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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.”
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SubscribeI’m sorry, but however much a film-maker may be “in touch with the zeitgeist”, they’re no more capable of demonstrating how things will pan out than anyone else. They’re not “gods”. (And if i see anyone use the term New Atheism again i’ll probably choke myself through disgust at those who use tropes in place of a convincing argument.)
The film will no doubt be a spectacle, but it’s entertainment. Go ahead Ridley, entertain us, but all this “film/book becomes our history” is just nonsense. In fact, it’s one of the things that writers need to just stop doing, and get over themselves.
“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”
I didn’t find the message of the original Gladiator nearly as optimistic as that. All the shots of the crowd baying for blood mercilessly, the lust for blood that ran through the society, and the hypocrisy and duplicity of the senators and politicians all pointed to a system where corruption and human nature had already condemned the empire to its eventual fate. The old Caesar Harris even seems to be having his come-to-Jesus moment only because he is dying, and is seemingly addicted to war.
The writer spent too much time mucking around in the fantasy land of the academy. I’ll look for a proper movie reviewer to get a clearer idea of whether the film is worth seeing.
The zeitgeist of 2024? Creating a desert of concrete dust and calling it a two-state solution?
Obviously Europeans have a huge fixation on the U.S.. However, what if Scott made a parallel movie about actual, linear descendant of the Roman Empire , e.g., the EU? What would that look like? Musical comedy with a Macron like lead?
The United States is the most direct descent of the Roman empire. It’s founding fathers were explicit in their desires to found a new Rome. They ended up with an expansionist Republic fuelled by a huge slave economy, which built temples to it’s emperors, just like Rome. Modern America is a continuation of this, and it’s societal fragmenting looks eerily like that of Rome’s. European or not, it’s a fascinating story.