What would you do if you were the big boss of a Roman amphitheatre? Someone who could commission whatever kind of bizarre phenomena you liked, for the entertainment of the masses? Each to their own but if we were given the job, we would immediately fill the arena with butter, heat the ground up ever so slightly, and watch two teams try to play volleyball against each other.
If you know your history, you’ll be aware that Roman emperors tended to go for the butter volleyball option far less often than the ‘pitting two petrified men against each other in a desperate fight to the death’ option. And this is the option in which the colossal new Amazon Prime Video series Those About To Die is interested.
The show, directed by Roland Emmerich and Marco Kreuzpainter and created by Robert Rodat, is about a constant jostling for power among both the elite and the poor. “If I am not ambitious… I am dead” is the kind of thing characters say every 20 minutes or so. And they have good reason to: as soon as you think you can trust someone, they’ve driven a knife through your mum.
We’re in the Flavian dynasty, and Emperor Vespasian (Anthony Hopkins, who despite being front and centre in a lot of the marketing material appears sparingly) has two sons trying to prove themselves: one, a weedy weirdo called Domitian (Jojo Macari), loves watching people impaled in the amphitheatre; the other, Titus (Tom Hughes), is the baritone-voiced soldier who looks as though he read Men’s Health workout guides even back in 79 AD. Elsewhere, we are given the ‘gladiator survives against impossible odds’ story via Kwame (Moe Hashim) and his mother (Sara Martins), who, when she isn’t watching her son’s fights through her fingers, is working for conniving Tenax (Game Of Thrones‘ Iwan Rheon), who owns a betting tavern and sounds, unfortunately, like he was named after a sanitary product.
It’s an exhausting world to live in. If you’re not being strangled to death, you’re having sweaty sex in a brothel (probably shortly before being strangled to death), plotting to have someone killed, being told that someone is plotting to have you killed, or being mauled to death by a lion. There’s an enormous shortage of down time.
The world of the show is one in which knives make metallic “shing” noises even when being thrust through nothing but thin air; where, every few minutes, someone violently objects to something and is then immediately convinced to change their mind after one line from someone else; and where lions and crocodiles tear men apart in order to max out the show’s CGI budget. Does every episode need to come in just shy of an hour? No! Are all of the actors as good as one another? No! Does it all come together in the final episode, making you care more than you thought you did about Kwame and his close friend Viggo (Johannes Haukur Johannesson)? Yes!
There’s always been obvious drama inherent in the world of the chariot race and the gladiator. You could argue that Those About To Die produces diminishing returns from this obvious drama and that we end up with melodrama. Or you could sit back and laugh as a crocodile bites the head off a man whose tongue was recently cut out. Each to their own.
‘For Those About To Die’ streams on Prime Video from July 19