I mean, the dictatorship existed, if that's what you're asking. Whatshername's (guys, it's been a while, ok) comment about Caesar afterward is a little bit problematic, in that Caesar's dictatorship(s) was not normal and he didn't just refuse to give it up, he was invested with increasingly lengthy periods of command. The dictatorship proper lapsed in 202, and Sulla's dictatorship, to which Caesar's looked back, should probably be best understood as a separate extraordinary magistracy with the same name, rather than a revival of the old office. Sula's dictatorship came explicitly with a purpose (legibus scribundis et constituendae rei publicae) which explicitly invested him with the power to promulgate legislation before the assembly and was conferred upon him by a lex Valeria rather than by the normal procedure. If Sulla's magistracy had a prescribed term limit to begin with it was likely at least a year long by the lex Valeria, and Sulla retired from his office either after six months or a year, before his command had expired. Caesar was made dictator several times. For the first, he was dictator for a few days to preside over the elections, since the consuls for the year were unable due to the civil war to return to the city and carry out the elections. That's a pretty normal dictatorial brief, although it hadn't been necessary in some time, and Caesar resigned his dictatorship when the elections were over. He may have been granted a dictatorship for a year after Pharsalus, and was subsequently granted dictatorships for ten years (46) and perpetuo from 44 on, though he did not live long enough to exercise it. Clearly this isn't a matter of Caesar's refusing to resign his dictatorship after its normal conclusion. That's exactly what he did in 49, after eleven days. Instead, the scope of Caesar's succeeding dictatorships was closer to that of Sulla, and had prescribed limits of expiration far exceeding those of the normal office.

More importantly (Google could tell you that much) Dent's comments about the ideology of the dictatorship are more troublesome. He refers to the suspension of "democracy," which is a misrepresentation in more ways than one, if not necessarily one that the movie's writers cared or knew about. No scholar would say that the Republic was a democracy except Fergus Millar, and only in his 2002 book The Roman Republic in political thought. In his earlier, highly-influential 1984 article "The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200–151 B.C." Fergus Millar explicitly states that he is not arguing that the Republic was a democracy. Millar's argument against the "frozen waste" theory that was standard for most of the twentieth century--that Republican politics was a non-ideological, aristocratic game in which elites competed for prestige using masses of loyal clients at the vote, with no reference to "real" political issues--has been generally accepted, though his reconstruction of the Republic in Roman thought has not necessarily. It's an open debate to what degree "the people" (a concept that must be, and has not really satisfactorily been, defined) held real political power in the Republic, how much they influenced the elite, and how independent they were. Nevertheless, even the leaders of what Mouritsen somewhat unfairly called the "democratizing movement" would not argue that Rome was a democracy, either as we or the Athenians would have understood it. Dent's precise wording also simply doesn't make sense. The dictatorship suspended neither elections nor the legislative powers of the assembly, and before Sulla no dictator promulgated a law before the citizen assemblies. On the contrary, dictators (and what the New Pauly calls "prodictators," which I'm not totally convinced ever actually existed) were frequently appointed not for military purposes, but for the holding of elections when the consuls could not do so. Indeed, this almost became the normal function of the dictatorship towards the end of its existence.

Dent's comment distinguishing honor from public service don't necessarily make sense in a Roman context. Latin has no word that quite corresponds with English "honor." The OED's first definition for "honor," which the subsequent definitions basically just expand, is "Great respect, esteem, or reverence received, gained, or enjoyed by a person or thing; glory, renown, fame; reputation, good name." In English "honor" is a distinctly abstract concept. By contrast the OLD defines Latin honor as "High esteem or respect accorded to superior worth or rank, honour" (emphasis mine). Honor could have a fairly abstract meaning relatively similar to that of the English word, and increasingly did so, but in the Republic the concept was firmly tied to the actual status that conferred it. That, generally, means elected magistracy, and this is born out in some of the OLD's subsequent definitions: "5. A (high) public or political office...5b. the holding of office." When the senatorial class spoke of honor outside of, say, philosophy (I would have to check, however, to make sure that honor's abstract meaning is not one of those terms introduced by Cicero to translate Greek, as I highly suspect it is) they meant elected magistracy. With elected magistracy comes certain ideological baggage. The discarding of the "frozen waste" theory has opened up the question of the conception of magistracy in the Republic. Several scholars, notably Morstein-Marx, have pointed out that the language of magistracy and election is not one-sided, but depicts it as an honor bestowed upon the individual by the populus in assembly, to whom the magistrate then has certain duties. This ideological framework for magistracy as a sort of reciprocal relationship, the trading of honor for precisely what Dent calls "public service," could come to a head in times of crisis and was called on to legitimize actions. Morstein-Marx has pointed out that when Ti. Gracchus defended his abrogation of Octavius' magistracy he did so by pointing out that Octavius, as tribune of the plebs, had a duty to defend the rights of the populus. In forbidding an assembly vote, which was unprecedented, Octavius had, Gracchus apparently argued, renounced his role as tribune and therefore the assembly, which had granted him the privilege in the first place, was well within its rights to remove him. In 88 and 87 both Sulla and Cinna appealed to the armies at Nola (in Cinna's case it wasn't even his army) by pointing out that their status as consuls had been disrespected (in Sulla's case by Marius, a privatus, and Sulpicius; in Cinna's by the senate that declared him hostis). Appian says that Cinna in particular called on the army as representative of the electorate (given the military structure of the comitia centuriata, a fairly normal statement) to protect their own rights to confer office from usurpation by the senate. But this is not just language of crisis, this is normal. Magistrates regularly in contiones invoked the assembly and populus as the granters of their honor and spoke of them explicitly as the power to which they were responsible. The dictatorship was usually created by a senatus consultum rather than a lex of the people, but I have never seen any indication that the dictatorship was thought of any differently. If it was conceived of as all other magistracies were it was both "honor" and "public service" at the same time, because the Roman elite understood the one as descending from the other.

Besides, if there was nothing worthy of esteem in the dictatorship, why do so many inscriptions catalog the deceased's dictatorships with such pride?