Historical

Thirteen hundred extras under arms, fourteen hundred costumes sewn by hand, and in the assault scene the sound of the battle taken away. The epic was invented to send the largest audiences home bigger than they came in: in this series its means are spent on weighing what disappears. The first volume measures a man against what he believes and hands him the bill once, then again, dearer every time — with a fifth film that believes in nothing and is there as a control. The second puts the same power at the service of an ending: an empire coming apart, a class going extinct, a world collapsing onto the people who lived in it. A writer finds here the thorniest problems in the trade: teaching a world while telling a story, keeping a protagonist active across decades, and always distinguishing dramatic license from historical fact.