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Gladiator
"Gladiator" (2000), directed by Ridley Scott, follows a betrayed Roman general forced into slavery and gladiatorial combat who rises through the ranks of the Colosseum seeking revenge against the corrupt emperor who murdered his family, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. Its recreation of ancient Rome's Colosseum, built as a massive physical set combined with then-groundbreaking digital visual effects to depict the arena at its full historical scale, helped set a new technical benchmark for historical epic production design at the turn of the millennium. Russell Crowe's performance as Maximus, combined with Hans Zimmer's widely influential orchestral score, helped trigger a broader resurgence of interest in historical epic filmmaking after the genre had experienced a significant commercial decline throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s. Its combination of its Best Picture-winning critical success and its genre-reviving commercial impact has made "Gladiator" one of the most significant historical epics of the modern filmmaking era.
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Kingdom of Heaven
"Kingdom of Heaven" (2005), directed by Ridley Scott, dramatizes the Crusades-era defense of Jerusalem, following a French blacksmith who becomes a knight and eventually leads the city's defense against Saladin's besieging forces in the lead-up to the Third Crusade. The film's director's cut, released after the theatrical version had underperformed and been criticized for narrative gaps, restored more than 45 minutes of additional footage and is now widely regarded by critics as a substantially stronger and more historically nuanced film than its initial theatrical release. Its relatively even-handed depiction of both Christian and Muslim perspectives during the Crusades, avoiding the more simplistically heroic framing common to earlier Hollywood treatments of the period, distinguished it from many prior cinematic depictions of medieval religious conflict. Its combination of its large-scale siege of Jerusalem sequences and its relatively balanced historical framing, particularly in its extended director's cut, has made "Kingdom of Heaven" one of the more historically thoughtful epics of the 2000s.
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