A good-looking ‘Spartacus’

The world may not really need a new version of “Spartacus,” Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s version of blacklisted novelist Howard Fast’s story of Roman slaves in revolt during the first century BC. (Especially after “Gladiator” pretty well covered the territory.) But it has one, and it premieres Sunday on the USA Network.

We open on what appears to be a pair of Victoria’s Secret models gamboling in a glade: Gaul, 72 BC. Enter the Romans, raping and pillaging. Varinia (Rhona Mitra, of “The Practice”) is carried off to Rome, where she is bought by the proprietor of a school for gladiators, who soon will save an already enslaved Spartacus (Goran Visnjic, “ER”) from crucifixion -- he is bit of a troublemaker, is Spartacus, but with professional possibilities.

As the two best-looking people in the Roman Empire, it is inevitable that Spartacus and Varinia meet, and they do, when they are thrown together one night for pre-gladiatorial slave sex. But Spartacus is a perfect gentlemen -- which impresses her all the more. There are many ways a man can be free, and one is by not having sex when he’s supposed to. But soon she is teaching him how to kiss, like they do back in Gaul, where it apparently is also how they pray; this explains much about the French.

Well, things get worse from there, and then they get better, and then they get worse, and then they get better, sort of. It is your typical “boy meets girl, boy leads slave revolt and gathers army, girl loses boy but gains freedom” story.

Comparisons to the original -- which, at three hours (four with commercials), the TV movie rivals at least in length -- are not all in the older film’s favor. It is hard to make a sword-and-sandal-style epic on a shoestring -- even with the marvels of digital matte painting, such things wind up looking like an episode of “Xena: Warrior Princess” -- but the current production is imaginatively designed within its budgetary constraints. Kubrick’s “Spartacus,” although its cost was commensurate with the glory that was Rome, looks like the end of its own era: Everything about it says “1960.”

Of course, that picture did have Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton, batting around some witty dialogue by Trumbo, where the new version ... does not. It does have the late, great Alan Bates in his last role, as Roman pretty-good guy Agrippa, but he has little of interest to say -- when not platitudinous, the dialogue is merely leaden -- and no one of comparable stature to act against. Let us remember him in “Gosford Park,” shall we?

As to new Spartacus Visnjic, he has -- above all -- the virtue of not being Kirk Douglas, who is too much the aging manly midcentury American movie star to be quite believable anymore. Visnjic is a decent enough actor and a good-looking guy, with the requisite well-developed pecs and abs and quads and delts, but he is more plausible for being less imposing (and younger) than was Douglas.

This isn’t exactly “a Spartacus for our times,” but, in the spirit of Trumbo, and of Fast -- who began the novel while in jail for being in contempt of Congress -- screenwriter Robert Schenkkan has given his mostly prosaic script an edge of political currency. If the pronouncements of the proto-fascist Crassus (Angus Macfadyen, “Braveheart”) are not meant to be reminiscent of a certain American president and company, I’ll eat my toga. There is talk of “national security,” and the admonition that “there can be no hiding place for those who would strike terror into the heart of the greatest nation known to man.” And let me be clear, this is the villain talking. The phrase “new world order” also makes an appearance.

Meanwhile, out in the unfettered fields, Spartacus and his multicultural, multiethnic, multisexual crew of utopian revolutionaries -- Thracian, African, Jew and Gaul -- run hither and yon across the Italian boot, dreaming of the day when all will be free, knocking off villas and making short work of the Roman cohorts. The swords and spears are fun for awhile, and when the Gauls get going, with their faces painted blue a la “Braveheart,” there is no stopping them. But battle fatigue eventually sets in, and it becomes clear that this is going to end badly for nearly everyone the least bit likable. And not soon enough.

*

‘Spartacus’

Where: USA Network

When: 8-10 p.m. Sunday, concluding 8-10 p.m. Monday

Rating: The network has rated the miniseries TV-14V (may not be suitable for children under the age of 14, with an advisory for violence).

Goran Visnjic...Spartacus

Alan Bates...Agrippa

Angus Macfadyen...Crassus

Rhona Mitra...Varinia

Ian McNeice...Batiatus

Executive producers, Adam Shapiro, Robert Schenkkan and Angela Mancuso. Director, Robert Dornhelm. Writer, Schenkkan, from the novel by Howard Fast.