance a show. As in Rome, it allows the recreation of a world that no longer exists and on a scale that is not possible with normal set design. I donвЂ™t object to the heavy use of CGI in Spartacus. DeKnight, who worked on both Buffy and Angel, though perhaps a clue to how low he was capable of descending was seen in one of the episodes he wrote when he worked on Smallville, the dreadful Buffy parody episode вЂњThirst,вЂќ in which Lana LangвЂ™s life is endangered by a vampire named Buffy Sanders. Sadly, the creator of Spartacus is Steven S.

Its many slow-motion sequences in fight scenes, however, lead to irritation. I will not defend Legend of the Seeker as a show of the first rank, but it is a serviceable guilty pleasure. Even in merely decent shows slo-mo frequently contributes a showвЂ™s weakest moments. The technique is used to intensify emotion or to deepen the reaction of a character, but not to focus in pornographic fashion on the infliction of a wound. 1,вЂќ when Buffy is shown runing in slo-mo as she realizes that she has been lured away from her friends so that they can be captured or killed. You might see slo-mo used in a shot on Buffy to register her horror at something, like in the last few moments of вЂњBecoming, Pt. Watch The Sopranos or Six Feet Under or even shows with a lot of action like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Battlestar Galactica and notice how rarely they use slow motion. A good show employs it rarely, a great show virtually never. There is so much blood in this show that it almost achieves self-parody.ДЄ sign of a weak show is how often it resorts to slow motion. What is most distressing is there isnвЂ™t the slightest exaggeration in anything that IвЂ™ve described here. At times the head of an actor will freeze while the blood continues to spurt across the screen. At the climax of the big gladiator scene in the pilot episode, blood surges in a tidal wave behind the head of Spartacus, washing across the entire screen. There are times that blood is seen merely flying across the screen with no discernible source. We see blood gushing from severed limbs, from busted noses, from slit throats, from decapitated heads.

#Spartacus season 1 skin

We see blood that has been left to dry on on sweaty skin and unshaved stubble. One could also speak here of violence, but the violence in Spartacus, which is unrelenting, almost always gives way to blood, as if the point of the violence is to generate a severed artery. So what descriptive terms spring to mind when thinking of Spartacus? Was blood eve intended to be the major component of any series? In fact, there is so much blood that it is hard not to think of the famous Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which copius amounts of blood spew from one severed arm and leg after another in absurd quanities. Instead of great acting, great writing, and compelling production values, with Spartacus you canвЂ™t think of much beyond nudity, the irresponsible use of CGI, cardboardish writing, and blood. If you were to ask someone what words first spring to mind after watching the two debut episodes, they would not be the ones that you would associate with great television.