Bring on the 'toga trash'

While sleek, futuristic science fiction continues to have massive appeal -- "Tron: Legacy" alone has raked in nearly $400 million worldwide -- there's a contingent of moviegoers who prefer to keep their action-adventure old school. Really old school.

Like papyrus-is-the-new-iPad old school.

And they're lining up this weekend to see "The Eagle," starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell as a Roman soldier and his slave in 120 A.D. being chased across the Scottish Highlands by wildly painted tribal warriors. Of course, that's after they checked out the latest episode of "Spartacus: Gods of the Arena," the follow-up (and actually prequel) to last year's "Spartacus: Blood and Sand," the violent, sexed-up foreplay-and-swordplay gladiator saga that was a big hit for the pay-cable network Starz.

From the biblical epics of the '50s to the toga dramas of the '60s through more recent hits such as "300," "Gladiator," "Braveheart" and TV series such as "Hercules," "Xena: Warrior Princess," "Rome" and "I, Claudius," it seems there is always an audience out there that is as entranced by the ancient world as the modern -- even if the genre is often dismissed as sword-and-sandal or toga trash.

But Tatum says he knows why such stories always appealed to him.

"There's a certain mystique and mystery in that age," he said. "I don't know if we can conceive of how people [lived like] that. Even though the Romans were very sophisticated, there's only so much fire can do at a certain point. ... All you had was your word and your honor."

Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com, which tracks box-office trends, says the genre is popular because it's visceral and primal. "That era holds a fascination for a lot of moviegoers," he said.

"It's the Rodney Dangerfield of movie genres," he said. "It can't get no respect."

No one knows that better than those who teach the classics for a living. They understand why some view with a jaundiced eye the movies and TV shows about the eras with which they are fascinated.

"That's a legacy of the '50s, those great Roman biblical epics that were so serious ... but there were fake beards and visible smallpox vaccinations," said Matthew Brosamer, an associate professor of English at Los Angeles' Mount St. Mary's College who specializes in the Roman, Middle Ages and Renaissance eras. "Literate moviegoers didn't respect them."

Richard Armstrong, associate professor of classical studies at the University of Houston, said the accents also get in the way: "We have these odd conventions that the Romans had British accents, while all the Christians sound like they're from Kansas."

(Actually, in "The Eagle," Scottish director Kevin Macdonald flipped the script and wanted American actors to portray Romans and British actors to play their slaves and occupied peoples. "He wanted to make a bit of a political statement," Tatum said.)

Armstrong thinks that Starz's "Spartacus" series is aping the worst aspects of "Caligula," the 1979 film produced by Penthouse magazine's Bob Guccione that was derided at the time for being pornographic.

"'Spartacus' aspires to that level of transgression," Armstrong said. "I think the constant juxtaposition of sex and utter brutality oversimplifies whatever it wants to say about the ancient world, and reflects more the worlds of cage fighting and the Playboy Channel than Rome, or Capua, where it's actually set."

That sense that the ancient world strutted to a different moral drummer is why some think that so many are intrigued by that time period. We can live vicariously through these characters and accept behavior from heroes and villains that we would be repulsed by if set in the contemporary world.

"Why can we be titillated by sexual situations involving Roman slaves but would perhaps object to modern pornography about sex slaves? Putting those actions among those 'decadent Romans' lets us turn our fantasies to 11 while displacing all, or almost all, the guilt," said Ricardo Apostol, assistant professor of classics at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University. He teaches a course called "Sword and Sandal: The Classics in Film."

"Some people can consume it that way, as straight 'awesome.' Others, needing a little more distance, ironize it into a guilty pleasure or camp," he added. "But it all comes down to the same thing, and our projections onto the Romans say a whole lot more about us than they ever could about them."

"The best of the genre, as in the case of HBO's 'Rome,' can help give a sense of the texture of ancient life -- not so much the 'facts,'" Armstrong said.