Bret Devereaux

Been piling through Hollywood battle speeches for reference for the next blog and it is striking to me just how poor most of them are. Nearly all of the work is done by the soundtrack. Howard Shore or John Williams can make anything sound inspiring. But as speeches...eh?

I mean, obviously, any decent rendition of Henry V's St. Crispin's Day Speech is bound to be good, because of Shakespeare - but it's so clearly a speech set from the perspective after the battle, when the outcome is known. Death or defeat aren't considered possibilities.

But take Troy (2004), "Let no man forget how menacing we are" - how well is that going to work after your 'menacing' comrade takes an arrow to the face right next to you? Pretty sure everyone has had a parent tell them 'the animal is more scared of you than you are of it.'

I don't recall that ever making me feel better. And Gladiator (2000) "Think where you'll be in a week, unless you're dead, if then just lulz" - hardly encouraging?

And those are some of the better ones. So many of these damn movie battle speeches are basically football pep talks, "I'm with you, you got this, winning is fun, go get 'em!"

I mean, have you read the ancient speeches that inspire these? Lendon (2017) memorably describes most literary examples as "cold, unbuttered toast."

I'm not sure that's fair to the genre (Lendon is speaking only of Appian there, as I recall?). Lendon concedes the genre is fundamentally tethered to actual delivery, even if the speeches themselves are inventions....

No, he's speaking generally, though he seems to draw mostly on writings from the Roman era. He also refers to many of these speeches as "painfully similar" and stresses the extreme limitations of the genre.