I was fascinated by the article and so I started watching this movie after dinner. I've only gotten through the first half, and it's basically nonstop Archimedes getting laid and breaking the hearts of hot Italian women. In other words, peak HN.
This is B-movie territory, until generative AI can be used to render battles of the Punic Wars without prohibitive budgets for battle scene recreation. For the 1950s special effects and mythologized 2000-year-old energy weapons, skip to the end.
Archimède's private life is not known. Neither is Marcus Claudius Marcellus's. So a story can be invented from start to finish.. And the screenwriters smartly opt for a melodramatic tale, a gripping script, certainly better than that of the average sword and sandals (peplum) standards..
Sword-and-sandal films are a specific class of Italian adventure films that have subjects set in Biblical or classical antiquity, often with plots based more or less loosely on Greco-Roman history.. Not only directors, but also some of the screenwriters, often put together in teams, worked past the typically formulaic plot structure to include a mixture of "bits of philosophical readings and scraps of psychoanalysis, reflections on the biggest political systems, the fate of the world and humanity, fatalistic notions of accepting the will of destiny and the gods, anthropocentric belief in the powers of the human physique, and brilliant syntheses of military treatises"..
In the modern era, Vin Diesel has tried to create a film on Hannibal crossing the Alps, without success. So we are left with 1950s peblum films.
