'Gladiator II' Post-Mortem: The Trouble With 'Noble Blood'
Let's get spoilery.
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I took my nephew to see Gladiator II this past week — his first time seeing it, my second. The kids were all out of school with the adults working, and it was also raining in California, so a movie seemed the obvious choice. Part of me wanted to see something new for the newsletter, but options appealing to preteen boys were scarce. I couldn’t see pushing for Heretic, The Substance, or Conclave. Wicked not only felt like a non-starter with the boy, but at two hours and 40 minutes of runtime, sounded about as fun as a root canal for me as well. (It’s also a film adaptation of a stage musical, that was adapted from a book, which was in turn based on another book, which was also a movie — an IP slurry rivalling those “live action” Lion King movies).
At the very least, Wicked gave us this bizarre press tour. (Maybe Ariana Grande is crying because she desperately needs to eat? Just the initial thoughts of washed dad, please don’t cancel me).
I digress, but anyway, Gladiator II it was, and seeing the film a second time really drove home some things I was already feeling the first time around. I already wrote a review, but I thought screw it, let’s do a spoilery post-mortem where we can really get into specifics — especially since Gladiator II’s most glaring flaws are some of the most common ones in megabudget filmmaking.
First things first, the fact that I was willing to see a 148-minute movie for a second time in less than a week and enjoyed the experience both times is a testament to how entertaining Gladiator II is. That’s why I gave it an A- review, which I think it earns. A review is supposed to weigh a film’s positives against its negatives, not just be a catalog of gripes (which I absolutely could’ve written, I am nothing if not a gripe-filled man). The most basic test for any movie is whether I can get through it without ever looking at my watch or thinking about my next meal — it’s kind of a high bar, and Gladiator II easily cleared it both times.
Visually, Gladiator II is genuinely an improvement over the original and a near-masterpiece generally. When Denzel Washington was sinking into that river at the end, I was thinking “boy this is stupid” and “holy shit this is awesome” at almost the same time, which is what compels me to write about it.
Stupid, because of the story choices that brought us there, and awesome because Marcrinus getting his arm abruptly lopped off and then sinking into the muck like Arnold at the end of Terminator 2 was so fun that I almost spilled my popcorn with glee. So much to love and so much to hate about this film simultaneously. Ridley Scott is “at the top of his game” as a visual maestro, but he sometimes seems like the director version of Ron Bergundy, who can shoot the the hell out of whatever’s on the page but doesn’t seem to have much regard for what it means. And the script for Gladiator II, if we’re being honest (written by David Scarpa, who also wrote Napoleon for Ridley Scott), seems like it was a big fucking mess.
Let’s get into that.
It seems to me that the film’s main conceit is also its original sin. This “twist,” if you regard it as such (it was spoiled in the trailer, but is structured like a reveal in the movie) is that Paul Mescal’s character is actually the son of Russell Crowe’s Maximus from the original film. This choice both paints the story into a difficult corner, but is certainly the most obvious choice from a boardroom perspective. If the corporate boss asks “how do we make a sequel to Gladiator?” you can imagine five underlings all shouting “what if Maximus has son!” in unison. Doesn’t take a genius to come up with that one. Whether the idea itself is stupid because it’s so obvious, or good because it’s so straightforwardly logical is sort of in the eye of the beholder. I don’t like the decision, but it also seems possible that the story still could’ve been great in spite of it. In either case, that didn’t happen.
Mescal’s character is named Lucius, though when we first meet him in the film, he’s initially called “Hanno.” He’s living not in Rome, but in Numidia, a city in Africa Nova that the Romans are about to conquer. He has a wife (Arishat, played by Yuval Gonen) and a mentor/father figure (Jugurtha, played by Peter Mensah), and when we first meet him he’s happily feeding some chickens. Then he sees the signal fires atop the city walls signalling the Romans’ approach, and he and his wife have to gear up to go fight them. A simple guy who just wants to farm, forced to do battle by some bad guys — typical action hero. He also seems to be a leader of men. Hanno gives a big speech to his Numudians as the besieging Roman naval fleet approaches: “Everywhere they go, they slaughter and plunder and call it empire. They create desolation and call it peace!” he yells to his men.
I didn’t write this speech down so I might be getting it slightly wrong, but it’s clearly paraphrasing Tacitus, and in any case the point is clear: the Romans are thieving imperialist bastards. Hanno also tells them “Where we are, death is not. Where death is, we are not!” which is apparently Epicurus, but initially sounded to me a lot like Syrio in Game Of Thrones: “What do we say to the God of death? Not today.”
Suitably badass lines either way. Gladiator was, first and foremost, a rousing movie, and these are rousing lines. The kinds of lines Ralphie Ciffaretto from the Sopranos would yell while swinging around a chain at a party. So far so good.
