Barbarians - german Netflix series

[Maskripper]

That might be one of the very first good german TV shows that isn't a comedy or crime show.
Mostly I am ashamed what little my country has to offer in many genres of the movie business, but I am very much looking forward to this one:




Please, let this show be good!

Some historic background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of ... urg_Forest
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[tallyho]

Ooo is it Teutobergerwald?!!

[tallyho]

Just saw your link and it is! Awesome!

[tallyho]

Rome didn't

Spoiler

lose many battles but when they did they tended to be annihilated! Like Trasimene, Arausio and Teutobergerwald. Looking forward to this.

,

[Maskripper]

....Tallyho seems a litttttttle excited in his posting spree

And yeah,

Spoiler

loosing three full legions with support with 16.000 to 20.000 dead in one battle with nearly no survivors on the roman side....that wasn't a glory day for Rome

[tallyho]

Love my military history and this encounter is legendary! So yes, yes I am a little excited.
There's so many great stories in history that never get air time.
I dream of someone doing the March of The Ten Thousand. It's got a great name for starters but what a story! A Greek mercenary army fights its way into the heart of Persia, after a few wins a stalemate is reached, its leaders are invited to a peace conference of sorts where they are all betrayed and murdered and the army, instead of disintegrating decide to carry on and fight their way back out of Persia. Fantastic story.

BUT anyway after that one, this is my second favourite story of historical military invasions.,

[Maskripper]

Most of you won't understand the text, but there is a big, fat picture gallery if you scroll down a bit....:

https://www.moviepilot.de/news/das-deut ... lt-1128898

That female warrior with her battle painting is quite sexy....
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[batgirl1969]

Most of you won't understand the text, but there is a big, fat picture gallery if you scroll down a bit....:

https://www.moviepilot.de/news/das-deut ... lt-1128898

That female warrior with her battle painting is quite sexy....
-

don't know who that Blonde girl is but I vote she gets a Roman gangbang!!!

[Abductorenmadrid]

Ah, so it's "that" Roman dalliance with the folk around the Rhine ... - interesting story!

[shevek]

Most of you won't understand the text, but there is a big, fat picture gallery if you scroll down a bit....:

https://www.moviepilot.de/news/das-deut ... lt-1128898

That female warrior with her battle painting is quite sexy....
-

don't know who that Blonde girl is but I vote she gets a Roman gangbang!!!

Well, you could look at it at face value for what it is.

But I sense a bit of historical revisionism.
The main antagonist against the Romans was Arminius. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arminius
I don't see any 'shieldmaidens' listed as part of the history of this battle.

And the timing of this presentation as the defeat of a Great Empire by the valiant rebels deemed to be savages? Hmm, I wonder to whom that could be referring..... (i.e. I hope it wasn't partially intended as a political allegory)

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Hopefully it'll be fun to watch regardless. Also, wasn't there already a TV show called 'Barbarians' in the mid-2000s? I think it had two seasons.

And yes, there are historical battles aplenty that have been severely under-exposed. Here are three I'd like to see:

1) The Battle of Kadesh. Nobody really won it, per se. But it was the first great conflict fought by chariots. Plus I'm not sure that
a "Hittite" has ever been portrayed on screen? The depiction of Hattushash, in fact, could probably be something similar to Conan or Scorpion King. A huge capital city of stone. This is a chance to return the Egyptians (specifically Rameses II) to the arrogant imperial 'bad guys' they used to be in films like Ten Commandments.

2) The Bar Kokhba Revolt. It's alluded to in movies like Ben-Hur and Masada, but if I'm correct, the battles aren't really shown,
nor are the caves in which they hid out. Let's put Gal Gadot in that one as the love interest. It could be a tragic story as the
Romans pretty much wiped them out - the second biggest mass killing of Jews next to the Nazis themselves (well over a half million).

3) The Battle of Meskiana - basically the North African version of Boudicca, in Algeria. Fierce warrior queen Kahina who led her Kabylian Berber people (possibly a mix of pagans, Jews and Christians at the time) against the invading Arabs and held them off for quite a while. The only depiction I've ever seen of her is in an episode of Relic Hunter (Kahina's Saddle).

[Maskripper]

......
Maybe I'm reading too much into this.
.....

It seems like it is just a historical TV show with the setting of the Battle of the Teutoberg forest (as I linked in my first post).
Don't know how accurate it will be, but that battle + the whole Arminus story is quite interesting.

[tallyho]

Bare in mind these things often take years to come to fruition. You often have them touting the idea around to get backers and find a production company then casting, pitching it to networks filming editing etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if this ball started rolling 5 or 6 years ago

[shevek]

Nobody has watched Barbarians yet? I binged it in two days.

