I have only given it 2 as Edward Fox is as splendid as always. The story jumps all over the place, it is historical nonesense and utterly confusing. Some of the acting is worse than dire and the direction is appalling. Peter o'toole is sadly wasted but even with a better script this would have been a film too many for him.I can understand why this film was not given wider publicity - it is rubbish and you will be wasting your time watching it.

Within five minutes I had figured out that this film was made by a woman - a vanity project for the star. It screams feminism. The British warriors fighting the Romans in Northern England are all women, their men having been killed. They even have a token confident assertive black woman ship owner - what was she doing on Hadrian's wall? Katherine's writings are distributed by women couriers, and so on. I was expecting the current obligatory lesbian relationship, but might have missed it when I finally gave up pausing it to do something else and switched it off permanently. Apart from being incomprehensible plot wise, the dialog screamed out for dubbing. I had no problem with the written dialog, just - the - way - it - was - delivered. The leading lady who also produced, spoke in a stilted phonetic English that was excruciating to listen to. Dubbing the foreign actors in normal speed would have sped up the film 75%. OK she gets applause for trying, but the audience deserves better. I really thought I was watching a post war Italian sandals and toga epic.My question, how did the female Mel Gibson get the funding for this vanity project? It was almost as bad, not quite, but almost, as the independent film about St. Theresa of Liseiux. This film did not even deserve to go straight to DVD, it should have gone into the trash can.

I am a fan of historical fact based drama films. Coming across Katherine of Alexandria and discovering Edward Fox and Peter O'Toole were amongst it's the cast, I was very eager to watch it.I wasted 108 minutes of my life! Poor (at best) acting and directing, "history" rewritten by the film studio and a general wondering if the whole movie was shot using cheap camcorders.On the plus side, now I have seen it maybe I am able to steer others away from it. Then maybe my 108 minutes would not seem so futile.1/10 because IMDb won't let me rate at 0. I will have to watch Lawrence of Arabia now to remind me how great Peter O'Toole was.

If we are to make a comment about this film it will certainly help if we compare it to a similar one, namely "Agora" Hypatia of Alexandria which was a fantastic epic and extremely well crafted which I can not say for this DECLINE in English cinema. What were the producers thinking when they gave the go-ahead for this over acted and under-scripted sprawling and incoherent diatribe? It is astonishing how low a quality of acting this film contained and that includes the late O'Toole. Sorry pal, it was not your finest hour but I do not blame you for this because the director must accept full responsibility for allowing daily rushes like this to be regarded as "IN THE CAN". Absolutely amateurish and low quality. As to the theme and plot of this tired film. If we take another comparison and this time of a writer named Garry Jennings who wrote a giant of a novel about this same period we see what serious research brings against the off the cuff thinking used by these scriptwriters. It almost made me feel like a sorry excuse for the actions of the lowly Wall Street morons under the banner of being the 99 percent people. PATHETIC! The only redeeming aspect of this film was that due to its scope we actually got a feeling for the decline. OK Great to see something actually worked and that was why I gave it 3 points but really I am being seriously generous.