Science and technology have scarcely progressed for ten thousand years, partly because they are treated with fear, ignorance and magical superstition, and partly because the Adeptus Mechanicus, the secretive, deranged machine cult that maintains the Imperium's technological base, generally sees innovation as blasphemy against the wisdom of the ancients and rightly fears the possibility of daemonic corruption of unproven equipment. A futuristic Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even the slightest taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, even going as far as destroying entire planets, just to be sure. The Space Marines (capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Knight Templar Super Soldiers) and the Sisters of Battle (equally fanatical, pyromaniacal battle nuns) serve as the Imperium's special forces, while the Imperial Guard, its at least trillions-strong regular army, takes disregard for human life to new and interesting extremes. Since then, he has become the godhead of the Imperium, and the incomprehensibly vast Ecclesiarchy spreads the Imperial Cult and commits horrible atrocities in his name (but against his philosophy) on an almost-daily basis. Its leader, known only as the Emperor, was betrayed and laid low by his most beloved son, and for more than ten millennia has been locked up in an arcane life support mechanism that anchors his soul in his withered corpse and requires the souls of psychic humans to be consumed in the thousands per day as fuel. In the waning years of the 41st millennium, the game's central faction, the Imperium of Man, is a paranoid, fascist theocratic state which spans the galaxy but is struggling mightily to maintain its grip on its territory. Rome only ran for two seasons, or twenty-two episodes-a sadly brief and attenuated run by HBO drama standards, where True Blood can run for six seasons to 70 episodes.In the distant past, humanity held immeasurable power and glory, but no longer. And in doing so, it embodied to a far greater extent Gladiator's chief cultural interest: its reformulation of Ancient Rome as an unambiguously positive force for civilization, rather than a hegemonic, ancient world "evil empire". Whereas the aforementioned feature films chiefly offered spectacle, with any socio-political import seeming secondary at best, Rome capitalized on the structural advantage of long-form television drama-the ability to let its story and themes "breathe" over the course of numerous hour-long episodes, rather than having to address every single aspect of its worldview in the course of a two-hour running time. Of far greater interest than any of these, however, is the HBO/BBC collaboration that was the television series Rome (2005-2007). Noam Murro), have all combined to keep up the renewed familiarity. Anderson, 2014), and 2014's 300 sequel, Rise of an Empire (dir. Jonathan Liebesman, 2012), The Eagle (dir. Louis Leterrier, 2010) and its sequel Wrath of the Titans (dir. Neil Marshall, 2010), Clash of the Titans (dir. Doug Lefler), and a succession of films since, such as Centurion (dir. Zack Snyder) as well as The Last Legion (dir. Oliver Stone), as well as the undeservedly lesser-known King Arthur (dir. Since then Ancient Rome, as well as Ancient Greece, have begun to reappear in films more frequently. Then abruptly, in 2000, it was resurrected by the immense critical and commercial success of Gladiator (dir. Mankiewicz) in 1963-the ancient world, or "sword and sandal," epic went into eclipse in Hollywood for more than a generation. With the box office debacle of Cleopatra (dir. Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today. DeMille made this blatantly overt by declaring that: The theme of this picture is whether man ought to be ruled by God's law, or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator, like Rameses. In a live introduction to The Ten Commandments (dir. The Biblically*themed "ancient world" epics of the 1950s and early 1960s tended to treat Rome and Ancient Egypt, almost interchangeably, as sublimated master metaphors for the Soviet Union-the menace of a godless imperium which would brazenly flaunt its capricious power over its people. On the jacket of Robert Harris's 2003 novel Pompeii, the summary says of its aqueduct-engineer hero that "as he heads out towards Vesuvius he is about to discover there are forces that even the world's only superpower can't control." This brief statement contains within it a key reason for Ancient Rome's discernible shift in status in Western popular culture in recent decades.
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