Q: Was the cannibal sorry about what he did to the missionary's wife?
The richest, cleverest and most powerful man in the world has declared that Gladiator II is Woke. It may be that his reasoning will some day be vouchsafed to us mortals. To my untrained eyes, the movie was full of machismo, honour, violence and pectoral muscles: not things especially associated with the radical left. There were no girly sub-plots about feelings. Unusually for a mainstream movie, there was no love-interest at all. Our heterosexual hero's heterosexual wife is killed in the first ten minutes. The only speaking role assigned to a woman is the hero's mother, who also happens to be the hero's antagonist's wife (who apparently had a clandestine affair with the hero's father in a precious movie). It doesn't so much fail the Bechdel test as get the Bechdel test handed back with "0/10 See Me" written on the bottom in red ink. It celebrates courage and leadership and sticking to your principles and extreme bloodthirsty violence. Granted, the film ends with the hero (having slaughtered the Machiavellian bad guy) mediating a piece between the Roman state and the armed insurrectionists. "Let no more blood be spilled in the name of tyranny" he explains, and goes on to suggest that Rome might become "a city for the many and a refuge for those in need." Maybe the richest, cleverest and most powerful man in the world thinks that there not nearly enough blood has been spilled, that tyranny is a jolly good thing, and what we really want are elitists cities that kick out those in need? Or could it, perchance, be that Denzil Washington's show-stealing turn as Macrinus, the slave owner and and wily political opportunist, is the thing which makes Gladiator 2 "woke"? The anti-woke go on and on and on about diversity hires, critical race theory and box-ticking exercises, but with two Oscars, three Golden Globes and two Emmys, I think it is highly probably that Denzil got cast in the role because he is a very good actor. Does "woke" (and indeed "woke death of art") simply mean "some films sometimes have dark skinned actors in major roles"?
The non-lunatic section of the electorate seems to feel that the major flaw with Gladiator II is that it is altogether too similar to Gladiator I. Some have gone so far as to say that it is a rerun of the first story rather than a continuation of it. (Can it really be true that an earlier script would have shown the original Maximus rising from the dead and having a fight with Jesus?) This puts me at an advantage since I never saw the first film. But I didn't feel that I was missing a great deal. Characters in these kinds of stories very often have famous fathers, and they very often put on their father's armour and take up their father's shields in the final reel. Characters referring to event which took place in a movie I hadn't seen didn't offend me at all.
All this leaves me with a distinct lack of things to say. Gladiator 2 is in the category of films which Just Work, the kind of film which They Don't Make Any More. It is full of impressive scenic shots of the the eternal city populated by a cast of thousands. I understand they actually built a life sized replica of the Colosseum. I assume that the sharks and the armies and the baboon-hyena hybrids are done with computers, but (unlike, say, Wicked), one never feels that chunks of the movie only exist to show of the capabilities of the software package.
It establishes early on what the story is going to be about, and pretty much rattles on until that story comes to a suitable break point. Bastard prince Lucius (Paul Mescal) is hiding out in some foreign land but Rome comes and burns his city, kills his wife, and sells him into slavery. So he vows vengeance against the Roman general, as you would. But it turns out that General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) is quite a decent chap, and himself plotting to overthrow Emperors Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) who twins, incredibly camp and completely mad. But Acacius is married to Lucius's mother (Connie Nielson, the only survivor from the original movie.)
Cue arena fights with rhinoceroses, sharks and the pretorium guard; cue bare flesh and decapitations; cue scenes in which doctors say "this will hurt" while sewing up open wounds; cue political intrigue and double-crossing; cue Caracalla making his pet monkey a senator. At least no-one is sick during a feast. The characters don't speak Latin or Modern English, but that dialogue called "Hollywood Epic". ("This galley is sending us to something I cannot do. I am ready to be taken to another place in a while longer.") They stay firmly within that register: no one says "okay" or "I was so, like, fie on thee."
Clearly, from an historical point of view, it is pillar-to-pillar tosh; but one is rarely struck by anachronisms. Maybe Matt Lucas's colosseum master of ceremonies is a little bit too close to the a modern sports announcer. It is very clear that at some point Lucius will have to fight Acacius (shades of Sorhab and Rustum!) and that then settle accounts with Macrinus (the slave owner) but it is by no means obvious who is going to be alive when the credits role and who is going to end up in a pool of stage blood.
The review writers union legally require me to end this review by saying that I was indeed not not entertained. I am not going to think about this film once a day for the rest of my life which is apparently what all real men do. (I think of Star Wars every day, but that's because I have the 1977 fan-club poster hanging in my hallway.) But I am certainly going to watch the original, finally. It is hard to believe that the same director can turn out Napoleon one year and Gladiator II the next.
So far as I can see the proposition "Gladiator II is woke" can only be derived from the premise "Everything is woke" -- which I understand is what the supreme ruler of the universe does in fact believe. It seems, at any rate, to have made a great deal of money, and the aforementioned Wicked seems to have rather emphatically not gone broke at all.
A: No, he was glad he ate her.