Gladiator Secundus
First as tragedy, then as farce.
[Spoilers, thoughout, in what follows. Context: the first Gladiator was my wife and my first date movie, back in 2000 when the two of us first started going out. We’ve been together a quarter of a century, now, and our kids are grown, or growing, up; and at the release of this movie we said: ‘shall we have another date night?’ And so we did: pizza, a glass of wine, cinema, strength and honour &c. We had fun! But that’s not to say that this movie is a patch on its predecessor.]
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Gladiator II, or as the title board has it, awkwardly, “GLADIIATOR”—glad-eeee-ator—is the sequel to 2000’s Gladiator, which I suppose we’ll have to start calling ‘Gladiator I’, or perhaps GLADIATOR. Which, actually: no, that’s fine. To make this movie Ridley Scott has put the original film in a huge CGI blender, mixed up all its elements and poured them out into two and half hours of visually busy violence, melodrama, spectacle and daftness. The story makes little sense, the action and motion are nimbly but weightlessly rendered, the design and cinematography are handsome. But really, this is a silly film. Sillius filmus.
All the famous bits from Gladiator get replayed, and repeated. You liked the moment when Russell Crowe growled ‘strength and honour’ to his soldiers? That phrase is repeated a dozen times in this film. ‘What we do in life echoes in eternity?’ Repeated repeatedly. Hand moving through a corn field, fondling the heads of wheat? Here. You liked the camp maître d’ announcing all the gladiatorial battles (‘your emperor is pleased to give you the barbarian hordes!’) Here it’s Matt Lucas doing exactly that. Russell Crowe going down on his haunches, picking up some grit from the arena floor and rubbing it in his hands? Paul Mescal does that several times. Crowe swinging two blades for a double-sworded beheading? Mescal does the same. Richard Harris’s ‘there was a dream that was Rome’ is quoted, repeated, re-repeated. Clips from the first movie are liberally sprinkled through this new one. And, of course, there’s all the fighting. The upgrades are: baboons and rhinos instead of tigers, a sea-battle for variety, but basically it’s the same thing: stabby slicey fighty-fight.
It’s a mishmash, its relationship to actual Roman history gloriously cavalier. Having watched Paul Mescal’s Hanno prove his worth fighting in the gladiator school, getting sweaty, dusty and bloody in the process, Denzel Washington’s Macrinus says to a servant: ‘hose him down and bring him to my room,’ adding, ‘use one of those galvanised rubber hoses that are so characteristic of Ancient Rome, attaching it of course to a bronze Ancient Roman high-pressure tap.’
Hose him down, indeed.
There’s a lot of this. The opening scene exists to demonstrate the domestic bliss that Mescal’s Hanno enjoys with his wife Hyacinthia (Riana Duce) in Numidia: he is running his hand through a bowl of unground corn, she is pinning washing to a washing-line with wooden clothes-pegs, an item that was not invented until the 19th-century (frescoes at Pompei show that the Romans simply hung their washing over a line, or spread it out on the grass to dry). Then the Roman navy hoves into view, and she straps him into his breastplate ready to defend the city, after which he straps her into her breastplate, to do the same thing. The Roman invasion is being led by General Acacius (Pedro Pascal)—Acacius is a Greek name, not a Roman one, but perhaps Pascal is from Greece, which would explain his accent—and it involves a great many flaming and explosive catapult balls, launched from the city and, improbably enough, also from aboard the attacking Roman galleys. The force with which they explode perhaps implies that Acacius is Chinese, and has brought gunpowder with him on his journey to the Roman Empire. Also: everyone is firing longbows like it’s Agincourt, with not an echt-Roman javelin in sight. Then Hyacinthia is killed, an arrow pronging straight through her breastplate with an ease that makes one think it may have been made of cardboard. Hanno sees General Acacius ordering the shot, sees his wife die, blames the General, and then falls off the city walls into the ocean where he lies on the bottom for twenty minutes or so. Here he has a vision of the Hadean Ferryman welcoming Hyacinthia onto his boat and poling her away to the afterlife. Then he comes back up for air.