So then the Roman fleet, led by Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) conquers Numidia, killing Arishat, wounding Jugurtha, and capturing Hanno. Before he’s rounded up by Roman soldiers, Hanno breaks off the end of the arrow that killed his wife and secrets it away as a keepsake.
In the hold of the boat on the way to the provinces, where Hanno and Jugurtha will be put on display in the fighting pits, they share a scene in which Jugurtha delivers some exposition, reminiscing about taking in Hanno as a boy. “I remember that guileless boy. You absorbed everything we taught you,” Jugurtha says admiringly. “…Never forget what you are.”
Unless I wrote the second part down wrong, Scarpa is once again cribbing from Game of Thrones here (“Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you" -Tyrion Lannister), but mostly doing it well. Jugurtha’s purpose is clear here: “Never forget what you are: a guy who knows that these Romans are fuckheads.”
The dying words of a mentor are generally something protagonists remember throughout their hero’s journeys in action films. At first, Gladiator II seems no different. On their way into Rome (after Hanno fought off some angry baboons by biting one and strangling another — a ridiculous scene in which the baboons look like cartoon demons, but also an awesome one) Hanno explains the wolf statue at the top of the archway marking the entrace of Rome to his fellow gladiators. He explains that the sculpture depicts the famous she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, the mythical twins who founded Rome. “They were always wild,” Hanno says, or something to that effect. Again, the gist is “don’t trust these thieving Romans, they are feral, bloodthirsty fuckheads who call us outsiders ‘Barbarians,’ when they are the barbarous ones.”
Hanno, having been bought by the striver, Macrinus (Denzel Washington) — who, knowing Scarpa’s influences, feels simultaneously like an extension of Oliver Reed’s Proximo from the original and a riff on Little Finger from Game of Thrones — goes to audition for/train under his new patron. Hanno beats up Macrinus’s lead goon, Viggo, and then is made to fight a champion owned by Thraex (Thraex being a weaselly rich ponce who is also a Senator, who has one little tuft of hair in the middle of his bald head plus bushy sides — another example of the wonderful production design throughout). This all takes place at a little afternoon kicker in a sumptuous villa at a get-together celebrating the louche co-Emperors, Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger). Caracalla, the dumber, more effeminate and child-like of the two (later we learn he’s syphilitic), calls an audible, demanding the fight be a sword fight, to the death. “Real combat!” he shriek’s, with a moron’s uncomprehending glee (Hechinger is straight up brilliant once again).
For his part, Hanno tries to get his forced fighting counterpart to look him in the eye, telling him that they shouldn’t kill each other just to please these assholes.
Because, obviously, Hanno knows who the real enemies are: the corrupt leaders of Rome, not the forced labor who do their bidding. Sadly the other tough guy isn’t having it, and Hanno ends up killing him (in what is really just a fantastic scene all around). Everyone celebrates his martial prowess, but Hanno isn’t really having it. He knows he’s just been used as a game piece in which the corrupt rich of Rome pit the downtrodden against one another. What’s there to be happy about? Geta demands Hanno speak after his victory and receive adulation, in another echo of the first movie. Hanno is silent for a beat, before he begins loudly quoting Virgil through a spray of saliva (tremendous amount of spit in this movie just generally).
This is another turning point in the film — Hanno giving clues as to his real identity, as someone who was born in Rome and raised to memorize Virgil. The emperors interpret, or pretend to interpret, this as a parlor trick, cooked up by Macrinus for their pleasure. A slave who can recit Virgil! Splendid! Everyone plays along and goes back to their grapes and whores (both male and female). A movie about ancient Rome should’ve had much more nudity than this (both male and female), but I digress.
Macrinus goes to see Hanno after the fight, trying to find out where he learned that Virgil. Hanno offers what seems to be a lie, about having learnt it from a Roman prisoner he was guarding, one who “liked to talk.” “Hm, and what did you do with this prisoner?” asks the skeptical Macrinus.
“We ate him,” Hanno laughs. “As we Barbarians are wont.”
Hanno here is once again clowning the idea that Romans are “civilized” and non-Romans are barbarians. Macrinus laughs with him, but tries to get him to see that it’s not about buying into any of that Roman propaganda, it’s about playing on their simplicity to get what you really want. “These people worship power,” he says. “Every afternoon they go to the arenas and cheer for the powerful to destroy the weak.”
Macrinus is obviously a Machiavellian type, who tries to see people for what they are rather than what they wish to be, and seeks to profit from the gap between the two (“arbitrage,” as they might call it in the finance world). His advice to Hanno: “That rage is your gift. Never let it go. It will carry you to greatness.”
