Gladiator II: I Swear It’s Not About the Sharks by Mo Halasey

Watching Gladiator II without first watching its predecessor for beat-by-beat comparison or borderline masturbatory indulgence in nostalgia is a bizarre exercise in interpretation. It is watching shadows on the wall of a cave, an astute audience perhaps faintly aware that these shapes cannot possibly exist in a vacuum, that their movements and patterns are too strange, too specific, and too divorced from their context to belong solely to the wall, but with nothing else to draw from they are forced to accept these as a complete reality. Should you have the profound misfortune of sitting down for this two-and-a-half-hour venture into an Assassins Creed loading screen with any cursory knowledge of this period in Roman history or expectation of serviceable writing, this experience will be less comparable to the allegory of the cave and more to the torture scene in A Clockwork Orange.

This bad boy is at least a triple threat—bad rhetorically, bad conceptually, and bad technically. That is to say, Gladiator II surpasses what audiences have come to expect from a bad movie in ways that should be studied. And yet, any attempt to do so will often elicit a premature defense of creative expression against absolute submission to the (almost entirely imaginary) tyrannical regime of historical accuracy. Unsurprisingly, Ridley Scott himself has railed against any historical evaluation of his work, to an extent that the historical consultant of Gladiator requested for her name to be removed from the film’s credits after seeing that her work had been mostly discarded in the final product. My issues with Gladiator II’s treatment of Roman history are not nit-picks about the anachronistic siege of Numidia, Pedro Pascal’s pronunciation of “Vae Victis,” or the inclusion of live sharks in the Colosseum.

I know that’s what people expect from me when I say that Gladiator II is a bad movie—that I’m a weird, pedantic snob who hates fun and demands nothing short of reverent adaptation from all historical fiction. I take great offense at this assumption. I’m a weird, pedantic snob who hates fun and expects artistic liberties to be intentional and beautiful, damn it. I don’t think that anyone, Hollywood consultants and myself included, expects historical accuracy from a movie like Gladiator II. What any audience member should expect from a movie with a budget larger than the annual GDP of the Marshall Islands is a decently written story made up of intentional decisions that serve to make the movie entertaining. The notable thing about Gladiator II is that it is only one of these things—it did cost three-hundred-and-ten-million dollars to make. If this movie is anything to go by, intentionality is not a word in Ridley Scott’s vocabulary, so any attempt to seriously evaluate his work requires you to engage in the same doublethink that he does—Gladiator II is both an oscar-worthy, box-office-smashing spectacle on the same artistic level as its predecessor, and also a fun popcorn flick that you’d be stupid to think about for even a second longer than it takes for one over-saturated shot to switch to the next. Aside from the fact that the movie is aesthetically repulsive and almost never pleasurable to watch, the problem with holding these ideas about your film and its historicity is that, whether you like it or not, it will produce an interpretation of real life history, and, consequently, a statement about real life modernity. There is nothing you can do to stop this, it will happen regardless of any freakish, vaguely centrist devotion to saying nothing. The world as we know it is inextricable from its history, and failure to meaningfully, intentionally, interact with the historical setting of your historical film is liable to produce a reading of Roman history that is, to put it mildly, revealing.

Gladiator II begins far away from Rome, during a siege on the outskirts of the empire. We’re introduced to our protagonist, Hanno, through his skill as a soldier, and as a result of the far-reaching, bottomless desire of the new Roman emperors, his wife is killed, and he is enslaved to fight as a gladiator. As he’s dragged to Rome by his owner, the affluent Macrinus (who is eventually revealed to have been enslaved himself), he is disillusioned with the opulence of the city and its Colosseum (both treated as microcosms for the empire as a whole) under the emperors, Caracalla and Geta, whose moral depravity we understand through their sexual deviance and zeal for unnecessary bloodshed both in the arena and in conquest. Most of Hanno’s disillusionment and rage towards the empire is communicated through his complicated relationship with Lucilla, Marcus Aurelius’ daughter and his long-lost biological mother, and especially through his desire for vengeance against her husband, the equally disillusioned Roman general Acacius, whose tactical skill and reticence for unnecessary expansion wins the loyalty of a legion which he plans to use to overthrow the emperors and save Rome. Hanno spends most of the movie distrusting Lucilla’s desperate offers to help, but after Acacius and Lucilla’s coup fails and Hanno is finally given the opportunity to kill Acacius, he recognizes their similarities and, to the ire of the emperors, attempts to spare his life. Macrinus has been scheming this entire time and after encouraging Caracalla to kill Geta and appoint him as consul, plans to execute Geta to quell the rioting mobs and assume sole control of the empire. With Lucilla’s life at stake, Hanno, now accepting his identity as Lucius, “prince of Rome,” unites the other gladiators to attack the praetorians, and during the chaos, Macrinus is able to kill both Geta and Lucilla. Lucius escapes and, following Macrinus, is led to the climax of the film, during which he kills the emperor in a fight to the death, presumably leaving the fate of Rome in his hands.