Captured, enslaved and made into a gladiator (as we know he will be) Hanno is shipped to the outskirts of Rome. Acacius also returns home, where he rides in triumph through the streets of the city and is greeted as a hero by the two boy emperors, Beavus and Butt-headus, twin brothers who are unstable, decadent, gurning tyrants. Acacius asks to spend a little time with his wife—Connie Nielsen, reprising her role as Lucilla, Marcus Aurelius’s daughter, young Lucius's mother, from the first movie. But the two emperors deny his request: having conquered Numidia, they insist he go straight back out with his army and conquer the Persian Empire, and India as well. Meanwhile there will be triumphal gladiatorial games in the Colosseum. Acacius reminds the boy emperors that the people of Rome are starving and should be fed. But the two lads are not interested in trivial details of governance like that.
Hanno is part of the gladiatorial stable of Denzel Washington’s Macrinus. He is wheeled towards Rome inside a cage on a cart with all the other gladiators. Ordinary Romans boo and hiss, expressing their hatred of these barbarians, which is the movie’s clumsy attempt at contemporary relevance, of a the people are starving but your leaders tell you it’s all the fault of immigrants and foreigners sort. To be fair, all the gladiators, Paul Mescal not least, do look extremely well fed. Anyway the Roman populace express their scorn by throwing fruit, vegetable and eggs at the gladiators, which is naturally how starving people prefer to dispose of their foodstuff.
Then it’s the fighting, which is, after all, why we bought tickets to see this movie. First-off the gladiators battle a troop of bizarre mansized hairless baboons, all of whom can open their hideously-befanged jaws reeaallly wide. What species these simians are is not disclosed to us, but they struck me as in many ways more promising gladiators than the humans they fought. Really, the movie should have given them armour, shields and swords and had them take on the might of Rome, voiced, perhaps, by Robbie Williams. Gladi-ape-r. At any rate Mescal beats the lead baboon by biting it on its wrist, which seems a bit lame. Then it’s off to the actual Colosseum to fight humans, first in the dusty arena, then on boats, the arena being flooded to provide a suitably watery medium, and sharks bussed-in from Jaws (‘you’re going to need a navis maior’ etc), then in the dusty arena again. One of the fights involves an adversary mounted upon an enormous, blood-thirsty Rhinoceros, genus Rappus Rhinoceros HippusHopaPotamus. Hanno defeats the beast by standing in its way as it charges straight at him, throwing dust in the air to confuse it, and jumping aside so that the rhino smashes into the wall and breaks his nasus, which is a rather Loony Tunes manoeuvre, frankly. He might as well have painted a false tunnel arch on the Colosseum walls and have the rhino run at that. Wilius Coyotus et Cursor Viae.
Away from the Colosseum, Hanno is brought to a Roman villa to fight another gladiator as entertainment during an orgy hosted by Tim McInnerny’s corrupt senator, Captainus Darlingus. It’s a rather chastely rendered orgy, it must be said: everyone fully dressed, eating slices of roast rhinoceros and drinking wine—one woman has her right boob out, but Scott has made sure she is wearing a gold circle to cover her nipple, to keep things PG. Hanno kills the other guy, and then recites a bit of Vergil. Recites one of the most famous bits of the Aeneid, in fact: facilis descensus Averno, which is quoted, in the movie, in Dryden’s translation:
The gates of Hell are open night and day: Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labour lies.
This is quite nice, though the moment is a little spoiled by Macrinus stepping forward and explaining to the assembled Roman aristocracy, including the two emperors, ‘Vergil, your majesties’—rather as if an entertainer quoted ‘to be or not to be’ during the Royal Variety Performance and his manager popped onto the stage to tell King Charles, ‘that’s by Shakespeare, your highness’.
