IFDB Review: Rome: Decimated:

Terrific work. I'm a big fan of Brumeous' first fanedit "Solaris Station"(1972), on which he reduced the running time of Tarkvosky's worthy but snails-pace epic and tranformed it into a much more enaging sci-fi film.And the story is the winner with his edit of "Rome", too. I only made it half way through the original 1st series. I knew there was something wrong with it, but I was vague as to exactly what. This fanedit has made the shortcomings crystal clear: too many subplots and soap opera nonsense. Let's face it: few writers have the skill to juggle such a huge number of plot strands - "Game of Thrones" is one of the few exceptions - and Brumous has been creative and thoughtful in untangling and streamlining what was a pretty knotty mess with "Rome" and turning it into a clearly superior piece of storytelling.Technically the editing is bang-on, save for a few crossfades in the middle part of Disc 1 which felt a bit abrupt, e.g. cutting away from the scene where Ceaser's men are about to discover treasure hidden on wagons that are leaving Rome as his army approaches.Video quality is good but not perfect. Using double-layer DVD discs to allow a higher bitrate would have made the video indistinguishable from the source. An MP4 or MKV encode with the x264 codec at around 2000kbps would also achieved the same result. Bare in mind that I'm fussy about vid quality, more so than many other people."Rome: Decimated" is fine work. Hopefully Brumeous will be editing Season 2 as well.

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