The insane thing about this movie’s strange relationship with its setting is that, aside from the appropriately raunchy “irrumabo imperatores” graffiti in the background of one scene, the only major historical elements that I can directly trace to ancient Rome, rather than later scholarship or Hollywood, are its moral anxieties, embodied in the film’s three antagonists. These archetypes—the scheming novus homo and the appetitive, venereally diseased homo—are ripped straight from the paranoid fantasies of Roman aristocracy. The aristocratic perspective also shapes the setting itself—Gladiator II takes place in the opulent, hedonistic Rome of any senator’s nightmares, where on one hand the whims of its despotic emperors could result in an exotic entree at a feast or unimaginable cruelty, and on the other the insatiable desires of the equally capricious common people can only be staved off with the sacrifice of more blood spilled in either distant conquest or in the Colosseum. A Rome in which the magnanimous grandsons of Romulus are killed or exiled every day while barbarians and the nouveau riche get to social climb. Nowhere is this anxiety projected more obviously than Macrinus at the very end of the film—the script buckles around his lack of clear motivation beyond being a vessel for these fears. The movie almost does something interesting by revealing that Macrinus was enslaved under Marcus Aurelius, the benevolent, morally uncomplicated autocrat of Gladiator, but it doesn’t seem to know what to do with this decision.

MACRINUS:  Rome must fall. I need only give it a push.

LUCILLA:  And after Rome falls…what then?

MACRINUS: You are your father’s child. His dream of Rome was never a dream. It was a fiction. “The best revenge is to become unlike the one who did the injury.” I have made myself unlike your father. He spoke of dreams, I speak of truth. And the only truth in my Rome is the law of the strongest. I was owned by an emperor. Now I control an empire. Where else but in Rome can a man do that?

Neither the script nor the Roman aristocrat with an active imagination can seem to decide whether these scheming foreigners want to seize power within the existing system or to destroy it entirely, but gee is it scary. What they both do say definitively comes to us in a much earlier line from Macrinus quoting Cicero, “The slave dreams not of freedom, but of a slave to call his own.” Of course, this is said by the film’s antagonist and the narrative foil of our adopted Barbarian hero. But the optics of writing this line, said by a formerly enslaved barbarian played by Denzel Washington to Paul Mescal’s secret blue-blooded heir to the throne apparent and great white hope for the Roman aristocracy won’t leave me. Nor will the hyper effeminate visual coding of Macrinus, Geta, Caracalla, and the background high-born Romans we’re meant to hate juxtaposed with the hyper masculine “good guys” whose defining characteristics are being normal and, of course, loving and wanting to restore power to the aristocratic class.

Now, this is a perfectly mediocre interpretation of Gladiator II’s moral positioning. However, there is one critical flaw that puts a wrench in the entire thing: it assumes coherence. To be honest, I don’t think Ridley Scott or the writers of Gladiator II are virulent racist freaks or defenders of oligarchy. I think they’re probably, at best, crypto-racist freaks unable to imagine morality outside of neoliberal capitalism like every other red-blooded patriot of the imaginary West. But I think part of the reason I imprinted so aggressively on this movie after seeing it the first time is that beyond the script’s technical problems, beyond its rhetoric and its bizarre, seemingly random historical divergences (a friend and I were white-knuckling to keep it together in the theater when, in a throw-away line, an unnamed character informs Macrinus that Emperor Lucius Verus couldn’t have fathered Lucilla’s ostensibly dead son because he was gay), I struggled to understand anything I had watched as a story. There were scenes that were occupied by characters doing things, and even doing things with and to each other, but I had no idea why. Gladiator challenged the audience to consider their complicity in the violence of the Colosseum, but never before or since seeing Gladiator II has a movie kept me painfully conscious of the fact that I was watching puppeted images synched to sound, performing a story arbitrarily for my entertainment. It’s a sensation I can only liken to a toddler suddenly gaining lucidity in the middle of a dancing fruit sensory video.

