Amph - Ridley Scott's Gladiator and Gladiator II Discussion (2025)

I didn't hate the movie, but it's certainly nowhere near as good as the first.

The acting is good, the costumes and scenery are also impressive.
But the centrepiece of the movie, the colosseum fights, were underwhelming to me. The naval sequence should have been epic but was kinda meh, and the sharks were ridiculous (why not just use crocodiles? That's at least plausible. Plus the CGI for the sharks was awful).

Nothing in this matches up to the Tigris of Gaul fight or the chariot sequence.

The plot twist regarding Lucius' father doesn't really work, plus the flashback part wasn't very convincing (Why send him away after Commodus died when she could have ruled through him alongside her allies in the army and the senate to bring about her father's dream? Sending Lucius away just hands power to someone else).

Gladiator II was an awful, awful film. The history -- of course -- was beyond the pale atrocious but it was awful even letting that aside (after all, Gladiator the original had bad history, but was a great movie).

It's a sequel that didn't need to exist, and it does not meaningfully expand or shed light on any of the recurring or new characters. It retreads the first movie to the point of being nonsensical, and relies heavily on nostalgia (including recycling quotes). It feels like a Star Wars thing released on Disney+.

Ah, but see, then how could we have Lucius do the exact same thing as the main character from the first movie if we didn't arbitrarily put him in these weird ****ing circumstances (and do ethnic tropes about places that were centuries-long Roman provinces already).

The feeling I was struck by was that the film’s very pulpy, and the script feels a bit like the sometimes unwieldy and little-bit-cheesy OG “Sword and Sandals” epics that came out after Ben-Hux. The script very much still carries a lot of “baby fat” to several plot lines that weren’t trimmed down, toned up, or cut altogether when they probably *should* have been.

There’s a bit of “wandering protagonist syndrome” going on early on, and some “guess who the main bad guy is” as well. Denzel Washington carries a good chunk of the movie as both de facto main character by right of actually being constantly dynamic and interacting with more of the main cast than Mescal, and as main antagonist by frustrating and upending so many other character’s plans while Mescal is still in his “mystery” phase. Yes, we see Mescal first, and get a very obligatory and abbreviated story of his city being taken, his wife killed, and him being enslaved, but he doesn’t start to show real character until well after Washington has cemented himself as the main force behind the narrative’s Act I and II. Once the plot “activates” Mescal's protagonist, he does a decent job, but Washington remains a much more dominant force and its his eventual assumption of the clear antagonist role that tightened things up for Act III.

Pedro Pascal’s Acacius in particular feels a bit victimized by the undercooked nature of some of the plot points, like they had a high concept idea to split the audience’s loyalties between him and Mescal’s character and pitch their battle as the best one-on-one duel in the film, but Acacius’s story also feels a bit obligatory and a waste of Pascal’s talents, and he checks out early, leaving the film with a bit of a problem of trying to make another great duel for the climax when Washington’s villain is a pragmatic schemer rather than a warrior.

I still liked the film, but in a “did it waste my money, glad I caught it when I had the time, might not watch it again unless a friend asks to” sort of way.

(As a Social Studies teacher, I also caught the ahistorical stuff... but the only one that really annoyed me was Caracalla and Geta being a bit of a waste just because every fiction writer thinks Caligula is the best “Corrupt Roman Emperor” and their clear ineptness as antagonists weakened part of the film... while adapting the somewhat more “dumb jocks but also genuine soldier boys” description they had in history might have made them more functional and also allowed Macrinus’s manipulations to be more impressive.)

Also, Caracalla and Geta weren’t white dudes.

I agree with a lot of that, although found many of the battle scenes still rather impressive.

Denzel stole the show overall, meantime... with Pedro a close follow up.

Mescal is growing on me - but lacks the raw and rough Crowe charisma so far.
And Gregson William's music was only decent, generally.

Nor were they twins.

As I said, they’re probably the biggest elements of changing history to be lamer rather than more dramatic - going off “Caligula if he somehow got fashion tips from France’s Ancien Regime” rather than “Warlord’s sons and warlords in their own right,” and part of that is switching out North African and Middle Eastern backgrounds for pale, pasty gingers.

Caracalla especially feels like a missed opportunity. Macrinus having to try and puppet an older, more brutal brother into having Geta stabbed on their mother’s lap while he’s begging for mercy would have given us two prodigious villains and allowed the endgame villain to surpass a genuine rival rather than someone who feels like an afterthought. He also might have provided a better counterpart to the fictional Acacius.

And it’s not like Caracalla and Geta weren’t Gladiator- and Chariot Racing-obsessed jocks.

Some things that really didn't work for me in this movie:

His Wife- Why was this a part of things at all? It seemed like they were trying to set up a ham-fisted parallel to the first film, but it falls apart in a lot of ways. A civilian being murdered for false crimes brought against her husband is a thousand times more sympathetic than a soldier who dies in active combat. That's just unavoidable. They try to give this some personal flair, but the idea that the general directing the entire battle would focus an entire team of archers on one specific person seems absurd, and still not terribly personal. Beyond the one moment with the ring, he almost never thinks about or references her at all in the entire movie. Most of his time is spent on his deep personal connection to his father* (more on this later).This was an attempt to give things individual stakes that just really didn't work.

