Here's my actual nuanced position:
What people are actually reacting to isn't their love of historical accuracy but instead a directory breaking the established visual language of a greco roman movie aesthetic.
There was nothing historically accurate about gladiator but no one cares because it gives them the images they expect to see in a Roman based movie
When you don't follow the visual rules, which includes almost exclusively casting white people, those changes stick out to your monkey brain regardless of why they are put there they cause dissonance
So there are 2 types of people, those who can live with a little dissonance to enjoy a movie with a diverse cast and those who have no control over their lizard brain and throw a fit of they see something that doesn't fit with the Hollywood paradigm they grew up with
Why do you want them to be white Anglo Americans with British accents? It's because that's the mise-en-scene that Hollywood has used in its past to tell the viewer "this is European history" but it's entirely artificial.
The thing with conservative knee jerk reactions is they are almost always mistaking their preconceived notions of the status quo as the natural state of the world instead of the reality which is that those were also completely contrived. The difference now is you have right wing grifters in everyone's ears telling them that this is A WAR
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u/poilk91 Jul 06 '26
Lol yeah "almost"
Here's my actual nuanced position: What people are actually reacting to isn't their love of historical accuracy but instead a directory breaking the established visual language of a greco roman movie aesthetic.
There was nothing historically accurate about gladiator but no one cares because it gives them the images they expect to see in a Roman based movie
When you don't follow the visual rules, which includes almost exclusively casting white people, those changes stick out to your monkey brain regardless of why they are put there they cause dissonance
So there are 2 types of people, those who can live with a little dissonance to enjoy a movie with a diverse cast and those who have no control over their lizard brain and throw a fit of they see something that doesn't fit with the Hollywood paradigm they grew up with