Imperium: Nerone

and not only. a film who creates one of many Nerone's portraits. not extraordinary but decent. only sin - the fear of Hans Matheson to explore new solutions for create his role more than copy of other emperor's representations. but he does a beautiful role, not real profound but honest, powerful and realistic. like many historical movies, the accuracy is not the best point and, in many scenes, Nerone seems be only sketch. but it is a good choice for an evening after work day, as mixture of history and crumbs of fairy tale, remembering Quo Vadis and the representation of the Roman emperor in different novels and in cinema. sure, the stereotypes are not the inspired ingredients and the story of Nerone could be more a story "ad usum Delphini" but the result is far to be bad.

This is entertaining enough, but you can't ignore the things about Nero that were left out of this story. History has said that he was cruel and depraved as emperor from the get-go. Contemporary historians documented this. Yet, this film would have us believe that he was gradually manipulated into that selfish, blood-thirsty personality by others around him. Some of his most notorious actions (incest, debauchery, arena killings, etc.) may be quietly implied but they are never clearly stated in this version of the story. For all intents and purposes, this is more a story about Christianity in Nero's Rome, than it is about Nero, and even this is somewhat sugar-coated. Again, this meets the criteria for fair entertainment but you can find better representations of this history elsewhere.

As a ravenous devourer of all films set in the ancient world, but especially the Roman ones, as soon as I found out this and "Augustus" are part of a larger programme, I had to uncover the remaining pieces to be filmed. As culled from the production company website, they are as follows:

Miniseries completed: Augusto/Augustus and Nerone/Nero Miniseries in production: San Pietro/Saint Peter, Pompei/Pompeii, Costantino/Constantine and La Caduta dell'Impero/The fall of the empire.

So it would appear that the series will not focus only on 'imperium' per se, that is emperors and all that. But instead, it will feature some historical events and important characters peripheral to Rome proper (in this case, St. Peter). Much as I don't like the Christian flicks, one cannot look at all Rome's history and shrug it off. But, for my part, I look forward to the Constantine piece. TThe man hasn't been 'filmed' much and I cannot locate the one that I know of on DVD anywhere.

Hans is great as usual but my God the girl who play's Acta what is that? This film version of the Nero story is fresh and easy evening watch TV but .... Because (I think) the actress who plays Acta has been dubbed, I am completely annoyed by her gasping and squeaking sounds before she says anything. Then she has the appearance of a goldfish so I really do not understand who has cast this lady. For me this role is the most annoying role that I have seen playing in years, so I ruined a very large part of the actually good series. The rest of the cast plays well and Hans is a Nero who does not fall into the stereotype of the overly insane emperor. So for a relaxing evening watching TV, this version is great, but not high-quality, unfortunately, because Hans had deserved a better opponent than this gasping girl.

OK, we all know that historical movies are full of inexactitudes, the list is so long, Troy was a disaster, and Brad Pitt acting was horrible, any movies done on Joan of arc was to laugh about, and so on and so on, so why review them pointing on how bad they are with respecting the real story? Sure I don't retain this movie as being Oscar material (then again I saw some winners worst than this movie), but it was entertaining, the set and costume were nice...The only shame was that it was entirely voiced over even for the English speaking actors, and I never get used to hear somebody familiar speak with another voice......