‘Gladiator II’ Is an Empty Prayer at the Altar of the Franchise

Gladiator II is nothing if not reverent to Gladiator, replaying the same emotional beats of its predecessor as Hanno, like Maximus before him, is enslaved as a gladiator and seeks revenge against the corrupt rulers of Rome.

To its credit, the film is a lavish visual spectacle with impressive action sequences and carefully choreographed fight scenes. But in worshipping the original, it loses much of the tight narrative and emotional punch while somehow displaying an even weaker grasp of history.

Of course, no one in the Year of Our Lord 2024 is watching a Ridley Scott historical epic expecting much in the way of historical accuracy. Nevertheless, the original Gladiator has left a significant impression on the public understanding of the Roman Empire, and Gladiator II seems certain to be similarly impactful. But while the events of Gladiator were fictional, they were at least tied thematically, if not factually, to the reigns of the emperors Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180) and his son Commodus (r. 180-192). The same cannot be said for the sequel.

Director Ridley Scott and Mescal on the set of Gladiator II.Paramount Pictures

To start, Gladiator II cannot even decide what year it is. The audience is repeatedly informed it has been 16 years since the first film, which suggests the year is 208. Yet the film is set during the joint reign of Caracalla (r. 211-217) and Geta (d. 211), which would place the film in 211, though an early title card declares the year A.D. 200, putting it also in the reign of Septimius Severus (r. 193-211). However, the film opens with a Roman invasion of North Africa, suggesting someone has confused the A.D. 200s with the Punic Wars of the 200s B.C.

The film’s troubles with history do not end with the date. In this opening invasion, the Romans assault the “city” of Numidia. Setting aside the technicality that Numidia was a region rather than a city, by the time the film opens it had already been part of the Roman Empire for two and a half centuries. Characters announce they’ll gamble with “gold denarii,” but the denarius was, somewhat famously, a silver coin. Returning character Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) is described as a “queen” of Rome and her son Hanno as its “prince,” but the Roman Empire had neither title.

The sets and costuming are as careless as the date. Gladiator II’s Roman and Numidian soldiers wear a pastiche of equipment covering close to four centuries, from Hellenistic Phrygian helmets to republican-era Roman mail armor (identifiable by the shoulder guards, absent from imperial-period mail) to more period-appropriate lorica segmentata body armor and imperial-type helmets. Audiences that have grown accustomed to the colorful set design of shows such as HBO’s Rome will be disappointed that the film’s buildings and statues are white, unpainted marble and limestone, rather than the bright and vibrant colors they would have had in antiquity.

Despite the Romans historically relying on non-Roman auxiliaries to provide archers for their armies, Gladiator II’s Romans have an awful lot of bows, which they wield like modern firearms, holding crowds at bow-point for extended periods, for instance. This is a feat well beyond the limits of human strength, given that war bows had draw weights often well in excess of 100 pounds. The same bows have seemingly no trouble putting arrows through solid metal breastplates, although more than a few swords are also thrust directly through armor. Indeed, the only piece of armor in the film that appears capable of stopping any sort of weapon is Maximus’s armor from the original Gladiator, worn now by Hanno. The old adage “They don’t make them like they used to” could apply as readily to this film as to the armor in it.

These details might matter little to a viewer who has come to the theater to see exciting action sequences. But the film’s deviations from history are most interesting where they reveal the themes and preoccupations of its director and writers.

The original Gladiator contrasted the corrupt and paranoid emperor Commodus against the strong and determined gladiator Maximus, a thematic opposition that, while fictional, made some sense. Commodus was a famously bad ruler who shunned the military campaigns and personal sacrifice of his father, Marcus Aurelius, in favor of staying in Rome and playing at being a gladiator. Meanwhile, Maximus, the career military man who dreams of returning to his farm, represents the old core of Roman virtue and the idea of a return to its republican roots.

