At first glance, Amazon is serving up a new production with “Those About To Die” that can easily make series fans rub their hands in ecstatic anticipation: It’s set in Rome in the year 79 AD. The atmosphere is rough and rude, the battle of classes and for power is as dangerous as the chariot races in the Circus Maximus. Bread, blood and games with the great Anthony Hopkins as the emperor. What could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot.
The ten-part series seems like an audiovisual chunk (which is too dark, by the way) that the “streaming content machine” spits out at your feet. Roland Emmerich, a representative of visual bombast, also directed the series and the series turned out exactly as you would expect it to under these circumstances – instead of concentrating on modern parables and finely chiseled content, the music blares while bland digital art occupies the (mass) scenes.
It’s like “Gladiator” – only with better resolution, but with too many frayed storylines and too many characters who, despite being very good at acting, hardly have time to illuminate their characters individually. Even Hopkins can’t make up for that. He has too few scenes for that.
Author
Nora Bruckmüller
Editor Culture
Nora Bruckmüller
