Blood, chariots, swords, sandals. The appeal of Amazon Prime’s new Roman epic, Those About to Die, to the modern viewer is about as simple as that of its central subject – the empire’s wildly violent races and fights – were to the residents of the ancient world.
In the first episode we see prostitutes baring their breasts, men fighting lions, and the bodies of chariot racers being smeared across the track. Sadly, that is about as far as the fun goes, for the rest of this £130 million production is a turgid mess of portentous scenes and cliche plot points.
We open with Tenax, played by Iwan Rheon with a hint of the icy charm he deployed in Game of Thrones, ordering a henchman to slash the throat of a man who owes him money The “lowly, plebeian, slumlord, criminal” is on the make, rigging horse races and attempting to climb his way out of the muck of low-born Roman society.
For this is, suddenly, a world in which much seems possible to the citizens of the empire. For a start, Emperor Vespasian is on the throne. Born to an equestrian family – that’s the second rung of the imperial class system – he was the first imperial leader not from the senatorial elite.
At the end of 69 CE, as Tenax’s voiceover explains, he seized power at the end of the year of the four emperors, before restoring political stability and bringing a measure of calm to the empire.
We then move throughout a cast of characters from across Rome’s vast realms. In northern Africa, a young man, Kwame, goes on a hunt and, in a totally absurd scene, tricks a lion into running into a net.
His sisters, meanwhile, are at home, establishing their identity in the most cursory way before almost immediately stabbing a Roman legionary to death when he makes a pass at one of them.
In Rome, a trio of young Spaniards – a province whose residents have only recently been granted Roman citizenship – have arrived with their prize horses. Keen to make enough money to found a stud farm, they head to the colosseum to barter.
The other big character we’re introduced to is Queen Berenice: lover of Titus, son of Vespasian, and the Jewish client queen of Judea. But in the first episode we hardly get a glimpse of her.
These scenes clip past at quite a rate, however. It seems, I felt while watching, as if the writers were keen to race ahead to the horse racing, animal fighting and gladiator battling and splurge the tens of millions of dollars given to them on CGI.
But for any viewer to care about the outcome of these battles and the political skirmishes around them, they will likely need some investment in the lives of the protagonists. Instead of character development, though, we are given stock phrases and remarkably clunky expository dialogue.
Tenax tells an acquaintance off at one point, for example, for embarking on a sexual relationship with, “the wife of consul Marcus, the owner of the blue faction.” Does anyone really speak to their friends like this?
The visuals, meanwhile, are sweeping. We move from the plains of north Africa to densely crowded Roman street scenes. Hundreds of rioters sweep crash against palaces, while chariots crash against each other in the arena.
The unfortunate issue is that all of this looks pretty bad. The colours are muted and the palate flat. Scenes that might be breathtaking instead resemble nothing so much as a poorly animated video game cutscene.
Rome was a great civilisation, with enough characters and stories over its hundreds of years of history to launch enough Amazon shows to bankrupt Jeff Bezos ten times over. I hope the next time they do something better with the material on offer.
