“Would you rather live in the ascendancy of a civilization or its decline?” - Arnold Poindexter, Revenge of the Nerds
The newish movie Agora offers experimental evidence proving that the decline of a civilization is harmful to liberty, the pursuit of individual happiness, and the advancement of science, and generally not a fun time to live. The lights are going out across the Roman Empire, especially in once-hot, now-not backwaters like Alexandria. Statues of good old gods like Serapis are being replaced with statues of Jehova. Slave-owning Rachel Weisz teaches the Socratic method to a bunch of rich, horny teenagers, but her card to the Great Library of Alexandria is about to be revoked.
This movie is aggressively iconoclastic. Almost every choice is at right angles to the traditional Hollywood formula movie. It has a classically epic sweep (in terms of movies if not of Homer) but the main character and the best known movie star is a not only a woman, but a geek. There are guys wearing sandals flashing their swords, but the mob-on-mob violence is too brutal to be stylized. There are lots of long, loving helicopter shots of a City of Antiquity…but it’s friggin’ Alexandria, not Rome, and with no Cleopatra or a lighthouse-destroying earthquake in sight. There’s the depiction of the early days of the Church, but almost all of the Christians are assholes. And even in a costume drama with a seething backdrop of religious and social conflict, the central dilemma is Hypatia’s efforts to disprove Ptolemy’s theories of astronomy, complete with experiments. There’s even a entr’acte or two. Box Office Poison.
For those reasons alone, I’m glad I saw it. It’s not great, but it’s interesting. It would be a good double feature with the movie I quoted above. There was a dark age when the search for knowledge was snuffed out…and now we live in a new golden age, when the nerds have had their revenge.
just saw this and enjoyed it. some of the characters’ motivations (such as davis) weren’t quite on the money early on, but the dramatic situations, whilst melodramatic in a latin way (including ubiquitous string action), were believable, and there was some nice directorial flourishes.
I rather enjoyed the whole movie. My understanding is that Rachel Weisz did not know who Hypatia was before this movie, which is disappointing. After watching this, it leads me to wonder how accurate this depiction of her was. Also, how close did she come to understanding the nature of orbits.
Considering the level of understanding achieved in Alexandria prior to that time, it is perfectly plausible that she understood how the orbits really worked. Unfortunately, none of her own writings have survived. It’s likely that many were lost in the events depicted in the film.
I should have known there’d be a thread about this movie here.
I had never heard of Agora. I’m not entirely sure how I stumbled across it. But a desire to see something set in antiquity that wasn’t Clash of the Titans (okay, I did rewatch the 80s version) or Ben Hur or 300 made me give it a chance despite the tepid reviews.
I like @Djscman’s summary of it up top. It’s not a typical sword-and-sandals, for sure. Two things stand out in their quality: The performances (Weisz is great–shocking!) and the sets. The production eschewed CGI backgrounds, instead building what looked to my underinformed eyes to be a pretty historically solid late-Roman, Greek-influenced Egyptian city.
What doesn’t hold up is the story, which is dour and tragic without making much of a point. Oh, except that religious violence is horrible. There are clunky cuts that indicate to me that they tried to give a new shape to the film in editing, but it didn’t work.
I watched I, Claudius for the first time this year, and can’t help thinking that Agora somehow needed to inject some of that show’s relish and fun at the cruelty and chaos that characterized the time. Maybe that’s a different movie, but it would be more engaging to watch.
Anyway, if you’d like to see a well-produced snapshot of a rarely portrayed time in history, you might like Agora. Just don’t expect an amazing narrative payoff.
Heh, if you keep comparing stuff to I, Claudius you’re just begging for disappointment!
I liked Agora but I also have become more aware of how my whole understanding of Hypatia-as-martyr-to-science, plus the whole ‘loss of the Library of Alexandria tragedy’ thing, have been heavily colored by a few minutes’ worth of Carl Sagan on Cosmos. This fellow claims Sagan was a bit out of his element when discussing ancient history.
It’s been years since I saw Agora, so I don’t remember how well it hews to actual historical sources in its depiction of Hypatia and the fate of the Serapeum etc.
I revisited this recently, not long after finally getting around to Netflix’s Troy: Fall of a City, and I was struck by how, despite Agora being based on reality and Troy coming from myth, the reverse felt true while watching them. There’s really not much on offer in Agora beyond Rachel Weisz besides the city itself, and these days you’d be better off exploring it through that Assassin’s Creed edutainment edition thing.
If you’re looking for great tales from antiquity, HBO’s Rome was excellent, though I can only vouch for the first season. It sounds like I need to check out I, Claudius.
Absolutely! Although it (via the books, apparently) cherry-picks the most scandalous and lascivious stories that historians concocted about the Julian emperors. If you want a companion conversation, nerdy comedians John Hodgman and Eliot Kalan did an episode-by-episode podcast about it. That’s what got me to give the show a shot.
I’m currently on Claudius’s reign in Tom Holland’s Dynasty, which is every bit as alive with color as Rubicon was, so I have a fair bit of context already. I also don’t mind dramatic interpretations of events that were doubtless shocking in the original.
I saw this movie randomly because hey, free Rachel Weisz. And it was awesome. A true homage to critical thinking and how Christianity violently destroyed it, changing human history forever.
You have my attention. I hope he gets to ride his horse across the bridge of boats. Xerxes only got to look at it. (To be fair, the far better 300 sequel did give us a small cavalry battle across the ships.)
