It took a millennium for western civilisation to create a canon of classical literature – but just 10 years for Hollywood to destroy it

When I think back on this decade’s spate of movies based on the great legends of European history, I remember how fantastically it started – with Gladiator – and how badly things went downhill after that: with Kingdom of Heaven, Troy, 300 and Beowulf.

When I saw Gladiator in 2000, I thought this was going to be just the best millennium ever. It had everything you could want in a movie: glory, gore, guts, gladiators. It was a sweeping epic with a computer-generated cast of thousands. Augustus Caesar would have been proud of it. Julius and Tiberius, too.

Yet the thing I liked most about Ridley Scott’s superb film was how closely it hewed to the historical record, in its portrayal of Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) as the depraved son of Marcus Aurelius, the zany old philosopher king himself.

Commodus, history tells us, was in fact a vogueing headcase who liked to dress up as a gladiator, to no great effect. Gladiator was the kind of movie you could enjoy, even if it could have done without all that Enya keening, but it was also the kind of movie that made you feel good about western civilisation.

Sure, we’ve had our share of rough times down through the centuries, and sure, we occasionally got suckered into playing ball with the occasional no-good mass murderer.

But when push came to shove, when the flickering embers of liberty were about to be extinguished forever, we all knew that a hell-for-leather hero like Russell Crowe would arise out of nowhere and get western civilisation back on track. Because that’s the way we do things around here.

Sadly, as the decade limped along, films of this emotionally nutritious nature started to stray from these hallowed principles. Liberties were taken with our touchstone myths – The Iliad, Beowulf.

The Crusades were belittled as the Franks were portrayed as avaricious scum in Kingdom of Heaven, and even the great Arthurian saga got turned on its head in the fashionably revisionist King Arthur.

By the time the decade had run its course, moviegoers could be forgiven for writing off westerners of bygone times as charlatans, butchers, psychopaths and scumbags.

The nadir was reached when Leonidas, whose 300 valiant Spartans had kept democracy from being crushed beneath the Persian boot at Thermopylae, got turned into a blustery show-off cavorting in his underpants in 300.

No longer did we need Genghis Khan – portrayed in the film Mongol as the sweetest chap since the young George Harrison – or Attila the Hun to put western civilisation to the sword. Hollywood did it all by itself.

To be fair, this was not a great decade for movies, period. Oh, sure, it was a pretty good decade for movies about slovenly males who could not get dates, or about adorable rodents, or about repressed individuals whose inner strengths could only be released through the power of dance.

It was also a good decade for movies involving suspiciously eloquent British gangsters and Orcs. But it was not a great decade for romantic comedies, movies about the government or movies involving amazing scams. And it was certainly not a great decade for the kinds of movies that I love: gladiator movies. Other than Gladiator, of course.

The past decade was a dark interregnum when directors cavalierly took the defining myths of the west and ripped them to pieces, often with help from screenwriters who had previously worked as bartenders.

This was a heartbreaking development for those of us who grew up worshipping swords-and-scimitars cinema. Every time I saw the trailer for one of these films – Golly! Look at all those CG ships sailing off to burn the topless towers of Ilium!! – my heart would leap in a way it had not since word got out that Pixies might be reforming.

This is puzzling because I am not even sure exactly what it is that all these films have in common, other than a passion for dismemberment. Troy is set eight centuries before Christ’s birth; Kingdom of Heaven takes place almost 1,200 years after His death.

Gladiator is dominated by pagans; Kingdom of Heaven by Christians; Troy and 300 by men who grudgingly defer to the suzerainty of Zeus; and Beowulf by unreconstructed devotees of Odin and Thor. Yet for some reason all these films seem to take place in the same historical era, and even in the same society.

That is because there is no sophisticated technology of note – just about everything is done with swords and spears and axes, plus the occasional catapult – and because the films are filled with comely, bosomy wenches manhandled by oafs clutching flagons of mead, or some mead-like substance quaffed from flagons undulating like the thighs of Minerva.

They are also films where men wear skirts. They are films where men will suffer excruciating deaths but the bards will sing of their glory forever, overlooking that business with the skirts. They are films where men will live for gold but die for glory. But mostly they are films where the hero’s sidekick will be played by Brendan Gleeson.

Searching for an all-encompassing term to describe this genre of rip-roaring motion picture, clinicians sometimes refer to them as Faux Quasi-Centurion Neo-Feudal Merovingian Ultra-Hyborean Men of Yore Action Flicks, where the story could transpire anytime between the era of Solomon and the rule of Saladin, and in which at some point one of the characters will say: “You do me great honour, my liege. But I’m still not going into that cave.” Though I have always preferred the term Films That Go Beyond the Impale.

As the decade wore on, Men of Yore films got more and more over the top and more and more dependent on special effects. This was partly because of an industry-wide belief that Ray Winstone’s acting could be dramatically improved via computer enhancement.

