The music used to show us the atmosphere in this scene is extremely quiet at the start, when both men are calm. As the emotion between the two rises, so too does the volume of the music. At the climax of the scene, the music becomes loud, upsetting and extrovertly spiritual.
Before Marcus Aurelius Caesar’s death, he tells Maximus that he wants him to become the next emperor of Rome. This firmly places Maximus on the side of justice and democracy. This is in contrast to Commodus who becomes politically associated with tyranny and despotism. Commodus knew what he father had said to Maximus, which was one of his leading motives for murdering him.
Proving the point his father said about how no-one in his family loved him, when Commodus’ sister finds out that he murdered their father the first thing she does is slap him hard round the face. She doesn’t grieve or freeze when she finds out that he killed him, she hurts him physically and emotionally. This does not make us feel sorry for Commodus in anyway, it makes us feel sorry for his sister, and makes us think how she, a beautiful and possibly angelic woman could be related by blood to such a horrendous and demonic monster. What makes us think even worse of Commodus is the fact that he feels so sorry for himself, which shows us how pathetic and immature he really is.
Possibly the most horrific event throughout the entire film is by no surprise performed by Commodus. We suspect it was Commodus who orders his men to go and kill Maximus’ family so that if he did become the emperor, his son would not take over after him because no one else in the film hates Maximus as much as he does, and if he wants to get at Maximus then killing those who he so dearly loved would be a perfect crime. We also suspect it was him because out of everyone, Commodus is the one who is most associated with death, murder, assassination and hatred. But still, we cannot be sure if it were Commodus who killed Maximus’ family, however we believe it was him and this makes us hate and loath him much, much more because we have grown to like Maximus.
As we see the devilish deed taking place, music is one of the most important features that gives us a sense of surrounding. There is calm, then loud booming noise, the calm once again, loud, calm and finally loud and racy, where we witness the crime about to be committed. When Maximus sees his slaughtered family, there is an angelic voice singing in the background, grieving and depressed, as if she were crying. This is one of the most powerful music compositions throughout the film, and really makes you feel upset and sorry for Maximus, thus again making us feel revulsion to Commodus.
When Commodus is named the emperor of Rome, he makes sure that there are many people there to worship him and praise him, again showing us how desperate he is for love and attention. However, he cannot force people to adore him as he finds out when he holds a meeting of the Sennets and they mock him. At the same time as when he is being mocked, he is busy playing with his swords and armour, not caring about what other people say about him because he thinks he is the supreme ruler of everyone in Rome and no-one’s opinion matters to him. Again, like many times before, when we see this act of bigheadedness we cannot feel anything else towards this malevolent man other than hatred.
To try to make a better impression on the people of Rome, Commodus arranges a tribute to his late father, Marcus Aurelius Caesar, to show that he is caring. This is a lie. He killed his own flesh and blood father and does not think back upon it and regret it. This is proved by the direction of the setting. It is a dark sky filled with black, rolling clouds, flashing lightning and thunder is booming over everything as Commodus prepares the joke of a tribute. The weather is an exact reflection of Commodus’ personality and morals.
The point that Commodus is lonely and deprived of love cannot be stressed enough. Whilst looking at his sisters’ child sleeping, he is unsettlingly close to his harmless, innocent body. He wants a son for himself to carry on his satanic legacy, but no one will love him so he must feel like the father of his nephew.
The clever use of camera angles on his face shows his dark thoughts of the boy and about everything innocent and peaceful, but it also shows how innocent he thinks himself to be. Half of his face is covered in darkness and his features are very hard to depict, whilst the other half of his face is bathed in golden sunlight revealing all. This can show two things; that he is two faced, or that he has a good side.
The way Commodus looms over the child defensively and protectively makes his sister Lucille suspicious of him because she knows he unstable and dangerous. The child’s breathing is loud and disturbing, but this somehow seems arousing to Commodus, which makes him lean over to hear more. Commodus speaks in a shaking whisper to the small boy until his sisters’ suspicion becomes to great that she interferes and takes Commodus away from her son Lucious before there is too much of a threat. Peadophilia is a crime against nature and seeing Commodus look at his nephew in such a way that his mother has to make Commodus leave the room makes the audiences view of him plummet from hate down to disgust.
Because Commodus has never been loved, he thinks that it is fine for himself to be sexually attracted to his sister. He tries to make love to her but she escapes without saying a word. Again, much like peadophilia, incest is a crime against nature and this also makes the audience look at Commodus in disgust.