Dances with Numidians- A lot has already been said about the dumb symbolism of white-washing Caracalla, and likewise of the treatment of Roman Africa. But it's worth noting how dumb it was on it's own terms. The greatest of all Numidians was. . .the Roman guy that moved there when he was 10 years old? One supposes Scott was trying to be edgy or give some kind of commentary with the way he handled the racial politics, but when we try and read things in that spirit, it's just the same trope as Avatar, Dances with Wolve, and the Last Samurai. This is another attempt that fell flat on its face.

Identity- This seemed really confused to me, too. In the original film, it was very clear that Maximus wasn't trying to hide himself. He was using the arena as a public forum to challenge the Emperor in court of public opinion. As ahistorical as it was, that at least gave us a clear, understandable framework for what was supposed to be happening. But what was this guy doing? On the one hand, he hides his true name, as if he wants to stay hidden. On the other, he gives what the movie calls out as obvious, deliberate tells about his background. Why both at once? What would be the point of that? How does this connect to his supposed identity as a Numidian, and his wife that he forgot about after she was offscreen?

And there was a lot more like this. The film was a real jumble. 2/2 Hollywood films with War Rhinos turn out to be dumb.

I feel like the answer is one small part “we have a cool idea for a climax that we abandoned eventually” and mostly just a massive voice screaming “FORMULA!” over and over again.

I still think the Mescal vs Pascal/Lucius vs Acacius fight was, in some early draft, meant to be the the climax by exploiting arguably the greatest conflict a gladiator scenario can create: not hero vs villain, but hero vs hero, with the audience having divided loyalties or even just feeling an excruciating conflict over who to support. To do that, though, you still need to give the two characters some reason to have genuine antagonism between them, or else the obvious “one shall nobly sacrifice his life for the other” answer pops up too easily. So... the wife is a classic unfortunate case of “Women in Refrigerators” syndrome, being a blatant plot tool designed to make sure our hero is motivated... though as you pointed out, they seem to swiftly drop that.

But of course, it’s entirely possible that Scott and/or the script writer were just like “We need a guy who has a weird fixation on picking up grains of something, anything, and who has a dead wife, because that’s what Crowe’s main character did...” and by entirely possible, I mean “almost certainly to the point of being something likely to be parodied by someone eventually because it’s so obvious.”

“If I had a nickel for every time Scott did a movie where a hero (Robin Hood, Gladiator II) has an unnecessarily hidden background that requires flashbacks when the narrative doesn’t really need it, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but more than I expected.”

Though again, I think it’s partially because we might have at least two original story ideas running against each other rather than one simply superseding the other.

“Splitting up” Maximus into two heroes to fight each other might encourage trying to make one of them more racially different than the other to heighten tension and obfuscate the intent - and making the vengeance-seeking widower non-Roman would do that, and provide a nice thematic example of a Rome victimizing more than its own citizens...

...but that also doesn’t really work with “We want the main character to be the kid from the first movie, retconned into Maximus’s love child” unless you do something horribly contrived.

And the “other script” that I think wound up being dominant was the “Macrinus manipulates everyone as the Anti-Commodus”, in part because it can accommodate most any other story where the other story can’t - you can throw in some straight forward scenes of Macrinus asking questions and making deductions to highlight his intelligence. But you can’t really accommodate the horribly contrived “We need Lucius to hide who he is for... reasons...”

By the way, is the Maximus thing you forgot to get to how awkwardly but exploitively the film tries to address his legacy?

Between this and the atrocious Napoleon, Ridley Scott seems to be getting dumber - or just lazier - with age.

I agree with all these criticisms. It’s just a bad movie, and there’s no way around it. But as a fan of picking up dirt and sand, I can’t agree with that one. Plus, it wasn’t weird in the first movie, as Maximus was a farmer. Handling soil is a good way to understand a place.

(repost of my review)

Gladiator II (2024)
Viewing Experience: Theatrical (IMAX)

“What does my past matter, when my future is only to die as a gladiator?”

Decades in the making, Ridley Scott delivers a solid follow-up to his 2000 film that revived the sword-and-sandal epic genre for years and added arena/gladiator sequences to films beyond it- even if this follow-up is one that never quite reaches the same instant-classic status of its predecessor. Where its main protagonist isn’t provided the same level of personal investment for the audience that Russell Crowe’s Maximus was afforded, the film makes up for it by providing a much more complex plot of alliances and vendettas that often leave you not knowing who to side with (in a very good way).

Paul Mescal doesn’t quite have the same level of charisma that Crowe had in his outing, but he delivers a very solid performance all the same. He is, however, eclipsed by Denzel Washington’s fantastic (and very layered) performance and Pedro Pascal’s natural magnetism. Even so, his character grows into the role as the film progresses- so, for better or for worse, he is forced to hold back for much of the film.

