"Gladiator 2" Crows about The Dream of Rome
But it's about tough guys fighting big dumb beasts, for your entertainment
Ladies and Gentlemen!
In one corner over here, we’ve got an awesome cast and unlimited resources to make any movie we want.
In the other corner, we’ve got . . . whoa, wow, will that even fit in the arena?
Ahem, excuse me, in the other corner we’ve got the mightiest most terrifying exotic animal to ever grace this arena!
With a near perfect record in this very arena, we give you . . . . . . The Zeitgeist!
[Cue loudest applause imaginable]
And here come the fighters charging at each other and . . . oh, wow, uh, the Zeitgeist stomps on the all-star cast and . . . uh, boy that’s a lot of guts . . . the Zeitgeist wins once again, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry about the mess down there.
Yeah, that Zeitgeist is a mighty beast, but always metamorphizing.
These days, it’s bigger and badder and tougher than ever: a Retread beast, demanding that whatever was made in the 1980s and 1990s be remade, artistic innovation be damned.
You make a sequel, you bring back some or all of the original cast, all the story beats, the famous lines, the famous shots, and you try to recreate the same tones and moods as the original.
All new movies bow to this Zeitgeist, if they want to make a buck.
So it goes in “Gladiator 2,” which rehashes and retreads one of the most popular manly movies ever, Ridley Scott’s 2000 release “Gladiator,” the one where Russell Crowe goes Count-of-Monte-Cristo on Emperor Commodus in ancient Rome.
That movie highlighted vengeance and colosseum battles, so what does “Gladiator 2” highlight?
Yes, it not only features vengeance and colosseum battles times ten, it bows narratively to the first “Gladiator” in such a way that you can’t effectively watch this movie as a standalone.
It’s just not going to make much sense if you’ve never seen the first Gladiator.
They tell you this in the opening credits, when — using a cool painterly technique, I must say — they retell the main parts of Gladiator 1.
But I tried to ignore that. For the first hour of “Gladiator 2,” I happily thought I was watching something all its own. The film starts with a mysterious white-guy stranger, played captivatingly by Paul Mescal, who defends the African city of Numidia against a Roman naval invasion, the so-called “last free city in Africa.”
Quickly his wife is killed, his city captured, and he’s taken back as a slave to Rome. There he fights rabid baboons in the Colosseum, impressing a higher-up named Macrinus, played captivatingly by Denzel Washington.
Our mysterious stranger is bought as a slave and turned into a gladiator, who fights at the behest of Macrinus, winning him quite a sum via gambling.
The hope for the stranger, they tell him, is to win enough gladiator battles to earn his freedom. He scoffs at this possibility; it’s no freedom to him. Therefore a thinking audience should be asking of his motives, “what does he think freedom is?”
We’ll find out by the movie repeating the same slogan over and over and having no idea what it means. That slogan is “The Dream of Rome,” which the movie opens by saying is 16 years dead, with Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ passing.
What the stranger wants is the dream of Rome to be reinvigorated. This has something to do, ala “Gladiator 1,” with restoring the Roman Republic and embracing Aurelius’ Stoicism as the way to feel good about yourself while endlessly fighting big dumb brutes.
Now I don’t expect my big dumb blockbusters to be coherent, and I would never expect a Ridley Scott movie to be historically accurate. Despite using real names of Roman emperors — such as Macrinus — anybody expecting wisdom and insight here, the kind you might find in Aurelius’ Meditations, should not even bother.
What you’ll get in “Gladiator 2” is the mysterious stranger fighting baboons, a rhinoceros, great white sharks, and the entire Praetorian guard.
The movie’s in love with the old Roman colosseum, and while it criticizes the idiotic, pasty-white Roman emperors of the day — the real brother-pair of Gata and Caracella — it revels in showcasing for you the ultra-violent entertainment that they adored.
Watching this movie, I ask myself “Am I supposed to love or hate gladiatorial combat?”
Sir Ridley says, with no hesitation, “love it! and here’s a second gory helping!”
The movie’s cast is among the best I could imagine, including movie-star turns by Mescal and Washington. Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen, and Derek Jacobi strongly believe in everything going on here. I’d love to see them all together in something else that’s striving for meaning and purpose.
Alas, “Gladiator 2” decides to intertwine itself so inextricably with the first movie that it’s completely subservient to it. Despite the main character not wanting to be a slave, this movie enjoys its aesthetic servitude to the popular original.
If you can’t guess who the mysterious stranger played by Mescal is, you haven’t watched “Gladiator 1.” And if you haven’t watched “Gladiator 1,” you’ll be lost as to who Maximus is and why everybody’s talking about him so much.
Also, in proper Star Wars style, everybody’s related by blood or by bond to everybody else somehow. The locus of these relations is Marcus Aurelius, a de rigeur figure these days presumably because of his Meditations.
As usual, on the question of whether “might makes right,” a Ridley Scott favorite, the answer is that it absolutely does. The movie, via the main character, hates the chaos and imperialism of ancient Rome, but it loves the use of power and longs to put that in the right and proper hands. Rome just has the wrong political system. With the right one, everything’s okeydokey, and presumably there will be more gladiatorial games because they are so darn cool.
All of this you will see in “Gladiator 3,” when Maximus’ grandson is enslaved, fights in gladiatorial games, and then cries “Freedom!” while shots of a hand touching grain in a field play touchingly on screen. And then he will clash with a hippopotamus, a komodo dragon, and a horde of angry beavers.
The Zeitgeist demands this.