That supposition proved to be false, though it worked well enough with Gerard Butler in 300. An even greater problem was the habitual tinkering with the historical record. King Arthur may be perfectly on target in suggesting that Lancelot was not a native of the British Isles.

But if Lancelot first drew breath in the steppes of central Asia, why would you get an actor named Ioan Gruffudd to play him? If Lancelot did hail from Sarmatia – first left past Parthia – wouldn’t it have made more sense to get someone specifically “ethnic” to play the role? Someone like Javier Bardem or Antonio Banderas or Sacha Baron Cohen? Well?

The films that clambered down the path once trod by Gladiator had mixed results at the box office. Most of them fared poorly in the US, but made up for it overseas. However 300, with no stars to speak of and not much money spent on wardrobe, was a jaw-dropping, breakout hit.

This may have been, as the Iranian government seemed to be theorising, because the film is a thinly veiled critique of present-day Iran’s nuclear ambitions, with Iran’s current president as the modern reincarnation of the rapacious Xerxes the Great, and Leonidas’s 300 Spartans serving as thinly veiled precursors of US special forces.

In fact, that’s as logical an explanation for the appeal of the movie as suggesting that it took hundreds of millions of dollars just because the public liked to see Gerard Butler prancing about in his skivvies.

Rest assured, I am not asserting that all of these films were complete artistic failures, that there was nothing in them that was worthy of note. I thoroughly enjoyed John Malkovich’s impish Norse/Santa Monica/Mull of Kintyre burr in Beowulf, where he played the skulking coward Unferth, son of Elfirth, sworn kinsman of Hrothgar the Miscast (Anthony Hopkins).

I also liked the part where Grendel’s unhinged mother sings a lullaby to her mortally wounded offspring that sounds like a Scandinavian version of The Star-Spangled Banner. Grendel’s mom, who’s got it going on, is played by a buck-naked Angelina Jolie, clad only in spiked heels and a delicate patina of spray-painted gold trim.

(Jolie cornered the market in legendary moms who’ve got it going on – she was also Olympias, creepy mother of the strangely blond Colin Farrell, in Alexander.) In Beowulf, Jolie also sports a smoky accent that suggests she may have relocated to the Lair of the White Worm from suburban Moscow.

It’s as if somebody deliberately set out to make a sixth-century Viking-American synthesis of Goldfinger and From Russia With Love. And not a moment too soon, say I, by the loins of Wotan! I said these movies were stupid. I didn’t say they weren’t fun.

I am also not trying to suggest that there is anything wrong with future generations tampering with the myths that have trickled down through the sands of time in an attempt to make them more relevant to contemporary audiences.

This only becomes a problem when the iconoclasts or revisionists of the present completely lose sight of what made these ancient myths so beloved by denizens of the past. The story of the siege of Troy makes no sense if there are no gods involved in the mayhem and if Menelaus and Agammemnon end up dead.

The whole point of The Iliad is that mortals are the helpless playthings of the gods and that stupid old men always start wars, but get impressionable young men to die in them. Just as stupid old men finance bad movies but get gullible young computer-generated men to act in them.

Beowulf is completely without meaning if Beowulf himself willingly fathers a monster. The reason people clamour for a hero who will become an icon and then become a legend and then quite possibly go back to being an icon – since the hours are better – is because they are looking for someone they can be reasonably sure will never, ever go to bed with the mother of a deformed monster he has just finished cutting to pieces. Even if she does look like Angelina Jolie.

The past 10 years were typified by films set in a land beyond imagination where a people beyond redemption cried out for a warrior beyond belief who would inspire the myth that spawned the untold story, but instead ended up with Orlando Bloom.

For whatever the reason, the yearning masses in these films, marooned between the bowels of hell and the sword of the infidel, continually put their money on the wrong horse. Eric Bana (Hector) instead of Brad Pitt (Achilles).

Ray Winstone (Beowulf) instead of Angelina Jolie (Grendel’s pesky mommy). Orlando Bloom (a French blacksmith) instead of Liam Neeson (a French knight).

I really and truly believe that if the imperilled Franks and Trojans and Saxons and Jutes in these movies had deposed their leader and replaced him with Brendan Gleeson, things would have turned out a whole lot better for everyone.

Let’s not forget that in the last frames of Braveheart, the previous decade’s great Man of Yore film, the Scots who come roaring down the hill to massacre the English at Bannockburn are led not by Clive Owen, not by Orlando Bloom, not by Gerard Butler, not by Eric Bana, and certainly not by Ioan Gruffudd, but by none other than Brendan Gleeson.

I am not being disingenuous when I say that if Brendan Gleeson had been alive when the Vandals and the Visigoths blew through town in the fifth century AD, the Roman Empire would still be around today.

And if Ridley Scott had only had the foresight to include Brendan Gleeson in the cast of Gladiator in the first place, Russell Crowe’s character would still be around for the sequel. A sequel, by the way, that I would very much look forward to seeing.