The Colosseum Was A State Propaganda Machine

Photo by Ceyda Çiftci

In this video, geek architect Dami Lee deconstructs the Colosseum of Ancient Rome, explaining how it operated as a propaganda engine to keep the the city's population distracted from the real issues.

And, yes, she concludes with comparisons to today's mass media...

The Hobbit - The Battle Of The Five Armies (2014)

And so Peter Jackson's epically-padded adaptation of a 300-page children's book into three two-and-a-half hour films comes to end with a concluding chapter that is essentially (as the title suggests) one giant battle.

And, yet, oddly, I found The Battle Of The Five Armies the easiest of the trilogy to sit through, quite possibly because it was just vignette-after-vignette of a massive fantasy battle.

It still suffered from dreadful sub-plot bloat:

• Thorin's "dragon sickness" - which started off as fascinating character development - got worse and worse until he had a fever-vision and then it suddenly got better;
• Any scene with Alfrid, the right-hand man of the Master Of Laketown, was just a waste of celluloid;
• Billy Connolly's Dain was a potentially interesting - if stereotypical Scottish - dwarf to throw into the mix, but then he disappeared from the action; 
• Whatever happened to the giant wormy-things that burst out of the ground and were never seen again? 
• What was the point of showing Beorn being parachuted into the battle if we never saw him again?
• etc  etc

The opening pre-credit sequence - the death of Smaug - should have been the finale of The Desolation Of Smaug and I really could have done without Peter Jackson's obsession with Legolas and his physics-defying stunts.

Moments like this tend to bring home the fact that you're just watching what amounts to someone else playing a very expensive video game - and sometimes the graphics aren't even that good.

Thankfully the misty, blur-o-vision that was so prevalent in the trailers doesn't seep in that often in the actual movie.

As much as I enjoyed the variety of fantasy races and monsters clashing, jumping around, killing each other and so on, for me, the most interesting part came with Bilbo's return to The Shire to find all his property being auctioned off - I could have watched more of that!

The hobbits are the most unique creatures in Tolkien's work and therefore the most interesting as they don't seem to fit comfortably with the rest of rough-and-ready Middle-Earth. That's why, if you're going to pad out a story entitled The Hobbit, I feel there ought to be more about hobbits!

Much like the Star Wars Prequels, I'm sure I'll come round to liking these three movies eventually, but they're never going to come close to Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings, which is a shame.

You have to wonder if The Hobbit might have been better treated as a single movie or maybe two, without all the spurious padding.

The book has stood the test of time without anyone feeling the need to write additional chapters and inflate it to the size of Lord Of The Rings, so perhaps there's a lesson there.

"SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES"

THROWBACK THURSDAY: What Was Gandalf's Handicap?

"...and knocked their king Golfimbul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment."

Back in 2012 I decided to reread The Hobbit, both to relax and mentally prepare me for Peter Jackson's new movie (An Unexpected Journey), and the thing that has immediately struck me (and probably explains why I stopped reading the book repeatedly after I grew out of my teens) is just what a clunky writer old JRRT is.

He may be a world-maker, language-crafter and mythology-weaver without equal in the realm of fantasy writing, but even if we ignore the odd similes that refer to 'steam engines' and 'pop-guns', or the fact that Bilbo has a clock on his mantlepiece, or that the 'terrifying' trolls are called Bill Huggins, Bert and Tom (these are the same trolls that turn up as petrified scenery in Lord Of The Rings), there is no excusing the ridiculous sentence that I began this piece with.

Read it again and just think about it. Golf was invented in Middle-Earth, before the time of The Hobbit, and was therefore probably being played during the War Of The Ring!

Did I skip the chapter where Legolas and Gimli worked out their racial differences on the Anfalas greens? Did the war disrupt the scheduling of the Rivendell Open?

And talking of Rivendell, check out this fantastic piece of elfish verse:

"O! tril-lil-lil-lolly
the valley is jolly,
ha!ha!"

And I'm only three chapters in. Makes me almost miss Tom Bombadil...

I adore the world Tolkien created, the life he gave to the creatures and races he peopled it with, but I just find the actual words he uses to tell his stories so laboured at times*.

The Hobbit is an easier read than Lord Of The Rings, of course, because it's written for children, not even young adults, but children too innocent to groan at awful puns and cheesy rhymes.

But surely I can't be the only one who has difficulties believing the world of The Hobbit is the same world that Lord Of The Rings takes place in?

For starters, where are all the golf clubs?

* As a side note to demonstrate how contrary I can be, I absolutely love listening to the audiobook of The Silmarillion (I have both the Martin Shaw and the Andy Serkis versions).

THERE CAN BE ONLY FOUR (ISSUES)

Issue one variant cover art by Brian Bysouth

Previously announced as a single graphic novel, Titan Comics adaptation of Gregory Widen’s original script for 1986's iconic Highlander will now, first, be released as a four-part comic book miniseries, debuting in December.

The adaptation is being written by Widen himself, with Szymon Kudranski on art duty.

A collected edition of Highlander: The Original Screenplay is now scheduled to follow in July.

Issue one variant cover art by Lee Binding

Issue one variant cover art by Szymon Kudranski 

Issue one variant cover art by Claudia Gironi