I have watched Gladiator II three times; after the (admittedly, not entirely sober) first watch on its opening weekend, I thought it was possible that because I had never seen Gladiator, and because I’m so interested in bad representations of the ancient world as a vector for understanding our current political moment, I, maybe like three-and-a-half sheets to the wind, sat down in The Strand and watched a projection of my own expectations of Gladiator II. But what I did remember with certainty is that when the lights turned back on in the theater, I felt too sober to live in a world where the movie I had just watched, real or imagined, was the labor of twenty-five years and three-hundred-and-ten-million dollars. I decided I needed some closure.

On Thanksgiving weekend, my mother and stepfather made the pilgrimage to Ohio to visit me at school. During this visit, we discovered that the Airbnb they were staying at had a hodgepodge of streaming services on offer, and after I had spent some of dinner mining them for their thoughts on Gladiator II, my step-father put on Gladiator. If, like I hadn’t, you have not seen the first Gladiator movie, I’ll provide a quick summary here: The movie begins far away from Rome, during a siege on the outskirts of the empire. We’re introduced to our protagonist, Maximus, through his skill as a general, and as a result of the far-reaching, bottomless desire of the new Roman emperor, his wife and child are killed, and he is enslaved to reluctantly fight as a gladiator. As he’s dragged to Rome by his owner, the affluent Proximo (who is eventually revealed to have been enslaved himself), he is disillusioned with the opulence of the city and its Colosseum (both treated as microcosms for the empire as a whole) under the emperor Commodus, whose moral depravity we understand through his sexual deviance and zeal for unnecessary bloodshed in both the arena and in conquest. Maximus’s disillusionment and rage towards the empire is often communicated through his complicated relationship with Lucilla, Marcus Aurelius’s daughter and his former lover, and especially through his desire for vengeance against her brother, the emperor. After Maximus reveals his identity, Commodus arranges a fight between him and an undefeated gladiator. Upon winning, Maximus recognizes their similarities and, to the ire of the emperor, spares his life. Maximus spends most of the movie distrusting Lucilla’s desperate offers to help, but eventually reconnects and collaborates with her and, after learning that his tactical skill and reticence for unnecessary expansion won the loyalty of his former legions, they plan to overthrow the emperor and save Rome. The coup fails, and with the lives of Lucilla and her son, Lucius, at stake, Maximus unites the other gladiators to attack the praetorians, enabling his escape, his subsequent recapture, and the climax of the film, during which Maximus kills Commodus in a fight to the death but succumbs to his own wounds, presumably leaving the fate of Rome in the hands of Lucilla and Lucius.

I felt like I had been let in on a cruel inside joke. Finally, I could understand what I was looking at: not a continuation of a story, but an aimless, disjointed imitation. Still, despite their obtrusive similarities, there is one distinction between Gladiator and Gladiator II that makes the first a rhetorically questionable but ultimately entertaining spectacle and the second an incoherent slideshow—its characters. Notice that despite the two summaries being nearly identical, Gladiator II splits roles occupied by a single character in its predecessor between two or more characters. Gladiator’s lack of in-depth character exploration works because the audience is still able to get a sense of its characters by watching them occupy different roles—we are introduced to Maximus as a highly strategic mind and effective general, but also as a humble servant of Marcus Aurelius, as Lucilla’s former lover, then as a grieving father and husband, as a vengeful gladiator, and finally, as the savior of Rome. In addition to seeing the character occupy many of these roles simultaneously, we also get to see him grow into a few of them through character development. Gladiator II, on the other hand, takes Maximus’s basic arc and splits it between Lucius and Acacius. Similarly, the role Commodus occupies in the first film—sexual deviant, insane tyrant, image-obsessed megalomaniac, and schemer—is spread thin between Caracalla, Geta, and Macrinus. Splitting the same basic character types from the first movie not only fails to disguise the fact that we’re straddling the line between sequel and remake, it also makes the plot unnecessarily convoluted, gives each character less screen time, and most importantly, strangles character development. 

One of the most fundamentally broken aspects of Gladiator II’s script is Lucius’s arc, if you can even call it that. I am well aware that it is not the role of the critic to play script doctor, but I have few better ways of conveying just how allergic this movie is to intentionally saying anything. It would be remiss to say that Gladiator II doesn’t set up ideas that both meaningfully interact with problems facing the late empire and make for good entertainment. It would be equally remiss to say that the movie stumbles across the finish line—it trips at the sound of the gunshot and quits. The first forty-five-or-so minutes are filled with empty set-up and lip service to ideas that will never be mentioned again, let alone explored. While riding into Rome, Lucius explains the story of Romulus and Remus to another gladiator, who asks, “How do you know this place?” Lucius says, “I know the chaos they brought. This city infects everything it touches.” Another gladiator remarks, “I never thought it would be so big,” to which Lucius responds, “Don’t fall for it. This city is diseased.”

