[TomDavey]

For me, "Fellini Satyricon" is his most remarkable film, even if not his greatest and certainly not his most popular. No film about the Roman world has conveyed so graphically what must have been the actual, enormous strangeness of classical times. It's a disturbing film, both a picaresque sex comedy and a nightmare of everyday superstition and casual violence.

In comparison, the most famous works of cinema about ancient Rome -- Ben-Hur, Spartacus, I Claudius, and so forth -- are laughably sanitized and similar to our own world, which is the common failing of most historical drama of course. Fellini ditched the convention by, among other things, staying extremely faithful to the original source. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter is a jolting and bizarre read. A lot of the humor and wordplay, I'm told, is lost in translation.

[pmoriarty]

Visually, Satyricon was one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen in my life, but also one of the most boring.

If you're looking for films full of sex and violence in ancient Rome watch Caligula[1] (starring, appropriately, Malcom McDowell in a role not too different from the one he played in A Clockwork Orange). Unfortunately, apart from the sex and violence this film doesn't have much going for it. But I'd still rate it far higher than Satyricon, except on the visual level, where the latter film has few equals.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula_(film)

[pradn]

I can't imagine calling Satyricon boring. Kidnapping a young hermaphrodite cult figure? A tour of Roman tenements? A pink sand villa? A raucous dinner party? It's unforgettable.

[srean]

Caligula seemed to me a B grade porn movie. I couldn't find any redeeming quality

[fastaguy88]

Not a Fellini.

[xkeysc0re]

I also loved that the jumbled, hallucinatory cinematography of Satyricon matches how we have only fragments of the text and whole portions are lost or exist only as a scant few lines