Denzel Washington (left) as Macrinus, Pedro Pascal as General Acacius, and Connie Nielsen as Lucilla in Gladiator II.Paramount Pictures

Gladiator II cannot resist the pull of a similar thematic opposition. The introductory crawl informs us that the collapse of Rome is imminent from its reckless conquests (odd given that Rome had reached its maximum extent roughly a century prior). The drivers of this excessive conquest are soon revealed as the emperors Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger). The two are depicted as immature and sickly pale redheads (another odd choice given that their actual heritage was a mix of North African and Syrian). They are eventually supplemented as villains by the scheming, queer-coded Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who aims to steal their throne and hasten Rome’s fall in revenge for his own enslavement at the hands of Marcus Aurelius. Opposing them are the grizzled Roman general Acacius (Pedro Pascal), who like Maximus dreams of peace, and soldier-turned-gladiator Hanno, seeking revenge on Acacius and the emperors for the destruction of his Numidian home and the death of his wife.

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Review

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Bret Devereaux

The ultimate message is not subtle: The villainous representatives of diseased, insufficient masculinity wear luxurious robes and copious jewelry, scheming from the sidelines and watching other men fight, while the robust, sufficiently masculine heroes wear armor and do their violence in person, man to man. The result is a political vision that is as contemporary as it is dark.

The “problem” plaguing this Rome is that effeminate or queer-coded men have power, and the solution is for that power to be violently returned to where it belongs—to straight, muscular strongmen. This borderline authoritarian vision is the film’s only real break with the original Gladiator’s theme of righteous resistance against unjust tyranny, but it fits neatly in an America where anti-transgender campaign appeals appear to have worked as a political strategy.

For those wondering what the women do in all of this, the film has two significant female characters, both of whom exist primarily in order to die taking arrows to the chest at appropriate moments to motivate the film’s male hero, Hanno. This dearth of significant female characters is striking given that the historical Severan dynasty was notable for the power of key women in it: Caracalla’s mother, Julia Domna; her sister, Julia Maesa; and Maesa’s daughter Julia Mamaea, all of whom are entirely absent in the film.

Fred Hechinger (left) as Emperor Caracalla and Joseph Quinn as Emperor Geta in Gladiator II.Paramount Pictures

The thematic point that Rome needs to be saved from decadent, effeminate men like Caracalla and put into the hands of soldiers is omnipresent. The irony is that the real, historical Caracalla was exactly the sort of man Scott appears to imagine as the savior of Rome—and was a terrible emperor for it. Caracalla was a consummate soldier, sufficiently uninterested in politics to leave most of the quotidian details to his mother. After taking power following the death of his father, he murdered his brother, Geta, and then left Rome to command his armies for the rest of his reign, never to return. In historical sources, Caracalla is a man of violence—brutal and tyrannical but perfectly sane. His frequent military campaigns and generous payments to the army emptied Rome’s coffers, while his oppressive style of rule alienated its elite.

Gladiator II likewise assumes a sharp distinction between Rome’s generals and its supposedly civil elite that simply didn’t exist in the Roman aristocracy. The decadent Roman elite and the hardened Roman general were one and the same. Scott seems to imagine that if only Rome trusted power to manly men in armor, all would be well. But the failure of Caracalla’s reign, followed later by the devastating series of third-century civil wars fought on behalf of generals vying for power, tells us it was not so.

Instead, Gladiator II saves all of its reverence for one thing: the demands of a franchise. From the opening credits, which retell the original’s story in oil-painted vignettes, to the frequent reuse of musical motifs, Gladiator II wants nothing more than to forge the material of the first film into the lore foundation for more. In its closing moments, just in case the audience was worried this might be the end of the story, Hanno contemplates the future—presumably the future of the movie’s intellectual property, as much as that of Rome.

There is no shortage of drama to be found in the actual reign of Caracalla, a brutish thug of an emperor who murdered his brother and was assassinated by one of his closest advisors in turn, operating in a dynasty orchestrated as much by its women behind the scenes as by its men at the heads of their armies. But telling that story wouldn’t allow the beloved story of Gladiator—of warriors, the Colosseum, and Maximus—to continue.

Just as the Romans would occasionally reenact mythological battles in the Colosseum, so now Scott is reduced to reenacting his previous movies in the decadent service of the franchise.