Gladiator II

Gladiator II ties itself in knots to place its hero, Paul Mescal's Hanno, on the same path to the colosseum as his predecessor Maximus, as played by Russell Crowe. The latest from 86-year-old Ridley Scott is a belated sequel that he (somehow) found the energy to film in the year following Napoleon, another of the director's enormously detailed historical epics. In terms of pure storytelling, David Scarpa's screenplay twists and turns around a shallow dynastic intrigue that seems rather obvious given this sequel's photostat plotting. Although charming in a five-a-side sort of way, Mescal isn't quite able to channel Crowe's strange, tractor beam turbulences; those arresting eyeline tremors that physically communicate a mind seesawing back-and-forth between temperance and explosive violence. Similarly, Connie Nielsen's performance as Lucilla, the daughter of former emperor Marcus Aurelius, is a shadow of her preceding act. The actress now flat and robotic where previously her Lucilla had registered as guarded but still extremely cunning. 

This lack of gravitational pull from two of the most important characters, as well as the aggressively blunt storytelling employed to get a gladius in Hanno's hands, means Gladiator II is a subordinate experience in comparison to the 2000 film. But that's not to say that Scott isn't having or transmitting fun. Like his twin Alien prequels, Gladiator II represents an opportunity to reappraise concepts and sequences that never made it into the parent piece, often because of budgetary rather than qualitative concerns. So while Prometheus allowed the director to reclaim Giger's pyramid designs, this second Gladiator inherits costly colosseum battles built around massive African beasts and duelling, burning battleships encircled by sharks. An arena battle involving a rhinoceros doesn't just deliver on the broad strokes of Sylvain Despretz's twenty five year old storyboards (images of which were tucked away in the special features of two-disc DVD sets for the first Gladiator), it also reproduces the unusual little details that Scott himself etched into his Ridleygrams. This fascination with macabre match-ups also allows for Hanno to be subjected to hand-to-hand combat with hairless baboons, rendered here as muscular teeth and claw that wouldn't shame Scott's pitiless Alien: Covenant. 

Gladiator II's vision of Rome is denser and dirtier as well, journeying beyond repeatedly re-dressed bedrooms and flat, computer-generated vistas to really stick its nose into the filthy stalls or subterranean tombs that are threaded into this ancient city. This vivid, lively approach to antiquity is best expressed by Denzel Washington as Macrinus, Hanno's ambitious, arms-dealing slavemaster. Washington's role could very easily default to a rehash of Oliver Reed's curtailed Proximo: an entertaining, storied actor for the less experienced leading man to bounce off or commiserate with. Macrinus' role in proceedings does overlap somewhat with Proximo's but, again, this sequel goes in directions that the previous film could not. Reed's untimely death meant that Maximus' master could not become an antagonistic presence in the Spaniard's life. Not so here. Macrinus is an actor, able to present whichever image his audience expects. So, with pompous senators, Macrinus pretends to be a rich gadabout. When in the company of real power, his servility may ratchet up slightly but it is always tempered with a ruthless focus. In all things Macrinus strains to appear useful; instantly solving problems that he himself has cultivated. The closer he creeps to the throne, the more venal and bloodthirsty he becomes. At his peak he's endangering maidens and galloping away from pursuing heroes like a serial villain. Washington's is a wonderful performance, one that combines the actor's Shakespearean bona fides with a more modern-presenting flamboyance reminiscent of an entitled, record label mogul. 

Gladiator

Following sepia studio logos and an introductory text that swirls inside the mists of time, Gladiator gives its opening seconds over to a hand touching the tips of long, wheat stalks during golden hour. While unseen children laugh, off in the distance, we watch as bronzed fingers lightly grasp at this waving grass, enjoying the prickly sensation. This interlude does not represent the present for Russell Crowe's Roman general Maximus, they are either his memories or a fantasy of home that has wriggled into him then refused to budge. Crowe's soldier blinks himself out of this trance to discover that he is still trapped on enemy territory in the midst of winter, preparing for an imminent, apocalyptic battle. It is, in a way, a dichotomy that is just as pronounced as the one experienced by Rick Deckard in the various Director's Cuts of Blade Runner: a dream that is pointedly disconnected from each character's current reality. Whereas Deckard's drunken, future-shocked reveries depict a muscular unicorn crashing through a forest, Maximus' interior perspective is softer, suggestive of a private moment that this man may have actually physically encountered. 

These personal desires instantly propose Maximus as romantic but beleaguered, an instrument honed by decades of bloodshed that would, quite happily, pack up then leave this place if he enjoyed that level of authority. Maximus returns to these visions again and again as the film presses forward. They expand in scope to explicitly include his wife and son, the situations curdling into precognitive glimpses of their death at the hands of bloodthirsty Praetorians. Later they are fleeting comfort for Maximus, following his failure to show fealty to Joaquin Phoenix's murderous heir. The visions are now drained of colour and life, taking on the same stark, funereal quality as that present in Arnold Böcklin's painting Die Toteninsel, specifically the monochromatic third version, painted in 1883. Scott's film portrays the afterlife as a place of family and comfort, an escape from obligation otherwise thwarted by the machinations of madmen. Happiness then is something always just out of Maximus' living reach. Even before his diseased body is sold into slavery, the General is very specifically a pawn in larger schemes. The dying emperor Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris, may trust and appreciate Maximus but the younger man is still just a tool, a way for this war-mongering monarch to realign a legacy that has emptied his kingdom's coffers and allowed for the rise of Phoenix's poisonous, self-obsessed Commodus. 

These strict states of being for Maximus have structural purchase as well. The General is always subordinated; always stuck answering for somebody else's life-or-death demands. After he is unceremoniously ejected from the Roman army he is bought by Oliver Reed's Proximo, an ex-gladiator turned slavemaster. Later, when he fights before crowds in the Colosseum, he acts on behalf of Connie Nielsen's Lucilla, functioning as a male proxy who can lower himself to violence and vanquish her creeping brother. It is in these later passages that Gladiator reveals itself as a sports movie masquerading as a historical epic. Ridley Scott's film, written for the screen by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson, may begin with massed, strictly regimented armies blasting flaming rocks at treelines but once the principal characters have returned to Rome, Gladiator gives itself over to a mode of storytelling that has more in common with a pro-wrestling television show than pious, Technicolor biblical blockbusters. Above all there is a complete submission to a very specific format. Secondary characters may plot and plan in shadow but nothing in Gladiator can truly be accomplished unless it involves armed combat staged for sadistic spectators. Scott's film then pointedly elides any of the contextualisation typical to this genre: Maximus isn't saved by the Christian faith. Similarly, he doesn't allow himself to be martyred or transformed into a messianic symbol. His final act is to relay the message, the albatross-like burden, that Marcus placed around his neck at the beginning of the film. He does this job admirably, after getting to enact a ferocious, truly triumphant beating on the new nepotism hire.