How some people see themself.
Holy Gladiators, Batman! As everyone connected to the internet now knows, Gladiator II, the not-awaited sequel to Gladiator, will be riding into your movie theater arena in November. But you don’t have to wait until then to get your fix of “always fighting to the death, although that is a terrible business model to kill off at least 50% of your entertainment assets” battles. Those About to Die has just premiered as a 10-episode series on Peacock (love you, Juno!), and chronicles…something about Ancient Rome, I wasn’t actually able to discern what from the trailer. Because I unwisely decided to have my children stay home with me this summer instead of going to camp, I have been too distracted by the battle royales occurring in my own house to actually watch the show. Like a good academic, that will not stop me from commenting extensively on what little knowledge I have gleaned from reading the abstract / trailer.
In what is quickly becoming a tradition, below I try to anticipate and answer questions that you might have after watching the trailer. Or I just ask questions that I had after watching the trailer.
Q: Who is Ramsay Bolton supposed to be? Is he the villain? He has to be the villain.
Look, I’m sure the actor who played Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones has a name of his own. I’m equally sure that I don’t care what it is. Because Ramsay does not have the godlike physique of Paul Mescal in Gladiator II, and appears from the trailer to be mostly (albeit not always) clothed, I’m going to assume that Ramsay is not the traditional hero of the series. But he may be some sort of scrappy, Littlefinger underdog anti-hero, probably one who stages gladiator fights, because in modern versions of Ancient Rome, the only careers available to anyone are emperor, gladiator, or gladiator manager.
Before any readers get all judgy about my making assumptions based solely on an actor’s appearance, know that the Ancient Greeks perfected the art of judging a book by the cover. They believed firmly that the gods favored the beautiful, with the correlate being that if you were not beautiful, you did not have the gods’ favor. The Romans, in contrast, held to the belief that the gods favored whoever was most likely to stab a fool, with looks being rather low on the scale of honor. I’ve lost my train of thought here, but the point is, we all know how Hollywood works, and we’ll never forgive Ramsay Bolton.
Q: Who is Anthony Hopkins supposed to be, and why is he even in this series?
I can only provide an answer to the first question. Sir Anthony is playing Vespasian, the emperor that won his crown through a series of bloody civil conflicts, now known as the Year of the Four Emperors. He later went on to build the Colosseum as a gift / bribe to the people of Rome. Like Denzel Washington in Gladiator II, I presume he has been brought on to add some Oscar-winning gravitas to the production’s marketing. As to his motivation, I am reminded of Sir Michael Caine’s quote about his similar involvement in Jaws: The Revenge (1987): “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”
Q: Who is that pale, anxious, bug-eyed guy supposed to be? And is that the same actor that played Theon / Reek?
IMDB informs me that that character is supposed to be Vespasian’s son Domitian, while the soldier guy with an awesome beard is Vespasian’s older son, Titus. Like Caracalla and Geta in Gladiator II, both brothers would rule as emperor, although not at the same time. Titus ruled for a brief two years before dying of something or other, followed by Domitian’s rule of an impressive fifteen years. Sadly, also like Gladiator II, it appears that this show emulates the unfortunate Ancient Roman practice of presenting villains as weird, less-than-masculine sociopaths. I don’t make the tropes: I just point them out.
I had to look it up, but unfortunately that is not the actor who played Reek, although that would have been awesome. That actor is named Alfie Allen, and this actor is named JoJo, and Michael Caine’s birth name is Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, so that’s fun.
Q: C’mon. Did they really flood the Colosseum for mock naval battles? Or fight African animals?
Surprisingly, the answer is still yes and yes! Ancient sources are full of references to flooding arenas, including the Colosseum, so that gladiators could re-enact famous naval victories. The same goes for importing hundreds of exotic animals from Africa, just to kill them in publicly staged “hunts.” Did a gladiator ever fight an albino lion? I presume no, but I haven’t done research on the question.
Q: Is there going to be kissing? There better be kissing.
Apparently there is going to be a lot of kissing, in various combinations of sexes and genders. One of the things that modern movies truly, deeply believe about Ancient Rome is that it was the Las Vegas of ancient history, an “anything goes” sex romp where, after their day jobs as gladiator trainers, people did nothing but scheme, fight lions, and move from orgy to orgy. The fact that Ancient Roman sexual mores were quite strict in their own way is one of the best kept secrets of Hollywood. I suppose it’s refreshing that Ramsey Bolton’s character seems motivated by something other than a dead lady love (Money? Revenge? Sansa-sadism?), but I will also point out that the sole female character featured in the trailer is presented as motivated exclusively by a threat to her children, one of two permissible motivations for poorly written female characters (the other being…well, you know).