It almost goes without saying that I could’ve watched two hours just of Denzel Washington playing an excessively bejeweled, lavishly embroidered ancient Roman (by way of Harlem) Little Finger. Macrinus is also the perfect mentor for Hanno, a guy who not only has first-hand experience rising from gladiator to gentleman (or whatever the Roman equivalent of “gentleman” is), but is also the human embodiment of guile, that very thing Hanno’s own mentor told us he lacked.
However, in one of the film’s stupidest moves, Scarpa pits Hanno against Macrinus, the latter of whom manipulates and then eventually murders both emperors, becoming the film’s (lone) big bad. I have a lot to say about Gladiator II’s bad, confused politics, but even putting those aside, turning Macrinus into the big bad is where Scarpa loses the audience. Both times I saw it, that feeling was palpable in the theater; the moment when the spell is broken and the audience loses buy-in. I doubt the average popcorn piggy could identify the film’s weirdly monarchist, psuedo-fascistic ideology, let alone object to it, but they can still sense the inconsistency of Macrinus killing both emperors, and the obvious unsuitability of Macrinus as a final boss. It’s a mismatch, and so it’s anti-climactic.
But that’s maybe getting ahead of ourselves. First Hanno has to find out from his mother Lucilla that he’s actually Lucius, the son of Maximus, and, even more obnoxiously, the grandson of Marcus Aurelius, the former emperor of Rome. And that Marcus Acacius, his greatest enemy, whom Lucius watched command the force that killed his wife and enslaved his homeland, is actually his stepfather.
What a tangle of relations! What a coincidence! What a fucking pointless plot conceit!
The introduction of this noble blood/successionary drama alone poisons a lot of what made the first Gladiator so rousing. As I wrote in my initial review:
The whole point of the Gladiatorial Arena in the original was that it separated the men from the boys, and identified the slaves who had GRIT (you can’t even spell “gladiator” without “grit!”). It was noteworthy that a great general like Maximus could have all his status and laurels removed and still succeed on the basis of sheer ass kicking alone. He earns it. Now, when Lucius wins, it’s more like a justification for monarchy than a repudiation of it. Of course he kicks ass; what would you expect from that pedigree?
The basic theme of the first movie was that noble blood didn’t mean shit, and now in the second movie, which is mostly trying its damnedest to copy its predecessor but without really understanding it, is giving us a whole story that turns on the hero recognizing the mystical power of his famous bloodline. Fuuuuuuck offffff.
Again, even putting aside the shitty politics of it, the twist doesn’t hold water on a basic narrative level. It’s rushed and inconsistent. Lucius at first screams at Lucilla (another saliva shower), ordering her away. In just a few scenes, he has to go from being wise to the lie of Roman propaganda, hating the empire and everything it stands for, and vowing revenge against its most celebrated general, to remembering “the dream of my grandfather,” teaming up with Acacius, and convincing an entire army to put down their weapons and come together to support a Republic (…as brought about by him, the rightful dynastic heir to empire).
Even Scarpa seems to understand that it wouldn’t make sense for Lucius to flip on a dime and go all in on Team Acacius — who, with the help of Lucilla, is planning a coup against Geta and Caracalla until Macrinus sells him out. So the film gives Lucius another ally, the doctor, Ravi, played by Alexander Karim. Ravi is underdeveloped, but provides Lucius a sounding board so that we can understand Lucius’s gradual about face. Lucius speaks to Ravi about his grandfather’s dream of Rome, and Ravi backs him up, having read “Meditations.” It’s a groan-worthy name drop, even aside from the underdevelopedness.
Now, even assuming one didn’t recognize that every Steve Bannon-type asshole seems to worhip the Stoics and usually has a Roman guy for an avatar, all of Gladiator II’s Marcus Aurelius horseshit doesn’t pass the basic smell test. We’ve already established that Lucius is a humble man who just wanted to raise chickens before the Romans showed up. Now he’s lecturing people about shit he learned from his grandfather when he was nine? This character reversal doesn’t make sense. Lucius has already seen through the Roman lie. He’d probably be much more likely to see Aurelius for what he actually is: full of shit. An Eisenhower type, who says “hey, you guys should probably do something about this whole military-industrial complex deal” on his way out of office, after spending his entire time in office building that military-industrial complex (only with Aurelius, the farewell address is actually a deathbed speech about bringing back the Republic at the high-water mark of the Empire).
In a “climactic” moment, Lucius sends Ravi away to go summon Marcus Acacius’s coup army. He tells Ravi to inform the army that they are being summoned by “the Prince of Rome,” delivered in a manner which is clearly meant to be a rousing turning point.
I don’t think it’s too political to say that an audience that showed up to cheer a heroic gladiator (a slave!) isn’t going to be too stoked to hear that gladiator declare himself prince. Oh, you’re a prince??? Ooh la la! He sounds more like a guy who deserves a wedgy than a gladiatorial badass. We came to watch Lucius kill and dethrone nepo babies, not take his place as the alpha nepo baby.