Hannibal: The Pubic Wars

Battles B.C., Season 1, Ep. 1. Hannibal: The Annihilator (2008)
Directed by David Padrusch, Written by David Padrusch

If I wrote this review the way Battles BC runs each episode I’d be starting somewhere in the middle and then incoherently going back and forth chronologically to make sure that the audience (who I think are a bunch of idiots) can’t get a grasp on anything other than the two or three points that I want to repeat over and over again with the help of some repetitive scenes of violent stabbing and screaming and the even more violently edited words from my resident scholars and summed up by some stupid narration. Cue the circus music. On to the next show about Hitler and UFOs and the Rapture or Armageddon or whatever new apocalypse some nutjob with a calculator has decided will be occurring in the next six months because they think the manager of the Piggly Wiggly down the street is evil incarnate. I’m sorry, was that too incoherent and rambling? Do you get a sense of what watching the History Channel is like? I apologize again. They don’t call themselves The History Channel anymore, they’ve dropped the The and the Channel and now they’re just plain History because presumably someone in charge decided that their subliterate audience has gotten even more stupid watching their shows so they can’t handle all those extra letters and words.
Hannibal....Alexander Castro (from the new American Gladiators, which is about as historically accurate as this show)
Hamilcar...Jaye Razor (http://jayerazor.com/ )
Publius Scipio...Kevin Moran
Hannibal’s #2...Kristopher Blount (Come on, admit it. You giggled when you saw that someone was cast in the role of Hannibal’s #2.)
Flaminius...Orion Barnes (Orion Barnes has come here from the future to be a stuntman in this awful show.)
Geminus...David John Wilson
Sempronius...Ken MacFarlane
Varro....Justin Spanko (Justin Spanko isn’t a real name, it’s some sort of London fetish club code for something horrible)
Paulus....Daniel R. Wolfe
General...Bryan Kent
Elephanteer....Nik Sharma (Oh, sure, get an Indian guy and put him on an elephant. It’s meta-historical.)
Elephant...Susie (Why do they bother telling us the names of the animals when it’s just a common first name? It’s not like I saw this in the credits and said “Oh, of course, it was Susie. You could really see her intent in the role.”)
The “Scholars”
I think it really says something about this show that this is the only place on the entire World Wide Web where you will see a complete list of the shame-faced scholars who appeared on this show. Could it be that they wanted their names to never appear in the credits because they figured nobody watching the show would reach over for a pad of paper to take down their names so they could make sport of them for looking like idiots spouting gibberish for people who can barely comprehend complete sentences.)
Richard Gabriel (Royal Military College of Canada)
The sheer number of misstatements, inaccuracies and misinterpretations this guy comes up with in every episode is mind-boggling. It scares me to think that this guy has been responsible for teaching history to the US and Canadian military. Those who learn history wrong are condemned to making spectacular mistakes.
David George (Director, Institute of Mediterranean Archaeology, Saint Anselm College)
This guy seems reasonable enough.
Matthew Gonzales (Assistant Prof. of Classics, Saint Anselm College)
Another relatively reasonable guy.
Mark Schwartz (Dept.of Anthropology, Grand Valley State University)
I don’t think this guy is an idiot like Gabriel, but I swear the editors do a number on him in how they cut things to make him sound like he’s wrong.
Steven Weingartner (Chariots Like a Whirlwind)
Every show needs a resident chariot expert. Of course, Hannibal didn’t have chariots, but he also didn’t have alien technology or access to uranium enrichment technology and chances are good the History channel will find a way of working those things in.

So, where was I? Oh, right, Hannibal Barca. So, the producers saved some money on this episode by not trying to hire Vin Diesel himself (though, really, I can’t believe he was all that busy filming Fast and Furious 22.7 or whatever) and instead getting themselves a Vin Diesel clone to stand without a shirt and wield a couple of swords.
Did the Carthaginians forget to pack shirts when they crossed the Alps? I seriously doubt it. And if you really think that was the case then you might as well have changed the story to have Queen Dido crossing the Alps with some elephants and without a shirt on.

And what is up with Hannibal’s dad, Hamilcar? Not only is a giant black guy (you can imagine the kind of racist crap that’s popped up in discussion forums with regard to that--though when you put him next to who they’ve got playing Hannibal the question does arise as to what the casting people thought Hannibal’s mother looked like.) but he’s also just about the same age as the guy they’ve got playing Hannibal, which is frankly much more disconcerting than the bizarre ethno-racial casting choices. (It would be one thing if they cast a Chinese actor to play Fabius Maximus.) Seriously, is Hamilcar Barca supposed to be really spry for an old guy, or are we to believe he fathered a child when he was 3?

So, the gist of this episode is that Hannibal was fighting a personal war of revenge against Rome and all things Roman. We don’t get anything useful in the way of background about Carthaginian politics and factionalism, but hey we don’t get much of an intro to Roman politics and factionalism either. The writers almost seem to get their Scipios confused. I’m pretty sure someone on the program implied that it was Scipio Africanus who eventually destroyed Carthage in the Third Punic War but this is the History Channel so maybe they think Zombie Scipio ate the inhabitants and that Roman historians subsequently covered it up. The coverage of the battles of The Trebbia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae is decent if full of innacuracies. They don’t even bother to cover Scipio’s campaign in Spain which eventually cut off and eliminated Hannibal’s power base thus sealing the deal on his inability to finish off Rome. And the episode finishes off without ever mentioning Hannibal’s defeat at Zama.

As you can expect there is a lot to say about the elephants that Hannibal took with him across the Alps. The talking heads are cut in such a way to make it sound as if nobody had ever even heard of elephants until Hannibal’s time.
Really? Don’t be surprised if they make similar claims for the Indian elephants Alexander runs into.

Did the Romans really ban the word "peace" in the middle of this war? I think not.
This is the kind of inanity that only people in this show could spout.
And Mr. Narrator-man, the word you're trying to pronounce is CAVALRY. You see how there's no L before the V? That means that it's not the same as CALVARY. There's no silent L before the V. Idiot.

As for this "annihilation" business, it is the kind of nonsense that you would expect from this show. Before Hannibal there was no such thing as annihilation? Really? He invented modern warfare, except when he didn't? Take a look at what happened to the Romans earlier in their history. Annihilation wasn't a new concept. Losing wasn't even a new concept for them.
Idiots.

And why do we have to see Hannibal fighting with two swords doing all sorts of fancy moves? Is it that hard to believe that he wasn't a muscle-man without a shirt?
Idiots.

And what's the deal with the bizarre animal-like roaring that Hannibal does? What the hell is that?
Idiots.

And another thing. And this applies to the whole series, and to 300 and to any of a number of recreations of ancient combat. YOU JUST SPENT AN INORDINATE AMOUNT OF TIME TELLING US ABOUT HOW IMPORTANT IT WAS TO KEEP ORDER IN A LINE OR PHALANX. SO WHY DO YOU INSIST ON SHOWING US SINGLE COMBAT HOMERIC STYLE? ISN'T THE WHOLE POINT TO AVOID THIS KIND OF FREE FOR ALL? I UNDERSTAND IF THAT DOESN'T MAKE FOR SPECTACULAR VISUALS, BUT CAN SOMEONE PLEASE DO A BETTER JOB OF SHOWING THIS? BECAUSE IT MIGHT BE USEFUL TO SEE JUST HOW BORING AND TIRING ANCIENT COMBAT WAS.
Seriously folks. I don't need to believe that Hannibal was a big bald bad-ass.
He was a brilliant commander. I don't need to imagine that he could also bench 300lbs and had great hip-hop dance moves.
Idiots.

Having expressed all these complaints, I’ll admit that this is not the worst episode in the bag. They make a lot of errors in this episode, but they are mostly errors of omission. Errors which, I might add, could be easily corrected if they cut the sensationalist crap and all the dumb repetitions. Seriously. They could include twice or three times the information in the same time limit if they actually tried. This isn’t the worst introduction to Hannibal and the Punic Wars you could get, but be prepared to take some serious supplemental information to go along with this episode if you want to actually know anything about the Punic Wars.