[COLUMN] The Nostalgic Paradox of Gladiator II | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains full spoilers for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II. Which is not great, but is at least interesting. If you are going to see it over the weekend, feel free to bookmark and come back.

There’s an unresolvable tension nestled snugly at the heart of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, a throwback spectacle about an empire that is caught in a spiral of nostalgic decline.

At the end of Gladiator, warrior-turned-slave-turned-gladiator Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) killed Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) in the Colosseum as part of a public spectacle. In doing so, Maximus sought to liberate Rome from a tyrant. He entrusted the Senate, under Gracchus (Derek Jacobi), to give power back to the people. In doing so, Maximus hoped to fulfil the dying wish of Commodus’ father, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), “the dream that was Rome.”

Two decades later, at the start of Gladiator II, that dream remains unfulfilled. Rome is in decline. Twin Emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) have seized power. Corruption is rampant. General Justus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) laments that he has been tasked with “sacrificing another generation of young men” at the altar of the emperors’ ambitions, expanding the empire’s borders as it rots from within. Slavery is still rampant. Crowds still pour into the Colosseum.

Gladiator II is a work of breathtaking cynicism. It is, in many ways, a movie about the emptiness of the ending of Gladiator, suggesting that Maximus’ triumphant stand against Commodus was just as empty a spectacle as any of the loose historical battles staged within the amphitheater’s walls. Maximus’ sacrifice – his death – ultimately means and accomplishes nothing. It was perhaps facile to hope that a single man could arrest decades of decline, as comforting as that myth might have been.

In this sense, at least, Gladiator II is a Ridley Scott film. Scott is a filmmaker preoccupied with narratives of decay and decline. This interest can be traced back to his earliest films. His first film, The Duelists, took place against the decline of Napoleonic France, each of the duels taking place in an old ruin, and Gabriel Feraud (Harvey Keitel) ultimately resigning himself to life in exile. However, Scott’s preoccupation with the fall of empires was not merely a historical concern.

Scott followed The Duelists with two of the most important and influential science-fiction movies ever made. Alien was remarkable for its portrayal of a working-class future, imagining space flight as a mundane long haul through a black void that could offer only terror. Blade Runner unfolded against the backdrop of a decaying Los Angeles, as humanity grappled with the creation of artificial lifeforms that could potentially replace them – but which came with their own ticking clocks built in.

However, this trend has been particularly pronounced in Scott’s work over the past decade and change. In All the Money in the World and House of Gucci, Scott painted grim portraits of wealthy families rotting from the inside out. Institutions crumbling to dust. In The Last Duel and Napoleon, the director deconstructed romantic notions of the past as an inherently “honorable” time. In Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, Scott offered a grim vision of mankind’s future, suggesting that the entire species might be doomed.

“Why are you on a colonization mission, Walter?” the psychotic android David (Michael Fassbender) asks a later model (also Fassbender) in Covenant. “Because they are a dying species grasping for resurrection. They don't deserve to start again, and I'm not going to let them.” David is obviously completely insane, a collection of bizarre Oedipal impulses towards his creators. However, Scott is somewhat drawn to David. David is the rare character in the Alien franchise to get a happy ending.

There is a bleakness to Scott’s filmography that borders on the misanthropic. Indeed, it is perhaps possible to trace a lot of the grim nihilism that informs his recent work to the tragic passing of his brother Tony. Ridley spoke to Tony mere minutes before he died, and he still speaks openly about how much he misses his younger brother. This may also explain why Scott, an avowed atheist, seems so preoccupied with questions of faith and belief.

Sometimes these portraits of moral decline are intimate and personal. The Counsellor is a grim moral parable about the slow and inevitable destruction of the title character’s (Fassbender) life stemming from his decision to involve himself in the drug trade. However, Scott also tends to tell these stories on a grander tapestry, often in conversation with recognizable genres and frameworks, taking classic Hollywood templates and turning them into tales of systemic rot.

Prometheus is perhaps best understood as a nostalgic throwback to the crazy science-fiction movies of the 1950s, movies like Forbidden Planet, albeit a version of that narrative where the postwar optimism has metastasized into something far more monstrous. Scott is particularly fond of doing this with historical epics, with Napoleon deconstructing the “great man” biopic and Exodus: Gods and Kings turning a classic biblical epics into a horror film.

Gladiator II is – like the original Gladiator – obviously a throwback to the classic swords-and-sandals epics. However, it never feels like it’s really about the Roman Empire, at least not as anything more than a metaphor. The film has been broadly criticized for historical inaccuracies. These criticisms are entirely accurate, but they somewhat miss the point. They assume that Gladiator II is aiming for historical fidelity and missing, rather than using its aesthetics to tell a more universal story.