When watching the gladiators and Roman soldiers reenact the battle between the barbarians and Rome, Commodus demands that they salute to him before the violence begins. This again shows that he thinks he is better than everyone else and that they should look up to him. Secretly, Commodus arranged for the Romans to slaughter gladiators by giving them missile weapons and transport while the gladiators only had shields and swords. By doing this, it shows that Commodus it a sadistically psychotic person who loves to revel in blood and the suffering of others. As the violence develops, so does the music. To start with, the music booms as the camera looks over the ‘Barbarians’ waiting in anticipation, but once they enter the battleground, the music dies down as Commodus enters.
Once the fighting begins, the music instantly starts up again. It is amazingly fast, much like the action, and dips up and down as the different teams get into the lead. When the camera looks over Commodus, the music fades a bit as he looks at the barbarians in disgust. As the fighting continues, the music becomes powerful, dominating and loud.
During the fight, when people are killed violently and gruesomely, Commodus is sickeningly bloodthirsty, laughing and joking and pointing when a gladiator is killed, even once licking his lips when someone’s throat is slit, but being sarcastically scared when a Roman soldier is killed, prancing around in his viewing box, waving his hands as if to stop someone, saying “Woo, ooh!” Proving to us that sarcasm really is the lowest form of wit, he acts childishly and immaturely infront of people of the highest respect.
After the longest and goriest battle in the film, Commodus decides to go and congratulate the gladiator leader. When this masked fighter shows his face and he turns out to be Maximus, Commodus staggers back and is speechless in shock. When Maximus shows himself, loud, dramatic music starts to play; music that sends a tingle down the spine and music that makes Commodus seem like a small insect compared to Maximus. This music causes emotion upon the audience and creates intensity between Maximus and Commodus. After Maximus reveals to Commodus that he knows it was he who sent an army to go and murder his family by saying, “Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife”, he claims that he will “have his vengeance, in this life or the next”. Slowly walking up to Commodus with a knife hidden in his palm, planning to kill him, Maximus retreats and drop the knife when the fearful and shaking Commodus is approached by his young nephew. When Commodus must make a decision about whether he will let Maximus live or die, he has to hold he hand up. Upon doing so, it starts to tremble violently, showing us just how scared he really is of Maximus and proving that he is a great coward. He decides to allow Maximus to live, however he does so with a smirk across his pale face, making us accuse him of doing something much more sinister later on.
After his decision, the same sort of music is played now as it was at the ending of the battle, showing us how much of a hero Maximus is as he walks away from Commodus, with the crowd chanting his name.
When Maximus revealed himself to Commodus, it enraged him. He became erratic in behaviour and created an evil plan to kill Maximus. However, when this plan failed Commodus was dumbstruck because something that he had created had not gone to plan. Enraged and confused by this, Commodus goes down and threatens Maximus, thinking that he can defeat him with a small rush of adrenaline. This shows us that the only way Commodus can kill someone he knows is by sheer, unplanned anger powered by jealousy. He was emotionally charged when his father told him he was a bad son which lead to him killing his own family, and when Commodus goes to challenge Maximus it is only because he is furious that he was still alive after killing the gladiator champion. However, because Maximus is the total opposite of Commodus he walks away, even after Commodus sickly and repulsively commented on how he heard his family die; “I heard that your son squealed like a girl when they nailed him to the cross, and your wife moaned like a whore when they ravaged her again… and again… and again”.
When Commodus is alone, he is a completely different person to that when an audience surrounds him. Instead of being threatening and violent, he weeps into his hands because he knows that he isn’t loved or even respected and that a common gladiator has more love and respect than the emperor of Rome.
When he is talking to the only Sennet, who he thinks he can trust, Commodus paces the room up and down, breathing heavily. His breath comes out of his small mouth in large, thick clouds because of the cold room. But this could be extremely relevant to his personality. The cold breath is there as an effect to show that he is a very cold hearted person. The clothes he is wearing (loosely flowing white robes) also reflects Commodus’ personality. It shows that he is weak and wavy, not being able to make up his mind and other people can easily alter his decision like the wind manipulates how the clothes flow. Commodus’ costume at first was always thick, dark, metal armour showing how strong he was and that no one could break him, but he has slowly been turned upside down emotionally.
In the film, Commodus is referred to as a snake. This is simply because he is sly, slimy, spineless, deceitful and manipulative. This is not a major speech in the play, but it puts into perspective the type of person Commodus has changed into over the course of the film in a few simple words.
In the scene where Commodus starts to reminisce, we finally see a trace of human soul in him. He starts to talk about his regrets, and the cameras that are used in the scene are set up so that half of his face is in total darkness, covered by shadows, whilst the other half is in bright sunlight. This shows us that there is a bit of humanity in him and the audience would have a slight feeling of sorrow for Commodus. However, even if the audience does feel slightly sorry for him, his is clearly loosing his sanity. The music played during the confession is soft and emotionally stirring, bringing up the feeling of sorrow and pity, but when his attitude changes, the music played whilst Commodus tries to advance on his sister is eerie, malevolent and stomach wrenching.