This would have been an interesting idea to delve into, especially since there’s a lack of Roman Empire movies that are conceptually critical of the empire. Too bad almost all of Lucius’ anger towards the empire is channeled into interpersonal drama with his mother and Acacius, until he very suddenly and for no clear reason other than to remind you of the first Gladiator, the movie you’d rather be watching, starts making vague allusions to “the dream of Rome,” and “the dream of Marcus Aurelius,” a concept that is never explained in this movie. Just five minutes after Lucius yells, “Is this how Rome treats its heroes?” to an audience booing Acacius’ execution, Macrinus and Lucius have this exchange:

MACRINUS:  The greatest temple Rome ever built. The Colosseum. Because this is what they believe in. Power. They gather here to watch the strong strike down the weak.

LUCIUS:  There has to be something else.

MACRINUS:  There is nothing else

LUCIUS:  There has to be another Rome.

MACRINUS:  There is no other Rome. The “dream”? The dream of Rome? It’s an old man’s fantasy.

For the life of me, I cannot find even a single reason Lucius would believe there was “something else” to Rome. Why would Rome sometimes victimizing its heroes negate the fact that those heroes earn their titles by enslaving or killing people like Lucius and his wife for the benefit of Roman citizens? Acacius never has a conversation with Lucius about his unwillingness to conquer new lands for the empire, and even if he did, Acacius killed his wife, an event that I know is important because Ridley Scott shows me the same Twilight-blue-tinted, slow motion flashback to Lucius’ dream about his dead wife three god damn times. It only hit me on my third (and most sober) watch that this choice might, once again, be more reflective of the movie’s understanding of modern empire than the ancient Roman one—that Lucius, upon seeing that the Roman people are subjugated by the emperors, suddenly aligned his struggle of being conquered and enslaved with theirs. I won’t argue with my own interpretation of this movie, but this understanding of geopolitics is one that I find nauseating and about as vacuous as every other aspect of this movie.

Perhaps the most infuriating example of set-up without follow-through I can think of is when Geta says, “Your name will be forgotten! Lost to history. You are damned, general.” And Acacius responds, “Everything is forgotten in time. Empires fall. So do emperors.” This had me sitting up in my seat the first time I heard it. Oh, I thought, okay, the first hour or so was a little clumsy, but now we’re getting into the good stuff. They’re introducing the concept of damnatio memoriae to set up for Geta’s erasure. For the uninitiated (or perhaps, un-toilet swirlied), the most memorable fact about the real life (briefly) emperor Geta is, ironically, his erasure from the official record. Should you happen to find yourself in the Roman forum, you can visit the Arch of Septimius Severus today and see Geta’s face and name conspicuously chiseled out of the marble. Using Geta’s murder and damnatio memoriae would play nicely with the references to the first movie—Maximus’ name is chiseled out of the wall of gladiators and later, when Lucius is taken to his grave, the inscription reads, “What we do in life echoes in eternity,” an iconic Gladiator quote. Now, imagine my surprise when the movie not only failed to capitalize on Geta’s death in his mother’s lap being one of the most melodramatic episodes in the history of the empire, it didn’t even hint at his erasure.

If all you expect from a Gladiator sequel is spectacle, sex, and violence, all this movie has to offer is shots with the same retina-searing sheen as an advertisement for a gambling app, stilted performances from almost every actor, and worst of all, a criminal lack of actual gladiatorial duels. The best fight happens within the first hour of the movie—it’s between Lucius and a gladiator at Senator Thraex’s party, and it’s the best by a long shot for the simple reason that it is one of the only fights between two gladiators. Nearly all of the other fights are between groups of nameless characters and usually have some form of animation kneecapping any convincing fight choreography: the drawn-out siege at the beginning of the movie, populated with ships brought to life with already dated CGI, the newly enslaved Numidians fighting against baboons brought to life with already dated CGI, a group of gladiators against a gladiator riding a rhinoceros brought to life with already dated CGI, two groups of gladiators on ships reenacting a naval battle in the flooded, shark-infested Colosseum, the sharks having been brought to life with already dated CGI. The only time the gaudy, hyper-pigmented cinematography works is when Geta or Caracalla are on screen, presumably because it’s thematically appropriate and complemented by the best makeup and costuming in the movie. Additionally, Joseph Quinn’s over-the-top performance as Geta is the only one that sells the limp dialogue. 

I went into each viewing of Gladiator II with increasing desperation to enjoy something about it and only found new reasons to hate it. I do not think it is a coincidence that my ability to enjoy the movie seemed to decrease when the amount of substances in my body did.