But the lines have a plot significance: for it is by hearing that a gladiator is reciting them alerts to Lucilla that said gladiator is her son Lucius, grown-up, for she had taught them to him. She sent him off to Numidia as a boy for (a flashback shows us) radically incoherent reasons, and then seems to have forgotten about him. But now she hurries into a room in her palatial villa and looks up to see the words written around the top of the walls in English. I mean, it’s well known that Vergil wrote in English, which is after all God’s language, and afterwards had the verses translated into Latin so that the vulgar Romans could understand them. But still: why is Vergil written on villa walls in English, but Maximus’s tomb has Virtutis et Honoris inscribed upon it? Pick a linguistic lane, movie. (The tomb actually has Virtus et Honoris on it, but let’s not go all romanes eunt domus). I don’t ask for absolute accuracy; this isn’t a historical documentary after all. But a little consistency would be nice. ‘Strength and Honour’ is said a lot, in one of the movie’s many clunking call-backs to the original Gladiator; but characters also say Vae Victis a fair bit, which is a different language (the characters seem to think this phrase means not ‘woe to the vanquished’, but ‘hooray for the victors’, but that’s a small thing).
Acacius and Lucilla have a plan: to fetch Acacius’s army, which he has rather carelessly left in Ostia, on the coast, but which can be summoned in a few days, and use it to overthrow the evil emperors. Why he doesn’t do this straight away—indeed, why he didn’t bring his army with him in the first place—is not explained. But Denzel Washington’s Macrinus has a plan of his own: to elevate himself to ultimate imperial power. To that end, he ingratiates himself with the boy emperors, learns of the plot via Senator Captainus Darlingus, and betrays Acacius and Lucilla. He also learns the true identity of Hanno, and soon enough Acacius is forced to fight Hanno in the arena, whilst a weeping Lucilla is forced to watch. Hanno wants revenge for his wife, whose death, you’ll remember, he blames on Acacius; but, after a rather abbreviated character-journey, he has a change of heart, decides he loves his step-Dad, and lets him live. Then the Praetorian Guard porcupine Acacius with arrows—arrows again! Does nobody in this notionally Roman army know how to throw a pilum?
The mob riot at this, for Acacius was a Roman hero, and Beavus and Buttheadus are momentarily inconvenienced; but it’s a rather desultory riot, quickly put down by the Praetorian Guard. Meanwhile Denzel manipulates the weak-headed Buttheadus (he has, we are told, tertiary syphilis, which seems pretty unlikely in one so young: it can take decades for a syphilitic infection to lead to neurological and brain deterioration) into murdering his brother, making himself sole emperor. Buttheadus makes his pet monkey consul, and makes Washington second consul, and as his first imperial act orders more games. Denzel then intimidates the Senate into giving him command of the army by waving the severed head of Beavus at them.
Washington has fun with his role, which is more than can be said for Mescal. A very handsome man, he has undeniably put in the work, and bulked up impressively, and he throws himself around athletically in the fight-scenes. But for a character who is supposed to embody boiling rage he plays the whole film with a stiff, expressionless, slightly-constipated-looking face, and declaims all his lines in the same steady, bass-baritone posh-English-accent monotone. Nor is Hanno a well-chosen name for this character: when the crowds in the coliseum start chanting it, it sounds like an Irish audience yelling “Ah, no! Ah, no!” over and over. But the fight scenes are certainly kinetic and there are certainly a lot of them.
Emperor Buttheadus has Lucilla brought out into the arena, tied to a pole, to be killed by the Praetorian guard, with only Hanno to defend her. This is actually Denzel’s plan: for he knows the mob love Lucilla, as Marcus Aurelius’s daughter, and they will riot when she is killed, giving him the opportunity to dispose of Buttheadus and become emperor himself. But his plan goes awry: Hanno has freed all the other gladiators, who rush out to hack down the Praetorians. Denzel kills the emperor by sticking a knitting needle in his ear, shoots Lucilla with an arrow, jumps on a conveniently located horse and gallops out of the stadium. Hanno jumps on a second, equally conveniently located horse, and gallops after him. The army—under Denzel’s command, remember—march after them, and the other army, the one Pedro Pascal left sitting around in Ostia, has finally been summoned, and is marching inbound. The two galloping horses reach ‘the Gate of Rome’, an arch in the middle of nowhere beside a river—the Rubicon, I suppose, though it’s not named in the movie—just as the two armies also reach the gate, which suggests they have been marching at galloping-horse speed. Pretty impressive! It’s time for the film’s final fight: between Paul Mescal (age: 27) and Denzel Washington (in his seventieth year). One, the strongest and most ferocious gladiator in Rome, the other an elderly slave-trader and politician. You’d think this would be a one-sided combat, but it goes on and on, and for long stretches it looks like Denzel is winning: the Equalizer bonus, I guess. He throws Hanno/Lucius into the river and repeatedly stabs him with his gladius—but Hanno/Lucius had the foresight to put on his father Maximus’s breastplate before coming out, and it is assuredly not made of cardboard. No matter how hard Denzel strikes, his blade cannot pierce it. Hanno/Lucius hits him with a rock, chops off his left hand and kills him. Then he clambers out of the river makes an awkward speech about ‘the dream that was Rome’ to the two assembled armies, and so disarms the entire situation. The soldiers all sheathe their swords, put away their bows-and-arrows, and th-th-that’s all folks.
