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I have been watching recorded episodes of the current TV adaptation of Spartacus. It is on air late in the evening, well past the recognised watershed for adult content.
It is quite an epic in the making and makes plenty of gratuitous use of nudity, sex (of all sorts), blood and gore. You would expect this being set in decadent Rome and with a focus on galdiators and the arena.
The special effects people must have had a heyday, with gallons of blood to spray around and horrendous wounds and mutilations to portray. Along with this they are pretty graphic in their illustration of the various sexual relationships, but stop short of explicit hard core pornography ....... just.
That said today I wonder if they went too far. Having become used to the usual cocktail of lust and horror, the following scene, shocked me, leaving me speechless. It felt that things had gone too far.
In essence Spartacus had a new bunch of freed slaves join his group. They were rowdy and one especially large and strong. During a evening round of rough and tumble amongst the men a fight ensued after one of the women was assaulted. It developed into a sword fight between this giant and Spartacus.
It was the usual stuff of clashing metal, grunting and glaring until Spartacus, standing to the side delivered and upward cut.
This literally sliced off the giant's face. What was left was a gaping, head-sized openning filled largely with a mass of red pulp pumping out spurts of blood. This was upon the shoulders of a still standing body that started to topple forward.
If this was not enough, as the body fell forward the brain slipped out and fell to its feet!
My daughter would have gone "OMG!", but fortuntately she was not there.
What can I say? Was there any need for this? Not that I can see. It was pure shock value and while it did grip my attention momentarily I am now left thinking has this gone too far or as they say in Hollywood (after Happy Days) has it jumped the shark?
I have no idea where this can go now, other than down.
Spartacus jumped the shark after season 2 "Gods of the Arena". Those two seasons were phenomenal. I recommended the show to all my friends, acquaintances and co workers.
ReplyDeletePeople should watch "Gods of the Arena", then "Blood and Sand" and stop after. The last 2 seasons were worthless. I know they tried to bring strong female fighting characters into it, but it was so surrealistic. For example "Naveah" becoming one of the greatest warriors of Spartacus? Really? Then all of Spartacus's freedom speeches that were ripped off from "Braveheart". Pathetic.