While preparing to write my review of Gladiator, I watched the movie twice within an 8-hour time span. Each time, I noticed more and more details about the script, discontinuities in fight scenes, and deeper meanings behind each of the scenes that, previously, I simply regarded as pretty, or unimportant. For example, in the scene of Maximus’s capture, he dreams of his horse riding swiftly through a grassy plain. Although the first few times I watched the movie I just thought that he was longing for his horse, upon watching it again with and intense and careful analytical mindset, I realized that he was longing for what the horse symbolized: to be free. Whether it was to be free from the cruel reality that was gripping him or to literally be free from his capture as a slave, I’m not sure, but I assume it is up to the discretion of the viewer. If I were not analyzing the movie so critically for this review, however, I never would have noticed in the first place. The most challenging part of writing was not actually writing the review, as it involved my opinion and my opinion flows quite freely onto paper, but formatting the document to fit MLA standards. Not in terms of in-text citations an such, but more the aggravating aspect of the document changing shape once I uploaded it to my blog. Not only did it fail to upload my original pictures with the text, but the Youtube trailer was only a hyperlink before I published the document. This made me believe that I did something wrong when, in fact, it was just a formality of the blog site itself. It took me longer than it should have to figure out how to do manually upload photos and videos, but overall writing the review was enjoyable and enlightening.