The historical record suggest that Macrinus should be emperor now, for a little over a year, but in the movie he is dead and floating down the Rubicon. The implication, I suppose, is that Hanno/Lucius will take the imperial throne, although in fact Macrinus was succeeded by the four year reign of the notoriously debauched Heliogabalus. And actually, and unlike the first Gladiator, Gladiator II is simply uninterested in the political questions it has its characters speechify about.
Gladiator had a heft and coherence this sequel does not, and was saying something about politics. It’s a movie that starts with an actual war, as prelude; and then moves to the main event, a fake war, the simulacrum of war. And it is saying that this second thing, the imitation, actually precedes the first—Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra—since it is by such spectacle and imitation that real political power is achieved. Then again, there is a complication between the ostensible ‘moral’ of the movie—in Lasse Thomassen’s words, ‘the message of Gladiator is clear: dictators are bad, and democracy and the rule of law are the best way to organize a society’—and the film’s actual jouissance, it’s inhabiting the idiom of violence. People didn’t flock to the cinema to see Russell Crowe living peacefully on his Spanish estate for two hours, after all. They want the excess, the violence, the show:
What then is the problem with Gladiator? The problem is that the violence of Maximus — the violence that (re)founds the republic — goes unacknowledged for what it is: founding violence. This violence may appear rational and justified from the retroactive perspective of what it institutes … however at the moment of the institution of the new order it is not clear that the violence is sufficient and necessary. [Lasse Thomassen, ‘Gladiator, Violence, and the Founding of a Republic’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 42:1 (2009), 148]
Gladiator II doesn’t even have this. Hanno/Lucius keeps citing ‘the dream that was Rome’, but when he tries to define what the phrase actually means he is incoherent: something about how people should be safe in the streets, and help should be given to the poor and incomers, but also the whole virtutis et honoris slogan, which gets repeatedly invoked, strength—the strength of a fighter, a soldier—and honour, militarily conceived. How else is power actualised in this movie? The army, is how: do as I say or I’ll order the troops to shoot you with arrows.
There’s the Senate, notionally a body of governance, but who do nothing. When Denzel Washington shows them the head of the emperor he has just murdered, do they [a] arrest him immediately as a murderer and traitor, or [b] applaud, and give him control of the army? Until he has [b] they are free to do [a], but they don’t; on the contrary they give him control of the army. They don’t exist as a political reality in the logic of the film. Indeed, nothing does really. The sense floats about the film that dictators are bad (capricious, violent, syphilitic monsters) and democracy good. Except that all the soap-opera plotting of ‘this stranger is actually your long-lost son!’ pushes the film into a Skywalker-esque narrative where the thing that matters is the magic bloodline: Hanno as Marcus Aurelius’s grandson and Maximus’s son. ‘The Prince of Rome’, he calls himself, a title that actual Romans would have shunned, since that they were not ruled by kings was absolutely central to their sense of civic existence. But the movie sets him up as the hero because of his bloodline.
Not to break a butterfly upon a wheel: Gladiator II is not a film with any load-bearing capacity, where actual ideas about politics, or history, or society is concerned. It is long, action-packed, nonsensical goulash of spectacle and, since Hanno is alive at the end, will presumably lead to a sequel, which presumably will be called GLADIIIATOR. Diminishingus Returnus.