The Ancient Roman version of the Mandalorian, shown here doing swords wrong.
It’s finally here! Twenty-four years after absolutely no one watched Gladiator and thought “Now that is a movie that needs a sequel!,” the trailer for Gladiator II has dropped, and it is…something. Maybe all the things? For those of you who weren’t part of the movie-going public in the year 2000, the original Gladiator slammed into theaters like a Roman legion through disorganized barbarian lines. Decades of silly sword-and-sandal epics had taught people to associate Ancient Rome with chaste Christian romances, over-dramatic acting, and very short (very short!) tunics. Then Russel Crowe’s Maximus growled “At my signal, unleash hell,” and audiences realized they weren’t in Kansas’ version of Rome anymore.
With this legacy in mind, what can we expect from Gladiator II? I really have no idea, but 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 Paul Mescal supposed to be? And why is he consistently shirtless? Did Romans not know about sleeves?
Paul Mescal plays Lucius, a character who appears as a child in Gladiator. Lucius is the grandson of Emperor Marcus Aurelius by his daughter Lucilla and his adoptive brother, Lucius Verus. If you’re sensing a sound pattern here, that is because Romans were not very creative in their naming conventions. Anyway, when Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, helps himself to the throne by smothering his father in a overly violent bear hug (at least in the movie), Lucius becomes heir to the throne. He then spends the rest of the movie running around being adorably oblivious to the political machinations around him. This of course raises the question of why Lucius II in the current trailer snarls that he never knew a father nor a mother. Perhaps this is setting up the trope, so beloved of Disney and Batman, that to be a hero you have to have lost at least one parent, preferably both? Or maybe he has amnesia, so he can discover he’s the one true heir? Maybe this will be a Harry Potter cross-over!
Romans did know about sleeves, although they generally didn’t trust them. The only men who wore sleeves outside of a military context were foreigners or poor people, and it’s not clear which demographic was worse, at least from an elite Roman’s perspective. Although Romans did not run around shirtless, ancient gladiators did maintain a bulky, muscular physique, mostly so that when they were wounded in combat it would be just a flesh wound, with the important organs protected.
Q: Who is Denzel Washington supposed to be and why is he acting like a drunken Joker in The Dark Knight?
I can only provide a partial answer to the first question. Denzel Washington’s character is presumably the equivalent of the former-gladiator-turned-promoter Prospero in Gladiator, who trains the former-general-turned-gladiator Maximus to fight in the arena. The character of Prospero was often shown drinking, and the actor who played him, Oliver Reed, notoriously and literally drank himself to death during filming that movie. So that might be Mr. Washington’s inspiration? Or maybe Mr. Washington is trying to demonstrate that, even for a Oscar winner, “madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push!”
Q: Who are those cackling, screaming young men supposed to be? And why are they wearing baby powder on their face?
IMDB informs me that they are supposed to be Caracalla and Geta, brothers who briefly ruled as emperors together before Caracalla straight up murdered his brother. I would presume they are wearing white face powder to emulate the unfortunate Ancient Roman practices of (a) wearing lead paste as facial makeup, and (b) presenting villains as androgynous or feminized lunatics. This is a good time to mention that neither smearing lead on your face, nor smearing your phobias on your characters should be emulated in the modern era.
Q: C’mon. Did they really flood the Colosseum for mock naval battles? Or fight African animals?
Surprisingly, the answer is 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 ride a rhinoceros that he somehow has trained to charge at a target? Probably not.
Q: Is there going to be kissing? There better be kissing.
Sigh, yes, apparently there is going to be kissing. There will be a love interest, and she will be an Amazon, and nevertheless she will die, and that will motivate the male protagonist to go kick Roman butt, because why else would a hero character ever do anything without a woman in his life being fridged first?