It's a notable look at the days of the Roman Empire at its most expansive as they attempted to conquer beyond the Rhine..and I've watched a couple of Youtubers who have proclaimed that both the Roman armor and weapons and the Germanic equivalents were quite accurate.

A lot of really gorgeous cinematography and set design went into this production, whether it's re-creating the Roman legions' camps or the Germanic villages. And lots of drone footage.

Overall, this production is very historical and very hi-T. Created entirely in Europe with a cast of mostly unknown European actors (almost all of them don't even have their own Wiki page yet), there's an extraordinary amount of blood and gore, and tons of masculinity..something you won't see much anymore in Hollywood. There's no forced diversity, or usurpation by female roles. Instead, what you get are bloody ruthless warriors who hate each other, situations filled with murder and intrigue, and lots of marching soldiers. What's interesting is that a lot of these Germanic berserker 'savage' tribesmen are fighting in blackface..I wonder if they'll get called out for it if some portion of American audiences get 'triggered'. Guess we'll see..I haven't noticed any controversy yet.

But of course I know what you're waiting for is the description of female warrior character. The only real lip-service given to the feminine side of things is the *one* major actress role: Thusnelda, the Germanic princess who eventually became the wife of Arminius for a while. Joanne Goursaud (who previously only had a handful of European acting roles) is a revelation here, evoking a bit of the Brigitte Nielsen/Red Sonja persona. In real history, she was a princess who was bounced around between chieftains until she was captured and taken to Rome.

But in this show, obviously some historical liberties are taken, as she becomes a valiant Valkyrie who evokes the power of the Germanic goddesses to kill dozens of Roman legionnaires, resisting a rape, and participating in very sexy consensual Game of Thrones-style sex scenes. She is topless several times, she is tied to a post by her father (so there's some bondage peril), and when she self-mutilates her face and paints herself for battle, Thusnelda becomes something very close to a superheroine comic book character. Joanne Goursaud is very hot in this role, and as she plays a prominent part all through the six episodes, I would recommend watching
them all in the turn to watch her character development from a spoiled chieftain's daughter into a goddess-like warrior.

Interested to know what others think. This is one of the better series I've watched for a while, and the fact that it's fairly compact (just 6 episodes) makes it easy to digest without a lot of the decompression and sidetracking you get with longer show seasons.

[Maskripper]

Watched the 6 episodes on 3 days, but forgot to post here.
Well, yeah it was entertaining and I like the setting.
The action scenes were done rather well. Acting was solid.

Things I didn't like:
- Barbarians often way too clean looking
- Some were pretty....fat. Not sure how they manage to get that fat in these circumstances. Food supplies often tight, no (artificial) sugar, no fastfood, more movement in comparison with today(?)
- some odd scenes in the last two episodes (

Spoiler

like Tusnelda cutting herself, supposingly loosing one eye, which is "only" red after that...and still working???)

and some more...
- the whole narrative structure of the last episode is uncool...where he talks to himself and thereby tells the story....with much pathos
- Roman soldier are mostly completely incpompetent and getting killed like cattle
- Roman officers are all arrogant and villainous
- You know the outcome of the story

Spoiler

and the cliffhanger at the end is misplaced

I'm surprised Shevek that you really like the very feministic Tusnelda character. I think her character is very much influenced by todays women (which isn't bad for me).
Yeah, she has her sexy scenes and looks really hot in her warpaint in the last episode:






I'm not hyped by the first season, but it was good. Especially for a german TV show in such a genre.
I hope there will be a 2nd season, even I don't know where they could go with the storyline then.

[lionbadger]

Mostly I am ashamed what little my country has to offer in many genres of the movie business, but I am very much looking forward to this one:

Why would you be........
.......oh, oh right, Uwe Boll

[Maskripper]

.......oh, oh right, Uwe Boll

Yeah, not exactly a good movie maker
...even he did very few good ones.

Sidestory:
I actually watched Postal in the cinema with Uwe Boll sitting a few seats away from me.
The theater offered a screening with the "grandmaster" Uwe himself, while he introduced the movie and sat then in the crowd during the movie.
It was nice because there aren't many chances to watch a movie with the actual director.