Because of being rejected by her, Commodus hates his sister. To get his own back, he tells her son Lucious a story about the late emperor Claudius and how his sister cheated on him and then threatened to kill her and her loved ones, but he is really talking about Lucille and how he will kill all of her friends and family and everyone she loves, including the boy.
In this scene, Commodus’ make up is the palest it has been so far. His eyes are made to look even deeper and darker in the dark shadows behind him, and the flickering candles at his desk makes his face glow red and orange, not only making look evil, but also making him look like the devil. The music played sounds as if it has been taken from a temple, a place of worship, used for good or evil, and then it changes, become evil, twisted and sickening, showing us how he feels about his sister. This is done because the audience would think that Commodus is a devil and comes straight from the depths of Hell.
Later on in the film, Commodus says that if Maximus should so much as look at him in a manner that he does not like he will have him killed. He also threatens the lives of Lucious and Lucille unless she allows him to let her have his baby and therefore so that he can have an heir to the throne. This shows us how twisted, incestuous and insane Commodus really is; he threatens to kill his sister and his nephew unless his sister agrees to sleep with him and to have his baby.
One of the main reason he wants this is because he wants Maximus to suffer. He knows that if Maximus finds out that another woman he loved has been killed by the same man then he will be heartbroken, even more so than when his wife was killed. To him, Commodus would find this extremely amusing to watch an innocent man suffer unbearable torment, and this is possibly the main reason we don’t like Commodus, because of he sickeningly sadistic manner.
Before Commodus fights Maximus, because of his devious nature, he chains him up for a long time and stabs him through a lung. He makes sure that his soldiers cover up the wound so that no one knows that he has weakened Maximus to enable himself to win the fight. This just proves how much of a weak coward Commodus actually is. Commodus calls Maximus a brother, and the only reason this is said is because that his father loved Maximus more than him.
At the beginning of the battle, the roof opens up and allows rose petals and sunlight to flood through and soak Commodus. The sunlight makes him look pure white, and the rose petals falling down make him look almost angelic. But to call Commodus an angel would be wrong. He is a dark angel. As he lowers his head, he has an evil grin across his face, and the shadows formed over his eyes and nose and chin make him look grotesquely satanic. He worships the power he has.
However, there is one more reason the sunlight and roses could be there. It could be there to show heaven, to shows that Commodus will be dying and to show that he will be judged in the afterlife.
During the fight, Commodus tries to boast his fighting prowess by placing one hand behind his back whilst using his sword. This shows us how good he thinks he is, but really how bigheaded he actually is. When his sword is lost in battle, he demands that his soldiers surrounding him lend him a sword, but an army general that ordered for Maximus to be killed tells them all to seize their swords. Music is played at this point, slow, gothic music, which gradually increases up to a whispering voice. Because Commodus has no real power, he is dumbstruck. He resorts to trying to further impress people by fighting barehanded but this only leads to his death. Commodus’ attitude got him killed.
When he is lying on the floor, dead, crumpled and bleeding, a wave of silence sweeps over the Colosseum where they were fighting. This is not because the people of Rome actually respected the emperor but just said they didn’t to be on the same side as the Sennet, but because Maximus has defied them. He was called Maximus the Merciful because he let people live in the gladiator battle, and it disappointed them that the only person he killed was the emperor of Rome. But by this dramatic ending, all we can feel towards Commodus is hatred and seeing him die a gruesome and painful death gives the audience a great feeling of satisfaction.
In the ending, Commodus’ sister runs over to Maximus and cries over his death, not the ending of her brother’s life. This is really the final point that shows us Commodus was hated by all and loved by no-one. Life like that would be pointless, and the fact that Commodus lived so long like that, gives us a final impression that he might not have been such a coward after all, and that he might have had some respect in him, but put in contrast with all the bad points he owned, this idea is quickly shoved out of the window.
Put simply, the main reasons people do not like Commodus are the facts that he is bigoted, bigheaded, sadistic, immature, pathetic, sarcastic, childish, violent, incestuous, insane, disgusting, satanic and gruesome. All of these elements came together in the film to create an amazingly bad impression of Commodus. The camera angles in the film have been made to fit the scenes perfectly, with light and dark, and the music played and sound effects used are tremendous and go with what is going on in the film brilliantly.
‘Gladiator’ is an amazing film, filled with hatred, love and emotions. It broke records at the cinema and used over 30,000 gallons of fake blood and sweat to make. But in the end, it is a film the no one could ever forget.
