November 16, 2024 - 4:30pm
Is Ridley Scott a good filmmaker? It is surprisingly difficult to say, just as it is difficult to say, even after watching Gladiator II, whether or not it is a good film. Yet the original Gladiator was a perfect film, in the same way a trashy three-minute pop song can be perfect. A creation of the studio system working at full pace within the constraints of the genre, a product designed to appeal to as many people as possible nevertheless achieved a kind of immortality: the purest, almost Platonic form of the Hollywood movie.
The sequel, notwithstanding some spectacular violence, not so much. But the differences between the two films, despite their almost identical plotlines, highlight how the culture has changed in the intervening quarter-century.
A titan of industry rather than an auteur, the fascination with Scott is how he soaks up and radiates the wider energies of the culture around him. If Gladiator reinvented the sword-and-sandal epic at the precise moment of America’s imperial zenith, 2001’s Black Hawk Down, through the uncanny prescience of its timing, caught the mood of the Global War on Terror which was both its result and downfall. His more or less explicit War on Terror epic, Kingdom of Heaven, still has the power to frustrate and delight in equal measure, recasting the Crusades through the lens of Boomer liberalism, soaking up the worldview of the then-fashionable New Atheism. By 2021’s underwatched The Last Duel, Scott had steered his craft towards the #MeToo wave: the enthusiasms of the current zeitgeist enter the director’s mind as raw material and are churned out, processed and packaged, as glossy spectacle.
What does Gladiator II tell us about the zeitgeist of 2024? It is a surprisingly Right-wing film: if the plot is laid out starkly, it could be a Mel Gibson script. A humble married farmer finds his homeland invaded; his wife is killed and he is dragged to the metropole of an overextended empire, now sunk into decadence. The Rome of Gladiator II is dirtier and more decrepit than that of Gladiator: its population, wont to burn the city down in fiery but peaceful protests, is significantly more diverse. In the civic nationalism of the lost Roman dream, wistfully expressed by an Indian gladiator-turned-healer, Scott explicitly makes his Rome modern America.
Echoing Francis Fukuyama’s The Last Man postscript to The End of History, Denzel Washington delivers an eccentric speech on Thymos in justifying his desire to bring the rotten edifice down. “Rome must fall,” he says. “I need only give it a push.” The villainous twin emperors, the source of the moral rot at the empire’s heart, are effete, spoilt children: in Scott’s portrayal they are also explicitly, strikingly queer in the modern sense. The abruptness of the film’s pivot from the reigning aesthetic and morality of the 2010s is genuinely startling.
If the Rome of Gladiator was still the shining city on a hill (or seven), which had merely lost its way through the chance rule of a bad emperor, the Rome of the sequel is inherently evil, louchely immoral at the centre and addicted to foreign wars without purpose. “I know the chaos they have wrought,” we are told of the Romans. “This city is diseased.” The director himself fears for the near future. “The big good wolf — the US — used to go: ‘Don’t do that.’ That’s all gone,” he said in an interview this week. “I think there’s something even worse down the line.” Or, as he has a character lament: “The dream of Rome is an old man’s fantasy… there is no other Rome.”
Creating a mass-market blockbuster that is dark, pessimistic and cynical of the society that produced it, unintentionally or not, Scott has captured the Trumpian zeitgeist swirling around him. Once again, his outsider hero must drain the swamp, this time for good. But even as he leaves the door open for another sequel, history constrains his choices: there is no return from the decadent empire to the virtuous republic. We already know how the story ends.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe