YMMV / Spartacus

• Adaptation Displacement: Based on a novel by Howard Fast. Guess which one's better-remembered today.
• Award Snub: It was nominated for six Academy Awards and won four, but none of them were Best Picture, Director or Actor.
• Awesome Music: The score by Alex North.
• Complete Monster: Marcus Licinius Crassus, first consul to the Roman Republic, is vile and ambitious even by the standards of the Roman elite. Crassus first demonstrates his cruelty by personally finishing off a gladiator slave named Draba who attempts to defy his captors, regularly presiding over all the usual atrocities of the Gladiator Games with bored scorn at best. When Draba's own friend Spartacus is inspired to foment a slave uprising in response to the cruelty of the Romans, Crassus walls him and the thousands of slaves he's liberated into an attack they can't avoid, before ordering the slaves slaughtered. Chafed at the continued defiance of the remaining slaves, Crassus opts to have them all crucified alongside the Appian Way, and invokes Exact Words on a horrified ally to whom he had promised the sale of "survivors" to. Crassus forces Spartacus to duel his last remaining friend to the death out of spite and kidnaps his beloved Varinia and his newborn son as slaves. Continually unable to grasp how beloved Spartacus is, even after he threatens the life of Varinia's son to try and force her love toward him, the only answer Crassus ever gets to his question is that he'd simply never be able to understand.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Woody Strode's Draba only appears in the film's first half and his Heroic Sacrifice serves as a trigger for the Rebellion, but he's such an incredible presence and gives such a powerful performance that he became one of the most well liked figures in the film. He got nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes.
• One-Scene Wonder: Herbert Lom as the pirates' envoy, who's amusingly entranced by the collection of treasure the slave army has acquired.
• Signature Scene:
  • The gladiator fight between Spartacus and Draba — it's a movie about rebellious gladiators after all — and Draba rebelling against the Romans at the end of it.
  • "I Am Spartacus." Funnily enough, Stanley Kubrick hated the idea when Kirk Douglas pitched it, though their already tempestuous relationship may have been part of that.

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