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Ridley Scott’s Turbulent Idea that is Rome

Really, it was only a matter of time before Ridley Scott came back to Gladiator. It is one of the three most important movies of his career as a director (after Alien and Blade Runner obviously), and the only one he hadn’t yet resurrected in some fashion. It was also perhaps the most pivotal movie for him, as its success spurred him on to making historical epics his primary calling card as a filmmaker. He has a great love for that style and that material, and it shows through as much in Gladiator II as it did in the first movie -even if his attitude to the history itself remains much less reverent.
The movie is set sixteen years after the events of the first during the reign of fiendishly corrupt Co-Emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). Hanno (Paul Mescal) is forced to defend his home city in Numidia when it is besieged by a Roman army and during the battle his wife is killed on the orders of the General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the husband of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), daughter of beloved Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the secret lover of Maximus from the first movie. Made a slave, Hanno soon becomes a gladiator for the influential stable-master Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who promises him the chance to kill Acacius in Rome.
On a glance, the story is very similar to the first movie, with maybe the one curious note being the splitting of Maximus the slave and Maximus the general into two characters. But both Hanno and Acacius follow a very close trajectory to the story of Maximus, while it’s mostly the political arena that is more creatively distinct, involving two unpopular evil emperors, the last link to an apparent Roman golden era, and a Machiavel games master as Macrinus grows more and more powerful when in Rome. Some of the idealism of the first movie fades, the script a little more cynical to Marcus’s “idea that was Rome” -as in the fantasy of a restored democratic republic that the first movie suggested was on the horizon. This movie acknowledges its failure and at one point even rips a hole in the sanctified image of Marcus by revealing Macrinus’s origin as a slave under that emperor. But there isn’t much ventured beyond this, and the fantasy still becomes a driving philosophy for Hanno whose true identity, obvious from the start, is Lucius -the son of Lucilla and secretly Maximus who witnessed his father’s death in the Colosseum years earlier. The ideology feels disingenuous here, as though mandated for the general romanticization of Rome when it doesn’t need to be. It is much easier to understand Macrinus’s cynical philosophy and even his goal to just have the empire ended -which we know is destined to actually happen.
But of course the movie speaks to modern civilization as much as it does to Rome, which is where some credence can be given to the point of view of Hanno or Lucilla or Acacius -who despite being singled out by Hanno as his nemesis is the much more traditionally heroic character. There's value in the kind of hope Gladiator II proffers in this moment, more perhaps than could have been anticipated while Scott was shooting it. Especially against a brand of chaotic corruption as seen in the twin emperors, one of whom in true Caligula fashion installs his pet monkey as consul. Hanno's journey is one of regaining the idealism of his father that has been swept away by cynicism and his own experience as a victim of the Empire. Scott frames it as noble and honourable to attain and fight for the dream. He makes the case, but perhaps not strong enough.
Mescal fits his part and the general time period like a glove -he's got the kind of face that wouldn't be out of place among a pantheon of Roman busts, a physicality put to adequate test in the arena action scenes, and he delivers the extravagant dialogue with appropriate gravity. He lacks some of the charisma though of both his prior roles and Russell Crowe in the original movie, his passions aren't so resonant. Meanwhile, Pascal as the red herring villain is underwhelming, and while Nielsen is given substantial material to work with, her fellow returning cast-member Derek Jacobi is consigned to the background. Quinn and Hechinger spend all their screen-time chewing scenery to mixed results. The only real star of the show is Washington, who honestly carries a lot of it on his back with his exceptionally magnetic personality. Washington is having the most fun of anybody, as he taps into the Shakespearean deviousness of his role and the shrewd politicking he becomes involved in. There is the glimmer of his Oscar-winning performance in Training Day, that same appealing yet dangerous combination of spirit and menace.
Scott ups the ambition in terms of the Colosseum action, with full war re-enactments and a naval battle the arena is flooded for -both of which were uses the Colosseum was actually put to. However the scope of these is tempered by some lacklustre effects, especially pertaining to the water in that sea battle sequence, and the animals -including some sharks escaped from an Asylum movie. When the CGI is so pronounced in such moments, especially compared to the original film, it does delineate the movie's sense of scale -it no longer feels as big and immediate as a Ridley Scott epic should.
Yet the movie does look quite good in spite of this. Scott fills out his historical spaces, his palaces and temples, and bombarded seaport villages, with colour and character. The Colosseum still generally feels magnificent and a major climactic sequence at the Gates of Rome achieves the right level of dramatic scale, visually warmer and richer than its equivalent scene in Napoleon. The movie returns in moments to visions of the same metaphysical plane where Maximus resides -a dim and indistinct haze that only produces for Lucius one vivid impression by movie's end; and while there is less mystique in this afterlife it is a visually and thematically curious corner of the movie regardless, especially as contrasted against how it was depicted in the first movie.
Gladiator II is generally more about the practical than the ideal. It feels more connected to our world than the first movie in its mythologising ever did -reckoning with the unkept promises in multiple avenues of that earlier movie's conclusion. At the cost of losing its operatic stature, it engages precisely with the navigation of and finding threads of hope in a reality that turned out the opposite to what it nearly could have been. Scott's optimism may be too pure and uncritical, but it is not unsympathetic. Gladiator II is guilty in stretches of repeating itself but in lesser terms, of not adhering to the old standards and coming across more shallow as a result (beyond of course everything Washington does). Maybe on some level Scott is aware of that too, but his convictions supersede it. It is not a great movie, though it is an intriguing one. And at the very least you are entertained.

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