Dystopia is nothing new.
Forty-three years before The Hunger Games, thirty-two
years before Battle Royale, the dystopian premise shared by those two
films was first pioneered by this dark, coldly analytical, and deeply political
art-house drama by writer/director Peter Watkins. That The Hunger Games has
so thoroughly captured our cultural imagination with many of the same themes
proves just how eternally-relevant Watkins' social/political commentary is; but
that said, the films could not be more different. While the current blockbuster
franchise fills the screen with flash and star-power, providing exciting
popular entertainment laced with deeper themes, The Gladiators aims to
unsettle rather than entertain, keeping an emotional distance that makes the
film more of a haunting philosophical thought-experiment than a thriller. So
similar in concept, and even similar in some aspects of its philosophy, yet
completely antithetical in style and tone, this new pop-cultural context makes
for a perfect time to rediscover Watkins' long-overlooked film, which is
perhaps made all the more interesting by the contrast.
The basic premise will sound remarkably familiar to fans of
either The Hunger Games or Battle Royale: in a bleak near future,
war has been replaced by a televised combat game in which teams of drafted
soldiers are forced to fight to the death in an arena-like territory that is
manipulated for maximum “entertainment value” and propagandistic impact. But
unlike in those films, The Gladiators does not invite the viewer to join
the “Peace Games” audience in finding action-movie thrills and entertainment
value in the games' killing. While it undoubtedly has a premise that suggests
“sci-fi-action-thriller,” Peter Watkins adamantly has created no such thing.
His style is cold, logical, and objective, forcing the viewer to remain a
distant observer of the action rather than a vicarious participant. The
characters of the fighters in the game are left deliberately undeveloped, so we
cannot form emotional investment or root for anyone; they don't even have
names. The combat scenes are deliberately edited in such a way as to defy
thriller convention, so they seem exactly like the senseless and pointless
moments of violence that they are.
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| "This competition is boring. Bring out the gimp!!! |
I must emphasize here that none of these things are
criticisms; indeed, they are the entire point of the film. We are to remain as
objective as Watkins is, so we can observe without emotional investment and see
the barbaric truth of the situation. Since the focus is never on the characters,
it is instead on the situation as a whole: the “Peace Games” as a
cruelly-calculated political machine that acts as a microcosm for military
force and global politics at large. The film is all about themes: themes of
political power plays, grand-scale manipulations of public thought and opinion,
the fallacy of common types of resistance, and wars themselves as means to
greater ends of control – on both sides of the conflict. While the tensions in
the film obviously draw from the Cold War, it remains just as relevant (at
least) in today's far more murky and uncertain political climate.
An influential – but very underground – figure in indie
filmmaking, Peter Watkins is known for his unique style of fictional films
directed and shot like cinema-verité documentaries.
His best-known works in this style are the excellent biopic Edvard Munch (1974),
and his highly controversial and confrontational political parables The War
Game (1965) and Punishment Park (1971). So powerful is his style
that despite obviously being a fictional film, The War Game won the Best
Documentary Oscar in 1967. The Gladiators is similarly constructed as a
documentary: in this case, a behind-the-scenes document showing the truth of
the Peace Games. The story is told through footage of the “games” paired with
interviews with the fighters, supplemented with voice-over narration and
on-screen data about the events unfolding. All of these devices serve to
underscore Watkins' analytical approach to the material. While all of it may
also make the film harder to swallow for many viewers, it is crucial for what
he is trying to show.
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| "Ummmmm....where's the button for free pizza?!" |
As underground as most of Peter Watkins' films have always
been, The Gladiators has generally been more underground than most,
receiving only very sparse distribution until recent years. After initially
premiering at festivals and receiving some limited European theatrical runs, it
largely disappeared until New Line Cinema acquired the American distribution
rights in the mid-1970s. In a wildly misguided attempt to market the film as
precisely the thing that it makes a point of not being, New Line tried to sell
it as a dystopian sci-fi/thriller, cashing in on the success of films like Rollerball.
The subsequent VHS release – which came out on the horror-focused Wizard
Video, of all labels – repeated the same mistake. Needless to say, this
bait-and-switch marketing ensured that the film never found its intended target
audience, and it disappeared again for over twenty years. Thankfully, it
finally found the right home on DVD, when the art-house label Project X Video
launched The Peter Watkins Collection, which restored his entire major
filmography. Unlike Punishment Park, it has yet to see any blu-ray
release, but at least there is an excellent, restored disc available, allowing
the film to find its audience at last.
With The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 freshly
released on home media, this is the perfect time to rediscover Peter Watkins' The
Gladiators. It certainly is not a film for everyone: it is a challenging,
potentially difficult film, and its deliberate disinterest in character
development and suspense will frustrate many viewers, but it simply is asking
you to focus on the ideas rather than the story. While it will not provide (and
does not want to provide) the entertainment that its Hollywood
counterpart does, it does offer a philosophically and politically dense,
intellectual look at the same concept. If that concept intrigues you, but you
want something more cerebral than typical blockbuster movies, this may be just
the film you are looking for. In addition, it now offers one seriously unique
opportunity: how often do we get two films so outwardly similar, so but deeply
different, that can act as such interesting counterpoints for one another?