The Colosseum sequences are much more varied this time, with a few surprising moments. However, on the whole, they have less tension this time because Mescal’s character is almost too good from the start, and rarely feels like he’s at risk or outmatched. This sacrifices some of the back-and-forth tides of combat that made some of the original’s sequences (the chariot confrontation in particular) so memorable.

The resolution to the film happens perhaps too quickly- while unfortunately promising something it isn’t prepared to deliver in the process. This doesn’t undermine the film much, but is another contributing factor towards why the film doesn’t reach the heights it potentially could have.

Also worth noting that the score for the film is not by Zimmer, but does include some subtle moments from his score to the original film. It’s not a strong score on the whole, however, so it leaves you wishing Zimmer could have come back (even though there’s no guarantee that modern day Zimmer could emulate peak Zimmer from the early 00’s). It doesn’t detract from the film, and services it fine. It just doesn’t have tracks that stand out as much as The Battle or Barbarian Horde did that elevated the first film’s score so highly to this day.

I feel like it’s juts more obvious that while he remains and always was a great storyteller, he doesn’t quite have a good eye for immediately recognizing a good central narrative or evaluating scripts - and that history-based stories can sometimes show that more than others by revealing where reality sometimes gets more interesting than what he and his script writer have put down.

Even his bad films and mediocre ones still show where he’s the right guy to have behind the camera and always have highlight match-ups between some performers and their specific part of the script - Kingdom of Heaven nailed Baldwin of Jerusalem, Reynald de Chatillon and (in the director’s cut) Sibylla of Jerusalem, Robin Hood nailed King John perfectly, and this movie nails it’s version of Macrinus (though it’s an extremely ahistorical version, mind you).

Where his poorer films can struggle is with his main characters, either undercooking them or the main conflict they’re a part of - his weak Everyman version Balian of Ibelin having a crappy antagonist in his version of Guy de Lusignan, his Robin Hood being way too mellow and mild and challenged only by Mark Strong playing a role he could handle in his sleep, and here having Mescal’s Lucius being out of focus and so unoriginal that being opposed by a lame version of a Geta is boring and when Washington’s Macrinus becomes the main villain, he just drowns underneath the superior gravitas and character.

The first Gladiator film has a somewhat colorful history as a script - apparently, everyone agreed it was weak and had bad dialogue, and it was heavily modified while being shot in sequential order - which actually let them react to Oliver Reed’s passing in a graceful way.

But what it did have was a beautiful simplicity, efficiency, and elegance in focusing on one compelling protagonist and antagonist - which is the opposite of this film’s script.

In the end I think his best historical epic was the Kingdom of Heaven director’s cut, followed by Gladiator.

KOH is probably his best in particular, but i think you have to give gladiator the edge over it because it's much more focused and easier to digest compared to KOHDC, which while superior to the theatrical cut, still does have to power through the pacing concerns of such length and scope.

Focused and easier to digest can sometimes be better. But not in this case. Not for me, at any rate. The depth of the world and story, and the production design, of KoH give it the edge. Had it been stripped down, ala Gladiator, I would like it less.

I agree that a stripped down Kingdom of Heaven would be sort of non-sensical and probably less interesting. But I also think that overall, Gladiator is still a much better story. The characters in gestalt are better realized. The narrative is tighter. Potassium hydroxide has many of the issues that others have already listed, which Gladiator simply does not. It might be that it is the more interesting underlying period of history, but we can only deal with the products we actually got. Gladiator did what it was aiming to do better.

I agree- but that simply has to do with the story they're trying to tell. KOH can't be told in a stripped down way and still be the story that KOH is trying to tell. Gladiator doesn't have to do what KOH did because that world is so well ingrained/established n our minds already, which allows it to tell a more personal-focused story.

I didn’t hate the film, and I always appreciate a lavishly visual ancient Roman film, but I did at times find it contrived, trite and schlock.

Whilst films like The Martian (and The Last Duel, I’d argue) show that he’s still got it, I think with age he’s generally less precise with the subtle visuals which were his trademark, isn’t as able to recognise when a script needs further polishing, and is probably rushing as mortality nears down on him (likely a combination of them all).

Scott has always had high output with masterpieces spaced between some mediocre, and sometimes outright terrible, films. It probably reflects him early work as a commercial guy and working hard and fast.

I just like directors that understand one simply fact: societies and cultures, not just individuals, are characters too. They are made of people, and how you present what they are, what they do, and how they progress (or not), has a real impact on how I judge historical, fantasy and sci-fi films. And for me, KoH simply presents a more well-realized society, as a character, than Gladiator does. Though the latter does an admirable job, and I still place it in second place of all his movies.

I think the complexity of the medieval Levant is better depicted than ancient Rome, but I agree with Wocky that Gladiator is a more tight, and therefore I’d argue, better story. It’s also an easier watch, although that doesn’t necessarily make it a better film.

I agree. Tighter, easier, all that. Just doesn’t add up to better. For me. I don’t need films to follow the logic of TV ads.

Then again, I’m a Malick fan, so I lean towards indulging in setting and atmosphere.