At various points in Gladiator II, Senator Thraex (Tim McInnerny) is seen reading a newspaper. Taking time out during training, gladiators mill around a coffee percolator. When Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) sneaks into the Colosseum training pits, she passes a massive homeless encampment. When Acacius marches to action against Geta and Caracalla, there is graffiti scrawled on the walls. Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal) talks about “the Roman Dream.”

The audience is not meant to understand the Rome in Gladiator II as a literal representation of the long-vanished imperial power. Instead, Scott is very clearly inviting the viewer to consider the Roman Empire as a metaphor for contemporary America. It doesn’t matter whether or not the Romans ever employed live sharks in their bread and circuses, because Scott is drawing a very clear parallel to a much more modern form of numbing spectacle. It is perhaps self-implicating.

Gladiator II seems to suggest that Rome is so fundamentally rotten that there can be no redemption. The movie’s most interesting choice is in the way that its opening evokes the opening scenes of Gladiator. Once again, Roman armies battle a barbarian horde at the end of a long campaign. However, while the opening sequences of Gladiator placed the audience with Maximus and the Roman army, Gladiator II aligns with Lucius among the Numidians as the Romans invade.

There is a clear structural absence in Gladiator II. There is no character directly analogous to Maximus. Lucius is a warrior who becomes a slave who becomes a gladiator, but he has little reason to care for Rome. Instead, the role of the patriot is carved out and given to Acacius. This feels deliberate. Not only does Gladiator II suggest that Maximus failed, the movie implies that he cannot be easily replaced. His narrative functions have to be split out among the cast. Once again, Pascal is cast as a well-intentioned but perhaps ineffectual stepfather figure - the ultimately decent guy who gets the job because there’s no one else.

In contrast, Gladiator II gives most of its narrative space to Macrinus (Denzel Washington). Like David in Prometheus and Covenant, Macrinus is ostensibly the villain. He plots to conquer Rome. However, like David, Scott is sympathetic to Macrinus. Washington is an incredibly charismatic performer. There is no actor in the film who can match him. Macrinus’ criticisms of Rome are entirely valid. Even if there was somebody to stand up to him, there is no response to his arguments.

Indeed, Macrinus’ very existence is a criticism of Rome and a rejection of facile nostalgia for some bygone era. Like Maximus, Macrinus served under Marcus Aurelius and internalized his teachings. However, once again like David, Macrinus was a slave. He still carries the brand on his chest, because some wounds never heal. Macrinus is an articulation of the unresolvable paradox of Rome. He is just much a part of Marcus Aurelius’ legacy as Maximus. Perhaps the rot was in the root, all along.

There is a meanness running through Gladiator II. As in Napoleon, there’s an emphasis on wild animals occupying human spaces – rats scurrying through public thoroughfares, the monkey that Caracalla names as his advisor. There’s also a viciousness. During the film’s epic climax, Scott makes sure to show Gracchus having his throat slit. It’s an incredibly brutal death for a beloved British character actor, and an allusion to Jacobi’s most iconic role. This Rome has little room for Claudius.

It's an interesting idea, but Gladiator II cannot support it in any meaningful way. As much as the film is thematically about the dangers of romanticizing the past, of indulging in nostalgic spectacle that erases real historical trauma, the film itself is an example of that spectacle. As with so many of these legacyquels, Gladiator II is as much a remake as a sequel. Like the Romans restaging old battles in the Colosseum, Gladiator II feels the need to hit many of the same beats as Gladiator.

This is a fatal flaw. On the most basic level, it puts Mescal in an untenable position, asking him to replace Russell Crowe. More broadly, it completely undermines the narratives and themes of the film. Gladiator II clearly wants to be a film about the victims of imperialism, the walking scars left by “forever wars.” However, the rules of these sorts of legacyquels demand that Lucius cannot be some random Numidian farmer whose life is turned upside down by invaders. He has to be revealed as Maximus’ secret son, “the Prince of Rome.”

Similarly, Lucius has to have the same basic arc as Maximus. He has to eventually decide that Rome is worth saving. He has to stand up to Macrinus and argue for “the dream that was Rome”, even as he stands in the exact same place where Maximus made his attempt to preserve that fantasy. Gladiator II cannot square that circle, and so Lucius’ big climax moment amounts to a stirring speech about how maybe the Roman Empire can just dream better, because the film has to hit the same beats as Gladiator.

There is something grimly revealing about this, about this wave of nostalgic sequels that are caught between competing impulses. Movies like Gladiator II, The Force Awakens and Ghostbusters: Afterlife are trapped between being stories about how this current generation has inherited problems that previous generations failed to properly vanquish and a strange hero worship of that same older generation. It’s a paradox that cannot be neatly solved.

Gladiator II is a portrait of an empire in decline, retreating into nostalgic fantasies of past glories as it threatens to tear itself apart. However, Gladiator II is also an example of such a retreat.