Decline of an Empire (2014)

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General		Extras
Category	Historical Epic	None
Rating
Year Of Production	2014
Running Time	102:02 (Case: 110)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Michael Redwood
Studio Distributor	Gryphon Entertainment	Starring	Nicole Keniheart Peter O’Toole Jack Goddard Edward Fox Julien Vialon
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	?	Music	John Koutselius

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) English dts 5.1 (768Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.40:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	None	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

     4th Century AD, Egypt. Pre-teens Constantine and Katherine are close friends. Katherine already has a reputation as a linguist and mystic and so is taken forcibly to the court of the Eastern Roman Emperor Maxentius (Julien Vialon) at Alexandria to be tutored by Gallus (Peter O’Toole). Fifteen years later Katherine (Nicole Keniheart) is a saintly and beautiful young women, her writings and denials of Rome’s gods gaining a following. Indeed her writings and her symbol of a wheel have spread throughout the Roman Empire, even as far as northern Britain where Constantine (Jack Goddard) is now a well-regarded officer in the army of the Western Roman Emperor Constantius (Edward Fox) fighting along Hadrian’s Wall. As most of the British men have been killed by the Romans, they now face predominantly female warriors.

     Back in Alexandria Katherine rejects Maxentius’s advances and continues to renounce Rome’s gods in favour of the one true God. She is tortured, subjected to a public debate with Roman senators and then executed on a spiked wheel. In Britain a dying Constantius decides to make Constantine his successor. Constantine makes peace with the British woman warriors, promising religious freedom, and then he turns his attention to taking revenge upon Maxentius for the execution of Katherine and to finding Katherine’s body.

     Decline of an Empire (also known as Katherine of Alexandria and Fall of an Empire) was obviously a very personal project for first time producer / director / writer Michael Redwood. The story of an early Christian martyr and saint is certainly one worth telling, even though the consensus is that Katherine was not a real historical figure; the first mention of her is not until 500 years after the period in which she supposedly lived. The real problem is that Michael Redwood’s intentions were too ambitious for his budget for he juxtaposes Katherine’s story with the historical figure of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who founded Constantinople and who did make Christianity the official state religion, although the facts of Constantine’s life as shown in this film are not remotely accurate. I am a huge fan of historical epics and can accept that films can and do ignore / amend history for dramatic purpose; see Braveheart for example (anyone interested in this topic can do worse than find themselves a copy of George MacDonald Fraser’s very entertaining The Hollywood History of the World). Sadly, however, Decline of an Empire is a jumble neither epic nor historical.

     With its low budget, Decline of an Empire was never going to be an action extravaganza although the crowd and market scenes in Alexandria, which utilise close-ups and low camera angles with a few people, work OK. However the pomp and ceremony of an imperial court are missing from the film, with only one guard standing around, and the historical battle at Milvian Bridge near Rome in 312 when Constantine’s army defeated Maxentius’ is sadly reduced to a hand to hand fight between Constantine and Maxentius in a ditch under a stone bridge without any accompanying soldiers! Earlier there was a battle between Romans and the British amazons but it was a sequence with only a few stunt people and a very up-close, jerky and out of focus vision.

     As Katherine Nicole Keniheart is saintly; she smiles and focuses into the distance a lot but we don’t get any sense of the woman and even the pivotal scene of her debate with the Roman senators, which could have been dramatic, lacks passion and tension. Jack Goddard as Constantine is not any better and while Peter O’Toole looks very gaunt in this last screen role before his death, his voice is still recognisable and charismatic. The best of the acting by some margin is by Edward Fox, who is a powerful presence and who actually makes some of the ponderous dialogue he is required to say sound as if it were important.

     Decline of an Empire tries to tie the openness of Constantine towards Christianity with the fabricated story of a childhood connection with the (probably) mythical character of Saint Katherine. The result is jumbled story telling which is clumsy, ahistorical and makes little dramatic sense. Perhaps if the film had concentrated upon the story of Katherine, whose death upon a wheel gave our language the Katherine Wheel firework, and better acting, Decline of an Empire might have been able to use its limited budget to deliver something interesting about a Christian martyr, conflicting religions and the declining Roman Empire.

Video

     Decline of an Empire is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.40:1, close to the original 2.35:1 ratio, and is 16x9 enhanced.

     Decline of an Empire tells two stories set in different locations and the film’s colour palate reflects this. The Egyptian sequences (filmed in Cyprus) are very bright, which does affect skin tones, and the colours are mostly yellows and browns. Detail is fine. The British sequences have a dull grey / blue palate. Blacks are fine although the way the film was shot with deliberate out of focus frames means that detail is frequently indistinct.

     Other than some slight motion blur against fragmented backgrounds, such as trees, I did not see any obvious artefacts or marks.

    There are no subtitles, although small white subtitles automatically appeared to translate some early sections of non-English dialogue.

     The layer change at 61:29 resulted in a pause at the end of a scene.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

     The film offers English Dolby Digital 5.1 at 448 Kbps and English DTS 5.1 at 754 Kbps. In truth, there was little difference between the two, and both had the issues noted below.

     The dialogue was clear and understandable. However on more than a few occasions (the first around 20:20) the dialogue had an echo type resonance as if it had been recorded in a tunnel. Elsewhere the effects were clean with music and ambient sound in the rears. The sound design in the debate scene was clumsy. When the camera was on Katherine and a senator was speaking out of frame his voice came strongly from the rears, switching back to the centre when the camera cut to the senator. I can understand what they were trying to do but the sudden and very noticeable switches felt amateurish and took one out the drama. The sub-woofer was used for the action scene, horse hooves and the music.

     The score by John Koutselius was almost Hans Zimmerish in places, by no means a bad thing.

     Lip synchronisation was occasionally out with the audio.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

     The Region 1 US and Region 2 UK (where film is called Fall of an Empire) DVDs of Decline of an Empire appear to be without extras. There are no reviews so I cannot say if the audio is the same as ours. There is a Region B German Blu-ray called Katherine of Alexandria.

     I enjoy historical epics and films set in the ancient world and I was attracted by the names of Edward Fox and Peter O’Toole in the cast list. I don’t even mind if a film strays from the historical record, (Inglourious Basterds, for example) as long as the internal logic is believable. Sadly, Decline of an Empire is no The Fall of the Roman Empire; it was clearly a work of passion by producer / director / writer Michael Redwood but he was too ambitious and the plotting, acting and low budget results in a film that is neither epic nor historical.

     The video is manipulated but fine, the audio has problems. There are absolutely no extras, making this film hard to recommend except to those interested in early Christianity, Christian martyrs or fans of Peter O’Toole or Edward Fox.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall