The deleted footage is ONLY identified on screen WHEN and IF you select the trivia subtitle track. If you're just watching the film regularly, nothing will jump up onscreen to take you out of the "moment"...chill, homie, chill... :thumbsup:

Thanks for the clarification!

How seamless is the seamless branching??

the extended cut is mixed for me... yes, there's some extra scenes and expands on several of the characters, but I have to say it didn't really "enhance" the movie all that much. There were a few great scenes with Connie Neilson and Joaaquin Pheonix that are all new, so that was cool. Most of the footage is just extended stuff, the kind of stuff tha you wouldn't notice unless you had memorized the theatrical cut. The branching was seamless, but the layer switch really showed on my player. There were no deleted footage markers (I haven't watched the trivia track yet).

This DVD has the best sounding Dolby Digital 5.1 track i have ever heard. All of us dts proponents and people saying "no dts, no sale" are really missing out.

I already own the 2-disc DTS edition. The only reason I would buy the new 3-disc set is if, in the 11 hours plus of documentaries, commentaries and trivia track, I could finally find an explanation to these troubling questions:

1. Why are the only two latin words in this three-hour movie about ancient Rome ("Roma victor" cried out by Maximus after the victory against the Germanics) in bad Latin? Roma being feminine, if this sentence was meant to mean "Rome [is] victorious", the words should have been "Roma victrix".

2. Why are all the other supposedly Latin words in Italian ("vino" is cried in the streets of Rome, instead of "vinum") or made-up Spanish (Maximus' son announces "soldati!" when he sees Romans approaching)?

Couldn't the production afford classically-educated scriptwriters or even a knowledgeable advisor on Latin and other tongues of the period? Couldn't the production at least afford a Latin dictionary? Or was the idea to dumb down any pretension at historical accuracy so as not to scare away the illiterate teenage viewers?

I can just imagine some Universal suit nixing the "trix" ending on "victrix" because "We don't want the kids going 'Who tricks what now?'".

Doesn't everyone know that trix are for kids?

Best GLADIATOR EXTENDED EDITION post ever.

:lol:

Finely observed!:)

Oh...my...God. Let me help you out here: stop watching Hollywood movies now. All of them.

Having said this, I noticed, after Googling "Roma Victor", that this faulty expression is now the official trademark of a video game that no doubt proudly pepetuates some of the 500 + documented historical inaccuracies of the film (documented everywhere except in the DVD documentaries and commentaries, that is).

There is something troubling about taking a literal goof from the film and making it the dumbed-down, ungrammatical title of a whole video game. But I guess ROMA VICTOR is more catchy as a game's name than something more accurate, like SPARTACUS LITE (TM) for instance...

I personally like to think that what the original script said was "Roma invicta", which is a time-honoured expression meaning "Rome [is] undefeated" and which would have been pronounced "Rom'invicta" after the required vowel elision and came out sounding something like "Roma Victaaah" in Russell Crowe's three-pints-for-lunch Aussie Shakespearian growl. ("Roma Victa", by the way, means "Rome is defeated").

Now who is going to break that news to the video game manufacturer?

Watched the extended cut last night and greatly enjoyed it. As someone else said, this is one of the best sounding DVDs I've heard and I don't miss the DTS at all. The added scenes helped flesh out the characters a little more without bogging down the film at all.

And Baracine, I'm going to have to agree with Filmmaker. If you're that anal stay away from Hollywood movies and video games. I could care less if the latin was correct. Hell, they should have just kept it all in english as it was kind of dumb to try to throw in a couple latin phrases.

Not to be anal or anything, but I believe the expression is: "I couldn't care less if the Latin was correct.":)

Wow, you must be a blast at parties... ;)

Outside Mensa, not so much...

Well, if that's the case, just tell them you were being sarcastic and you're covered.... On the other hand, judging be the fact that Baracine put his period with the quatation marks tell me that he knows his stuff.........

Later,

Matt

so... what was the point of including the original theatrical cut of the film?? what a waste of space IMO. They could have easily just lopped it off and thrown on the DTS-ES soundtrack, oh well, whatever.

I'm gonna throw out two reasons... it's probably a mix of both of these:

1) Ridley doesn't call the longer one a "director's cut" because he was happy with the theatrical. I feel confident his preference was to have both cuts available for the viewer. This is exactly the same setup for Alien, with the intro by Ridley Scott saying it wasn't a director's cut.

and

2) The feature was a braching setup, meaning even though there's two "cuts" of the movie, it doesn't take up the space of two movies, in fact, other than actually doing the braching setup, there was no extra effort needed on Dreamwork's part to author the disc with both cuts, and it only takes up the space that the extended cut would take up to begin with.

hpow's that for a run-on sentence heheh

edit: wanted to add #3:

3) The DVD authoring was done by the same group that did the authoring on the Alien Quadrilogy set, and guess what, all the Aliens movies have branching titles.

The disc 2 documentary is one of the best "making-of" pieces I've ever seen. It's as good as the stuff found on the LOTR EEs. Just fantastic.

I was thinking about buying this, but now that I know that the Latin is messed up I will have to pass.

I read there was little overlap of the extras between the two sets.Does the EE pretty much cover everything,or does the two disc sets extras add more insight?

Most of the stuff on the 2-disc set is promo junk. But there are some gems like the commentary (different from the EE), a few deleted scenes that I'm not sure have been included with the EE, and an interview with Hans Zimmer.

From the looks of things, the EE is very comprehensive, but I haven't been able to go through all its extras yet though.

i thought the blood games tlc documentary on the original set was great (sure it went promotional at the end, but at least it gave us some historical background.

I have read that there is an easter egg on disc 2 where by you highlight credits after going to the chapters menu, and click right on the remote and the medallion is supposed to light up and get to the egg, but I cannot get my disc to do this. anyone else figure this out yet?
thanks,
smurr

Hey, a man's gotta live by his standards! :thumbsup: