Agora

Alejandro Amenábar refused to build Alexandria inside a computer. In preparation he went back to older sword and sandal pictures including The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur and Pharaoh, and production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas put up physical sets on Malta that took close to 400 people to construct. Although this is a Spanish production, it was shot in English and the cast largely used British accents. Its budget and length made distribution hard, and its widest American release reached 17 theatres. The prize side is not one item, though: at the 24th Goya Awards the film drew 13 nominations and won 7, among them original screenplay, cinematography, art direction, costume design and makeup. It lost 6, including best film, best director and Rachel Weisz for best actress, on a night headed by Cell 211 with 8 wins. Before release the distributor screened the film at the Vatican; no objections were reported and Vatican officials helped with some of the religious detail. A good fit if you take Hypatia’s orbital discovery as the screenplay’s own invention and want the argument rather than the history. Not for viewers who will check the events against the sources; The Cambridge History of Science calls the film spectacularly anachronistic, and the Serapeum, demolished completely in fact, is only ransacked here.