"Gladiator II": Bloodlines and Bloodshed in A Corrupt Empire
Anyone who’s seen Ridley Scott at work quickly realizes just how he’s churned out 17 films between 2000’s “Gladiator” and this weekend’s release of “Gladiator II”.
His work ethic is storied. One wintry day in the late winter of 2005, I hustled out of a rain squall and into the doors of De Lane Lea, the noted production house in London’s Dean Street film ghetto. Scott, ever alert to the room, was twenty feet away. He’d just shucked his rain jacket, and mine was dripping like an “Alien” special effect as I crossed the floor to renew acquaintances. His editing team may have been aghast at the walking mop I was, but he smiled. From a week on the Moroccan set of 2002’s “Black Hawk Down,” I had seen him transform mess into cinema magic. As set designer Arthur Max told the New Yorker last November, the director’s aesthetic preferences include “Smoke,…heavy aging. Filth. Dirt. Textures of all kinds…”
All that and more Scott had shown in abundance shooting and as I arrived at his editing suite in 2005, dubbing his sprawling “Kingdom of Heaven,” in which he ran Orlando Bloom through his paces as a Crusader—or more crucially, an enraged exile—in the heat, dust and bloodshed of the 12th Century Holy Land.
He was brimming with the same zeal I’d seen three years before: “I love it, he’d said, “Because I was involved 22 hours a day, flat out.. you have to live, and enjoy what I call positive stress.” In a dubbing suite he pulled up footage from early in the film, where Bloom and and several holy warrior led by Liam Neeson, as his father, are set upon by brigands. "It's the first big punch-up," he said, calm but eager.
Still, there was an edge showing, due to a worrisome factor that his bankrolling studio, Twentieth Century Fox, had introduced. He’d shown them his ideal cut, at 194 minutes, with Bloom’s Balian character up against opposing warrior Saladin. The story is a complex saga of war and family imbued with a search for spiritual resolve. But Fox wanted him to trim it to under 2 1/2 hours.
Years later, Scott would confess that there are commercial and other disadvantages to such lengthiness—he calls it “bum ache”--but this day he was readyoing pushback to the studio's urge to cut, and I found him immediately asking me to help think of great films that exceeded such bounds. Of course, the inspirational directing icon David Lean had released the likeliest comparable, “Lawrence of Arabia,” at 3:36, and “Ben Hur” and “Cleopatra” stood as genre classics. “Apocalypse Now” and “Godfather II” were indisputable, and “Titanic” and “Schindler’s List” also heavyweights.
Scott didn’t win that fight, and the downsized effort fell short of epic scale, reviews and box office. (A proper outcome was achieved with the Director’s cut of 2019, with key motivation and thematic heft gained by re-inserting 45 more minutes.)
Scott’s history is about to greatly update with this weekend's opening date, as we greet the long-awaited sequel effort “Gladiator II”. Few could have missed the blockbuster promotional campaign, as it infiltrated social media and launched a nationwide slew of billboards showing star Paul Mescal ten times life-size and ready for battle. The outdoor onslaught and reams of press coverage seemed almost determined to rival the reported $250 million production cost.
The buzz had begun some months ago with the key cast announcements, notably the presence of rising master thespian Mescal as Lucius, who fled Rome for a North African colony but returns to stride into the arena—a bit bow-legged, to be frank –as the newly brawny Irish answer to sturdy Aussie Russell Crowe’s Oscar-winning turn as Maximus, the hero who personified the original title. Connie Nielsen has come back as Lucilla, no longer the almost covert lover to Maximus but still mother to the long-vanished Lucius. She’s shaded with added gravitas and dark regrets from the passage of years, but still the evanescent beauty that bewitched her dementedly louche brother Commodus (in one of Joaquin Phoenix’s best-ever performances.).
As the Paramount release opens wide across domestic territory to predictions of between 60 and 75 million dollars up against weekend competition “Wicked,”, it has already scooped up more than $87 million—a record global opening for Scott—worldwide.
The earlier film’s success provided both an opportunity and an obstacle to a follow-up.
The tangled birthright story of the hero is just one of the complexities that both inspired and bedeviled the composing of a new story. How might Scott equip the grown Lucius, a humble farmer in North Africa's Numidia province, with a back story that could resonate in the brutal oligarchy that is Rome two-plus decades later? From the reboot’s opening passage, an assault by Roman warships on the fortressed, rebellious colony, we learn that Lucius is a command-level warrior and strategist. Amidst the bloody sword fighting (and spear-thrusting, and flaming fireballs, and boiling oil), we see that Lucius is a warrior unmatched except for, possibly, the attacking Roman general who just happens to be the battle-worthy Acacius—none other than Pedro Pascal. Not only is Pascal a fount of rough-hewn masculinity and virtue (as he proved in one of the wildest fight sequences in all in “Game of Thrones”0, he’s also a canny strategist of regime change.
At a screening last week of the film in Hollywood's cavernous TLC Chinese movie house for an ample cross-section of 900 industry guild members, you could feel the big room’s attentiveness fluctuate during such civic handwringing, but at reliable frequency we heard the roar of the Colosseum, with its floor bloodied by much-flogged special effects if slightly haywire battles including sharks, a rhino, and some truly cray-cray, mutated baboons. The clanging edged weapons made the crowd noise sound like box-office cha-ching.
I had the welcome chance to do a Q&A last week at IMAX's Playa Vista theater with seasoned Ridley cinematographer John Mathieson, who in tandem with Scott can shoot action as well (and cogently, which isn’t always guaranteed in lesser fare) as anyone ever has.
Scott was sometimes shooting with as many as 12 cameras, all but eliminating the need for multiple time-sucking coverage set-ups, and brought the film in under budget and a bit early, in 51 days.
Brimming with clanging swordplay and nasty assassination as it is, the scenario draws great strength from Mescal’s performance as man filled with useful rage. It’s an aptly controlled turn that also reveals real depths that Mescal finds, and he shows it to us with his immensely watchable eyes. It’s s not for nothing that Scott admired him as a tormentedly depressive girl dad in “Aftersun,” but found him still better in the series “Normal People.” He recruited him just before theater-trained Mescal stepped into “A Streetcar Named Desire” on the London stage; time and again, dramatic range is vividly delivered. “He brings a wincing, grimacing base note of despair to his righteous rage,” wrote the Guardian’s reviewer.
And that’s a fortunate thing, because he comes to convincingly cultivate that rage—the quiet fury of an abandoned son—as he’s mentored by Macrinus in the person of none other than Denzel Washington, who’s a study in how to swan about in flowing robes while still conveying a history as a formidable gladiator himself. It would be foolish for any popcorn-strewn filmgoer not to dive into his tee-heeing and offbeat theatrical choices, as he toys with anachronistic tics and his own subsumed wrath until we simply submit.
“This city is diseased,” Lucius observes, en route to demonstrating the bar fighting rule that it’s the quiet ones you better watch out for. For the more palpably corrupt elements, the fil shows not only its conniving if weak-kneed senators—anyone feeling a reference to our current political system?—but summons up the dreadful governmental farce we’ll soon be watching. When one of the corrupt twin emperors—effeminacy has often been a prelude to harsh retribution in Scott’s world—takes shaky command we get the film’s funniest scene. By way of serving the agenda Macrinus has put him up to, twin Caracalla introduces as his trusted and vital consul his tiny, chittering monkey Dundas, clad in a frilly white dress. The senators don’t balk. It may have been wrong for me to mutter, “Little Marco?” at the big screening at the Chinese Theater, but the couple next to me laughed.
I’d like to think the man I visited that rainy day in London would approve.
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