[Femina]

Bones of female fighters continue to be dug up all over the world where they weren't expected. It's simply NOT fact that there were no female warriors on battlefields historically regardless of what Rome Total War gamers want to believe. The only truth we can glean from this is that they were rarely ever documented. The reasons why they were never written about we can't possibly know for certain, but historical accuracy is less and less certain about this particular arguing point. While it's VERY likely ROME didn't have many female career soldiers and we can be fairly sure of this as it wasn't JUST a civilized society, it was a very historically DOCUMENTED society, less entrenched and cultivated civilizations tend to include the remains of female fighters on the battlefield far more often than historically accepted when taking into consideration growing archaeological evidence... beyond armed female's turning up in 'mass grave' sites, we KNOW that female gladiators both existed and occasionally were the big climactic act at the end of a day at the Roman games... most Gladiators were slaves, most gladiatorial slaves were taken from conquered peoples... suggesting that the women in the Arena were most probably female warriors taken as slaves off a battlefield. (There's also the occasional Roman noblewoman who felt like mixing it up in the sands as well which, while by no means evidence of women fighting in Warfare... simply presses further back against the common absolutist belief's regarding this subject)

So, while regardless of argument we can be fairly confident it was historically much less common for women to fight than a man, it's very much NOT far fetched that a single Germanic female might be on the battlefield. In all likelihood there were MORE and the Roman's probably would have considered it as just further evidence of their 'barbarism'.

[Maskripper]

Bones of female fighters continue to be dug up all over the world where they weren't expected. It's simply NOT fact that there were no female warriors on battlefields historically regardless of what Rome Total War gamers want to believe. The only truth we can glean from this is that they were rarely ever documented. .....

Yeah, I just watched a documentary about that. With a new advanced testing they finally realised that bones in a famous warrior grave were indeed female. And they wanna do more testings in the future.
In the documentary I watched it was primarly about female viking warriors. But surely there must be other cases for other countries as well.

Funny that you mentioned Rome: Total War.
Yeah, I noticed how that was discussed. In the game you have female units for a lot of different people/tribes.
Have to play that again.

In newer games of that game series they heavily discussed the fact that they have female generals for the troops....

[the123]

looking forward to this love women warriors they are awesome.

[shevek]

So, while regardless of argument we can be fairly confident it was historically much less common for women to fight than a man, it's very much NOT far fetched that a single Germanic female might be on the battlefield. In all likelihood there were MORE and the Roman's probably would have considered it as just further evidence of their 'barbarism'.

Of course there were female fighters here and there. More importantly, there were female generals, leading entire rebellions
against Rome, Islam, Mongols and others. I've used a reference to Boudicca in my own productions. None of that is overly "feministic", Maskripper, it's just history. Plus, female domination and berserker battle action is objectively hot. Certainly the Romans realized that as much as anyone else, whenever they sent a few female gladiators into the arena as the 'undercard'.

What *is* historically inaccurate, however, is Thusnelda's position as one of those Germanic warriors. Because in history, she wasn't a fighter, just a princess who married into alliances for the ethnic pride of her people. They made her "feministic" in this presentation because otherwise, there would have been absolutely no "diversity" whatsoever in the casting, and nothing for a female audience to grasp onto in terms of empowerment. The characterization of Thusnelda saves the series from being heavily castigated by Twitterati.

Because (as you said), she looks really excellent in that warpaint (as well as several sex scenes), this was a good choice. Nobody said that historical fiction always has to be 100% historically accurate - just close enough to be sufficiently entertaining.

[TIEnTEEZ]

Dumb question, and maybe it has already been answered here, but this thread is too long for me to read it all the way though, but...

Is this show in English? Dubbed? Subtitled?

[Femina]

Dumb question, and maybe it has already been answered here, but this thread is too long for me to read it all the way though, but...

Is this show in English? Dubbed? Subtitled?

It's not in English. It's a German made show.

It's both subtitled and dubbed....... but imo the dub is REALLY bad so I just watched it subtitled.

[TIEnTEEZ]

Dumb question, and maybe it has already been answered here, but this thread is too long for me to read it all the way though, but...

Is this show in English? Dubbed? Subtitled?

It's not in English. It's a German made show.

It's both subtitled and dubbed....... but imo the dub is REALLY bad so I just watched it subtitled.

Thanks for the info. Not gonna watch it, then. Can't stand reading a video. :-P

[Damselbinder]

Damn, Femina, someone agrees with you about the subtitle thing.

It was me.

I was the wrong one.

[shevek]

The version I watched was apparently one which had some English dubs but no subtitles!
The entire movie is spoken in two languages: German (not ancient Germanic, unfortunately) and Latin (actually pretty close to
how Latin sounded, for example pronouncing "Warus" for Varus).
They only dubbed the German lines into English, but left the Latin lines alone without dubbing.
I thought this was actually great, because I was not really interested in hearing the harshness of German spoken on screen for long periods of time (es ist zu schwer!) but hearing Latin in its pure form in a movie was a rare joy. Your mileage may vary of course.

[Femina]

Damn, Femina, someone agrees with you about the subtitle thing.

It was me.

I was the wrong one.

What can I say? It's not like, some special intuition or anything, I've just seen this response more than once.