Ridley Scott’s legasequel can’t escape the shadow of his previous Oscar-winning Epic
The Roman Empire is crumbling in Gladiator II, Ridley Scott’s follow-up to his Best Picture-winning epic. Ruled by the unstable twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), the Empire continues its brutal conquests while neglecting its captive citizens. Exiled from Rome for his safety after the events of the first Gladiator, Lucius (Paul Mescal) lives under a new identity as Hanu, a farmer-soldier in the last free city in Roman-controlled African Numidia. However, a brutal battle for Numidia’s freedom binds Lucius to General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) when Acacius kills Lucius’ wife, triggering a quest for vengeance.
Enslaved and shipped to Europe, Lucius rises in the gladiatorial ranks under the watchful eye of the sly trader Macrinus (Denzel Washington). Revenge against Acacius remains Lucius’ goal, but an unexpected reunion with his estranged mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), who is also Acacius’ wife, ignites a tragic standoff between these complex characters, each manipulated by the scheming Macrinus in a battle for Rome’s fate.
Much like how the actions of Russell Crowe’s Maximus loom over those trapped in the Colosseum, one can’t make their way through much of Gladiator II without encountering strong narrative echoes of Ridley Scott’s previous film. Napoleon scribe David Scarpa (from a story with Peter Craig) borrows heavily from the first film’s story structure, combining hidden identities, journeys for vengeance, and battles for public opinion settled with the swords and sandals of the arena. Plenty of films like Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Top Gun: Maverick certainly own their status as a legasequel, intentionally mirroring their first films’ structures to critique and elevate themselves beyond their status as mere cultural cash grabs. In this modern world of pop culture cannibalization and crumbling political empires, it’s completely understandable why there’s potential in revisiting an IP like Gladiator. But while Gladiator II incorporates fresh technical achievements and larger-scale action, its formal reverence for the first film comes off as more rehash than reinvigoration, echoing its beats and tropes without reaching a similar emotional payoff.
Some of Gladiator II’s familiarity also feels by design, an attempt to revisit the potential of the first with modern resources and creative cache. In recent years, Ridley Scott has been increasingly defined by his pragmatism as a director. His run-and-gun shooting style honed in the commercial world has grown to embrace the time-saving qualities of sweeping multi-camera coverage and digital media, an aesthetic whose possibilities arguably peaked with All the Money in the World’s staggering swap of Kevin Spacey for Christopher Plummer in eight days less than a month before the film’s premiere. As such, the Ridley Scott of today can realize sequences and ideas from Gladiator that weren’t possible a quarter-decade ago. Scott devotees will surely be delighted by the appearance of a Rhino-based fight scene, left incomplete despite initial work by VFX legend Phil Tippett, and a standout sequence brings to life the Colosseum’s naumachia staged water battles with a stunning blend of on-set work and modern CGI wizardry. As such, we can see Gladiator II as less of a sequel than another crack at the first film’s material, with its individual and structural callbacks to Gladiator as reflections of its director’s evolved technical and philosophical worldviews. Yet despite these innovations, the film feels less like a forward-thinking sequel and more like a new attempt at the same story with amplified spectacle.
Among the film’s strengths, its tragic core—the crisis between Lucius, Acacius, and Lucilla—is its most compelling, its Shakespearean gravitas made even more so by the scheming Macrinus. The broken, bitter charm Paul Mescal has cultivated in work like All of Us Strangers and Aftersun effectively fuels Lucius’ anger, while Nielsen’s more even-handed pull between her son and lover against her role as an exiled ruler of Rome grants Lucilla a nuance and range lacking in the original film. Pedro Pascal, however, feels constrained by Acacius’ one-note stoicism and weariness, reducing his impact against the more richly layered performances around him. Though not for lack of trying–Pascal’s Acacius knows all too well that he’s a cog in a failing machine, though this compelling aspect of the General is just as frustratingly underdeveloped in the film.
The standout, though, is Denzel Washington. Macrinus’ sinister charm effectively reflects Rome’s decaying ideals, marrying the gravitas of his recent Macbeth with the cruel showmanship of American Gangster’s Frank Lucas. He wines and dines Rome’s elite, immediately dropping the mask when Macrinus must brandish a dagger or evil grin–often accompanied by line readings that make a meal out of Scarpa’s dialogue.
But while the film’s grandiose action and initially intriguing character dynamics flexes Scott’s legendary chops as a director, Gladiator II’s commitment to expanding the scope and depth of its predecessor’s themes dilutes its emotional impact more often than not. While Quinn and Hechinger’s wonderfully unhinged twin Emperors bring a Caligula-level camp to the film’s self-seriousness, they mostly serve as attempts to humanize Acacius’ earlier actions on the battlefield. Coupled with Macrinus’ double-crossing schemes, the constant mitigation of Lucius and Acacius’ dynamic only spins Gladiator II into convoluted rather than complex emotional territory. Meanwhile, the film’s returning subplot of Rome’s transformation into a republic lacks focus, with Lucilla’s covert schemes largely amounting to redundant scenes of furtive cloaked wandering.
Finally, the film’s examination of Maximus’ legacy allows Scott and company to explore Gladiator’s impact in full legasequel fashion. Mescal’s indecisive rage works well as this aspect starts to rear its head, and it asks compelling questions about mythmaking and identity. Despite the emphasis in the film’s marketing, however, Lucius’ reckoning of his relationship with Maximus amounts to little more than thinly veiled callbacks and iconography, another device among the film’s overstuffed arsenal of ideas. What’s more, it threatens to rob one of Gladiator’s more ambiguous aspects of its overall emotional heft.
Scott has proven that he can revisit and evolve upon his previous work with an earned, mature wryness–look to how Prometheus and Alien: Covenant imbue Alien’s sci-fi horror with daunting cosmic fatalism, or how The Last Duel bitingly further deconstructs The Duellist’s action-driven male egoism. To his credit, Scott seems in on Gladiator II’s self-reflexivity from frame one as an opening sequence renders the title as GLADIIATOR, seemingly calling back to James Cameron’s infamous pitch for another Scott sequel. However, Gladiator II’s overload of characters and subplots undercuts rather than augments its potential, and only matches the onscreen fall of the Roman Empire in terms of chaotic, bloated excess. So many ideas are cast away as quickly as they’re introduced, making it difficult to find what Scott and Scarpa find so compelling about revisiting this material. Much like Christopher Nolan’s similarly disappointing The Dark Knight Rises, Gladiator II tries to top its predecessor in terms of themes, antagonists, and scale, but confuses narrative sprawl for complexity. As a result, each of Gladiator II‘s half-realized, individually-promising ideas sacrifice the narrative focus and emotional resonance that made the original so powerful. Much like the longer cut of Kingdom of Heaven, there’s a version of Gladiator II in one’s mind that manages to balance intimate family drama, wide-scope geopolitics, gruesome revenge sagas, and shrewd power grabs; however, what makes it to the screen doesn’t inspire hope that this could exist on the cutting-room floor.
The technical prowess, fastidious attention to random cool historical facts, and unmatched curiosity 86-year-old Ridley Scott brings to his craft are more evident than ever here. Gladiator II’s ensemble does its best to match Scott’s all-in energy, especially as Denzel Washington relishes every frame he occupies on screen. For all of its strengths, though, Gladiator II feels more like a series of expected set pieces than a coherent, emotionally satisfying epic, where even the central revenge arc lacks the gravitas that made Gladiator unforgettable.
If “what we do in life echoes in Eternity,” as echoed in both Gladiators, it pains me to say that Ridley Scott’s long-awaited return to Ancient Rome adds up to little more than another sentiment from the original:
“Shadows and dust.”
Gladiator II opens in theaters on November 22nd courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
