Brett has said in his past reviews of the battles of Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep that the important part of a film is that it works _on screen_. So he points out differences between the book and the film, but says this is not meant to be criticism of the film. Except the bit where they get the logistics wrong.

He absolutely tore into Rings of Power, but that only makes me like him more.

He does get a bit worked up, understandably, when the Romans attack with an M777 howitzer firing napalm shells. Rome wiped everything that stood in their way for a long while, but not like that.

Bret Devereaux does touch on an interesting concept though in his articles on this nitpick... That movie goers are so acclimated to seeing how "movie Roman" armies fight, that showing them a more historically accurate battle scene would be highly jarring to the point of being novelty.

I'm hoping the days where movies show the Romans forming testudo, moving up to fur clad enemies and then breaking up to do one on one gladiator style individual battles are gone.

Devereaux's objection is that Scott is to some extent trading off a reputation for making "historically accurate" movies. As TFA points out, on a "historical accuracy scale" Gladiator gets about a 2/10. So in that sense it's false advertising.

> Bret Devereaux isn't wrong. He's also not in the film business.

However I would be interested in seeing someone put to the test his thesis that a more historically grounded battle scene would be even more epic and visually interesting.

I also should mention that Bladerunner was not historically accurate for 2019.