Pantheon, Rome

Source: Bigstock

Sir Ridley Scott’s 2000 movie Gladiator with Russell Crowe as the hero Maximus has been one of the more unexpectedly culturally influential films of the 21st century.

Americans had thought endlessly about Ancient Rome until the later 20th century, as my recent visit to Washington, D.C., pointed out. Countless structures in our nation’s capital are modeled on the interior of Hadrian’s Pantheon, from the Capitol rotunda to the Metro stations.

Similarly, sword-and-sandal movies, for instance, had been a huge deal in the 1950s and 1960s, both low-budget Steve Reeves types and colossal epics like Cleopatra. But ancient times fell radically out of fashion during the cultural revolution of the late 1960s.

So, nobody was expecting much from Gladiator three decades later. But it turned out that Crowe was in the middle of a brief but historic hot streak as a leading man (L.A. Confidential, The Insider, Gladiator, Master and Commander, Cinderella Man). So, Gladiator helped return Rome to American masculine consciousness.

For example, the highlight of this year’s World Series was Los Angeles Dodger Freddie Freeman’s last-chance grand slam to beat the New York Yankees in the 10th inning of the first game. Rather than then flinging his bat away contemptuously in the modern style, Freeman instead strode toward first holding his bat skyward in a dignified gesture I instantly recognized, although I haven’t seen the movie in decades, as drawn from the body language of Gladiator.

I only learned later that Freeman had named his son Maximus.

(Personally, I don’t actually like the Romans very much; they were like a culture completely dominated by the values of NFL team owners. I prefer Italians, ineffectual as they often may be.)

Because Gladiator turned out so well, winning Best Picture, there has been much demand over the past two dozen years for a sequel or remake, even though Scott generally dislikes making follow-ups, preferring to indulge his standing along with Scorsese, Spielberg, Eastwood, and Nolan as one of the last directors so august that he gets to indulge himself on novel intellectual property rather than retreads. For example, he let young-gun directors James Cameron create Aliens and Denis Villeneuve Blade Runner 2049.

Still, Scott lived long enough that the economics of exploiting the Gladiator franchise finally became overwhelming.

Of course, Hollywood tends to revisit overachieving movies that were fortuitously good and only rarely redoes underachieving movies that were worse than they ought to have been (e.g., Ocean’s Eleven). So, sequels tend to regress toward the mean.

Thus, Gladiator II, unsurprisingly, isn’t as good as the original, but it’s also not bad. Rightfully, it’s a fairly big hit, although not as huge as Wicked or the original Gladiator.

Gladiator II could have just been a remake of Gladiator, the way Cecil B. DeMille remade his 1923 silent epic The Ten Commandments in sound and color in 1956, or the way that Disney has been minting money remaking its animated classics as live-action films.

But not that much has changed technologically since Gladiator, other than it’s probably gotten easier to make a movie. Scott’s director of cinematography John Mathieson complained that the industry has gotten lazier, that directors are now using multiple cameras on scenes rather than lighting optimally for just one angle. If a boom mike happens to carelessly intrude, they’ll “just fix it in post”-production.

Whether Mathieson was specifically criticizing his boss, the now-87-year-old Scott, who has been rushing out a movie per year lately, is unclear. Gladiator, in contrast, was a product of Scott’s late prime, along with the following year’s masterful Black Hawk Down, both done in his early 60s.

Still, Gladiator II looks good, with a rich palette of colors. On the other hand, perhaps it could have been as terrific as the original if Scott hadn’t announced eight more movies he has in the works to finish before he dies.

Or, at the other end of the spectrum, Scott could have commissioned a script that just makes up a wholly new story based on the original’s general premise of gladiators and emperors.

Instead, Gladiator II features a new story that’s very similar to the old story. We have a noble hero who is enslaved and trained as a gladiator, who then overthrows a cruel imperial regime.

