Next up on the AFI list is this 3+ hour historical epic. What’s weird about it is that it’s directed by Stanley Kubrick, but if you didn’t know it, you’d never know it. It doesn’t feel like a Kubrick movie, it feels like a generic historical epic.

You’ve got your strong-jawed Hollywood patriarch (Kirk Douglas here); you’ve got your extremely earnest and square protagonist character, who never has a moment of moral ambiguity or human failing; you’ve got the obtrusively swelling orchestral score; you’ve got the piles and piles of extras filling out enormous battles and crowds. There are some pretty shots, but they’re just pretty, not genuinely interesting.

If you put this next to Barry Lyndon, another Kubrick historical epic, there’s just nothing to suggest that they’re by the same person. Everything about them, from acting styles to visuals to dialogue, is just completely and totally different. Barry Lyndon is brilliant, Spartacus is competent at best.

But it’s also probably competent at worst. Compared to the other major sword ‘n’ sandals epic on the AFI list, Ben-Hur, this movie is fucking brilliant. It tells a good story, it has some human sentimentality in it, and Gracchus’s cynical realism adds the one note of recognizable modernity in an otherwise old-fashioned movie. And while the acting is stiff and the writing stodgy, it’s less stiff and less stodgy.

Not a bad movie, but neither is it an especially good one. From an AFI list perspective, I can see where it’s worth representing this historically-important subgenre, and since Ben-Hur definitely needs to be thrown off the list, this is a good one to hold down the spot. But I can’t really recommend it as anything other than a historical artifact.