The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Gladiator II
“Jug-Jugurtha!” I blurted out laughing. It annoyed the people around me, which also made me laugh. If you don’t know anything about Roman history, making Jugurtha a Roman enemy during the (rather brief) Severan dynasty is comparable to having Generals Lee and Grant put aside their differences and team up against their common enemy, Henry VIII. It’s that stupid. Ridley Scott needed a black king and liked how the name sounded. You can tell that was the creative process.
I suppose I’m approaching this from a much different perspective than most people. I was not entertained by the first Gladiator movie either.
I know too much about the period to enjoy a movie that clearly doesn’t give a crap about Roman history. I honestly feel that the softcore porn TV series Spartacus: Gods of the Arena had more respect for the past, (I can much more enthusiastically recommend rewatching HBO’s Rome).
I’m not going to pretend that Michael Crichton was a prophet but he absolutely nailed one thing, authenticity is the currency of the future. And there is nothing authentic in either of the Gladiator movies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not that much of a humbug when it comes to historical fiction, I loved Shōgun and I don’t remember there being a Torranaga Shōgunate. But the Gladiator films on the other hand are the result of a creative vision that is blitzed on acid after watching Sparacus (the Kirk Douglas one). I probably could have enjoyed it more if they had just started making up Roman-sounding names instead of using the real ones.
Like the first movie, I keep getting completely kicked out of the story, (what there was of one) by the ridiculous bullshit going on.
I’ve enjoyed (some) Ridley Scott movies but I’ve never been under any delusion about the level of originality he displayed. He’s a cinematographer who has a talent for recreating glory shots from other movies and passing them off as his own. He is clearly of the “It doesn’t have to make sense if it looks cool” school of filmmaking. Sadly, he has now become his own tribute band.
The story is basically a beat-for-beat remake of the first Gladiator movie, which is basically the only thing you can do when you have a completely self-contained story that has left no room for a sequel. Which means there isn’t much point going into the plot. The setup is that Russel Crow knocked up Commodus’ sister somewhere along the line. She sends her son, Lucius to North Africa for his own safety because… he… has a claim to the throne? Okay, fuck it whatever moving on. Lucius gets enslaved when Pedro Pascal invades Numida, then he follows in his Dad’s footsteps so the movie can happen.
Ridley Scott keeps plusing history. He takes something that actually happened and adds to it until it’s ridiculous. Siege towers on ships happened, (once I think), but the circumstances were very specific. Regardless the Romans never had Trebuchets. Catapults, and ballista sure but that wasn’t good enough for Scott. The Roman Coliseum was indeed occasionally flooded and naval battles were conducted in it but they never dumped freaking sharks into a naumachia. The Coliseum was an amazing engineering achievement and could do a lot but it was never a saltwater Aquarium. What is really stupid is that the Romans did occasionally throw hippos into it from time to time and grownup Deng-Moo is way more dangerous than your average shark.
I don’t know why they put Caracalla and Gerta in this thing. Okay the timeline does work I suppose but they get the characters completely wrong. Emperor Caracalla was anything but frail. His brother Geta, maybe but not Caracalla. He was about as brutal a ruler as it gets. And the Severan brothers got along about as well the Ptolomies.
Macrinus may have been part black but he was never a slave. The Romans would never have accepted a freedman as Emperor even that late in the Imperial period. In case you were wondering no, there are no Christian characters in this.
I’m okay with historical fiction but this was historical fantasy up there with Hercules and Xena but it’s masquerading as the real thing.
The effects are good enough. I have no objections there so that’s something.
The performances on the other hand are just weak. Scott has never been an actor’s director, so far as he’s concerned they’re just props that talk. The only actor of his that ever took home an Oscar was Russel Crowe and it was total bullshit, Tom Hanks was robbed.* However, when even Derek Jacobi is phoning it in, you know that nobody was under the impression that this was anything but a paycheck.
This might have been more tolerable if it wasn’t so godawful long at two and half hours and you feel every minute of it.
In conclusion, Gladiator II is a soft remake of the first film that is overlong, with dull performances, derivative everything, and whose only source of amusement is just how badly it screws up history.
Let’s get this stupid joke out of the way.
I. Was. Not. Entertained.
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Gladiator II
*That performance was in Castaway.
