Agora

“You do not question your beliefs, you cannot. I must.”

Watching this film so quickly after, what I had assumed would be the very different Fog of War was interesting and also rather fitting. Wheras that film surmised and exemplified everything about modern warfare, this does the same for classical combat; though at their heart they are very much the same and driven by the same forces. McNamara’s (The subject of Fog of War) second rule of military command was as follows: ‘Rationality will not save us’; and this concept – which he used to illustrate how two sane men could through  the pressures of conflict do something completely crazy like end the world – is perfectly illustrated here in a much more literal manner.

This idea lays in many ways at the centre of the film’s orbit; depicting as it does the bloody illogicality of war between brothers as one side of a city rises up to cull the others, the way in which religion gives these people ‘the right’ to enact such slaughter in the face of reason and the fall of civilization’s bastion of knowledge and logic, the Library of Alexandria, underneath the trampling hooves of these marauding masses. It is then an entrance into a genre that had previously been long abandoned, the historical epic, but despite the spectacular sets and special effects it is very much an intimate story of three beings, each equally alike and unlike, who are caught in the midst of this mammoth-esque context.