But that repetitiousness is elaborately justified in Gladiator II by the new hero Lucius, who was the adolescent son of Commodus’ sister Lucilla in the first movie, being confirmed to be the biological son of Crowe’s Maximus and the grandson of emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), as the popular fan theory held.

In Gladiator II, nature rules over nurture.

The effort to tie the two movies’ plots together is cleverly done. On the other hand, if you aren’t that into Gladiator nerd lore, it can seem exhaustingly contrived, as if the movie consists of a variety of cool scenes linked together by laborious silliness.

One problem is that the current movie is carefully set in the private timeline of the characters in the original Gladiator, but not in the public timeline of the historic events unleashed by the first film’s plot. As you’ll recall, Gladiator begins in A.D 180 with Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) poisoning his father, Marcus Aurelius, to steal the throne, when Marcus instead wanted his best general Maximus (Crowe) to restore the Roman Republic.

By the way, Scott doesn’t seem exceptionally interested in politics. In particular, he doesn’t expect modern audiences to appreciate obsolete norms, the way that Robert Eggers didn’t apologize for the appalling moral code of the Vikings when directing The Northman. So, Scott mostly has his screenwriters make up some political moral that his contemporary fans will find reasonable, such as that wars of conquest are bad and that republics are better than empires. (Of course, the real Roman Republic was exceptionally rapacious, while the Roman Empire tended more toward a reasonable balance of power.)

In the historical world, all we know is that Marcus died and his son succeeded him as the emperor had planned.

In Gladiator, the jealous Commodus has Marcus’ wife and son murdered and the general sold into slavery, where he learns the gladiatorial trade. In an implausible-sounding but historically accurate plot twist, the decadent Commodus takes to engaging in rigged fights in the Colosseum as a gladiator. In a completely fictional development in the first movie, Commodus meets his demise in 192 at the hands of the wronged Maximus, who restores the republic with his dying breath.

And the Roman Republic lived happily ever after in that timeline.

Or, apparently, not.

In Gladiator II, the public history of Rome has lurched back onto the historical timeline: It’s now 211, the revived republic has vanished, and the new co-emperors are the real-life brothers Caracalla and Geta.

They are portrayed as cruel and crazed boy-children, with Geta being based on Butt-Head and Johnny Rotten while Caracalla is modeled on Beavis and Sid Vicious.

In reality, however, countless portrait busts endure depicting the soldier-emperor Caracalla, the survivor of his sibling rivalry with Geta (having had his brother murdered in late 211), as a scowling beefy bruiser as tyrannical-looking as the annals attest.

Caracalla would have been better played by somebody who looks like a young Oliver Reed, the hard-drinking, hard-punching tough-guy actor who died while making the original Gladiator. There aren’t many young action stars these days, but perhaps Scott could have cast as Caracalla somebody like professional wrestling heel Maxwell Jacob Friedman or MMA bad boy Conor McGregor.

Meanwhile, the private timeline of the first movie is still chugging away, as the new plot focuses on an impressive young man around 30 named Lucius (ruggedly built Irish actor Paul Mescal) whose elegant diction and nobility of bearing suggest he is the same Lucius who had been a minor character as an adolescent in the first movie: the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen in both films). In Gladiator, Lucilla was sister of Commodus, daughter of Marcus Aurelius, and, perhaps, former secret lover of Maximus.

Lucius has been living obscurely in Numidia in modern Algeria, which is in hopeless revolt against Rome. A brave and competent Roman general, Acacius (the formidable Chilean Pedro Pascal, who is a kinsman of overthrown Marxist president Salvador Allende), the new husband of Lucilla, sails up, defeats the Numidians, kills Lucius’ warrior woman wife, and takes Lucius (who he learns later may be his stepson) prisoner.

Our hero is sold to an ambitious businessman, Denzel Washington, who has him trained as a gladiator. As a star of the games at the Colosseum, which are attended by both emperors and all the senators, Lucius soon comes into contact with the world of high intrigue. The general (who is perhaps his stepfather) is sick of war and dreads the emperors’ plans for him to conquer Persia and then India, so he launches a conspiracy to restore rule by the Senate.

Denzel is quite good as the Iago-like villain Macrinus (in real life, Macrinus was a Caucasian North African, not a sub-Saharan African, who had Caracalla assassinated and briefly became Roman Emperor before losing his throne to the transgender Heliogabalus, who sounds like he would make a lurid bad guy for Scott’s planned Gladiator III). Denzel plots to take over Rome, or destroy it trying, as vengeance for Marcus Aurelius having been his slave owner long ago in Africa. (In Roman literature, former slaves make the most vicious slave owners.)

Two weeks ago I argued that it wasn’t ridiculous to imagine that an exceptional black could rise to a position of power broker in the Roman Empire. For instance, Pushkin’s great-grandfather Abram Petrovich Gannibal, an extraordinarily clever sub-Saharan slave, became a czarist general under Peter the Great and the ancestor of much of Britain’s current aristocracy.

Nonetheless, the 69-year-old Denzel makes an anticlimactic Final Boss for the hero to fight at the end.

I think the complex story could have been simplified by dropping Denzel’s conniving character completely and instead focusing more on how the heroic gladiator and the heroic general overcome their differences to team up to fight a more realistically formidable version of the emperor Caracalla, who would make a more plausible Final Boss.

Caracalla died in real life being assassinated by his own soldier when attacking Persia. Scott could have made that the moral of the movie: Don’t start a needless war with Persia.

Sounds timely.

Unfortunately, the sequel’s obsession with the glamor of royal descent contradicts the ostensible anti-dynastic pro–Roman Republic ideology of the two movies.

In Gladiator II, Lucius is depicted as fit to rule by blood. But the Romans had overthrown their last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, 700 years before to initiate their republic. When Augustus Caesar, a superb politician, became the first emperor 240 years before, he kept his precise status somewhat ambiguous, in respect to Romans’ ancient anti-royalty prejudice.

Imperial succession roughly followed the hereditary principle, but the empire reached its greatest height in the second century during the reign of what Edward Gibbon considered the Five Good Emperors who practiced succession by adoption: from Nerva’s ascension in A.D. 96 through the aggressive Trajan, the defensive Hadrian, the fair-minded Antoninus Pius, and the stoic Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180. The first four lacked legitimate biological sons of their own, so they each adopted competent younger potential rivals as their heirs. As the republican Machiavelli wrote in the 16th century:

From the study of this history, we may also learn how a good government is to be established; for while all the emperors who succeeded to the throne by birth, except Titus, were bad, all were good who succeeded by adoption, as in the case of the five from Nerva to Marcus. But as soon as the empire fell once more to the heirs by birth, its ruin recommenced.

Succession by adoption was not a formal theory but an expedient, rather like how CEOs of modern corporations foster their successors (and how many corporations have been well-run for 84 straight years?). But it was never an ideology. Indeed, most of the adoptees were kinsmen and/or in-laws, in the way that Augustus Caesar was Julius Caesar’s most impressive grand-nephew.

In real life, as soon as the fifth Good Emperor, the otherwise admirable Marcus Aurelius, had a legitimate male heir, Commodus, he appointed him his successor even though Commodus would have been voted by his peers Most Likely to Be Played By Joaquin Phoenix.

In Gladiator, like in the 1964 flop The Fall of the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius is murdered so the succession of his incompetent son Commodus can’t be held against him.

But Hollywood likes the hereditary principle: Nepo babies really do tend to inherit more charisma than do commoners on average.

Hence in Gladiator II, Lucius, the son of Maximus and grandson of Marcus, is so clearly worthy by blood of being “Prince of Rome” that when questioned by his inferiors he often refuses to speak so as not to give away his hereditary superiority by merely opening his mouth. When he does finally open his mouth, it’s obvious that he deserves to determine Rome’s fate as the descendant of movie stars Russell Crowe and Richard Harris.