I agree, the second was better. The first started out looking like a cheap production to me.
I must have caught it the second time. I was seeing portrayals of antiquity but I couldn’t help but think of how much money it cost to produce it. There is something about watching stuff like that where the people were so poor, destitute and diseased when the world was so much smaller, but then you remember that millions of dollars were spent to make it look ‘real’. Weird.