I don't consider the lack of romance a flaw. It isn't good to not have it. It isn't bad to not have it. It just is.
I do get irritated when it seems like the romance is there just to be a source of epic angst. I quite enjoy the first half of Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor. I find the second half--as Antony self-destructs--rather dull. Likewise, I never moved on to Rome's second season, in part because I thought the death of the wife was pointless (I was far more interested in watching an ordinary family survive the upheavals in Ancient Rome than watching them enact melodramas) and mostly because I don't care how much Cleopatra and Antony loved each other or destroyed one another, which the second season, by default, focused on.
Two non-doomed romances in epics--Hawkeye and Cora from Last of the Mohicans and Andrea and Maria from Guns of Navarone--work to an extent because they are taken for granted. Hawkeye does rescue Cora and there is a kind of a rival but the relationship by the leads is assumed. In Guns, Andrea's relationship with the freedom fighter, Maria, provides motivation for Andrea to change direction in his life. The romance is skillfully set up in prior scenes, in part because Maria announces her attraction to Andrea (providing an opportunity for Gregory Peck's Keith Mallory, who is in the car during the exchange, to look blankly bemused, which he does effortlessly).
I do get irritated when it seems like the romance is there just to be a source of epic angst. I quite enjoy the first half of Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor. I find the second half--as Antony self-destructs--rather dull. Likewise, I never moved on to Rome's second season, in part because I thought the death of the wife was pointless (I was far more interested in watching an ordinary family survive the upheavals in Ancient Rome than watching them enact melodramas) and mostly because I don't care how much Cleopatra and Antony loved each other or destroyed one another, which the second season, by default, focused on.
From a more workable standpoint, Dov's romance with Karen in Exodus belongs in the "and then she died" category since no parental figure of good sense would encourage Karen to commit to Dov. Her death is more about Dov's growth than Karen's in any case.
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| Maria and Andrea |
Epics in romance are opportunities to present romances as givens, which approach can itself be quite relaxing.
