Here’s a funny question: Who is Gladiator II about? The obvious answer is Lucius Verus Aurelius (Paul Mescal), the prodigal child of Maximus (Russell Crowe, only present in archival footage) and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role). The film sets Lucius on a journey that echoes Maximus’s story in the first movie: from a warrior adopted by the people of a North African province to a gladiatorial combatant turned instrument of liberation. Yet that doesn’t quite feel true once you’ve watched the film—or rather, once you’ve watched the film, that perspective feels fairly dissatisfying.
It’s easy to lay this at the feet of Mescal. As many have noted, the glimpses of Crowe we get from the previous film do the actor no favors in living up to that standard. But whether Mescal has the arena-rock juice necessary to rival Maximus is only part of the problem. The larger share of the blame might lie with the script, which is withholding to a fault and reverential to the first film in a way that is genuinely disconcerting for Ridley Scott, a man whose filmography isn’t beholden to anything—not his previous films (as his Alien prequels demonstrate) and definitely not something so trivial as the historical record.
But what if you ran at Gladiator II another way? What if you rejected the popular understanding of the word protagonist—i.e., the main character of the movie—in favor of the more literal definition of character who drives the action? Maybe then you’d consider Gladiator II to be about Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, a far more compelling figure (and the film’s one gloriously indulgent performance) whose actions propel nearly the entire plot.
That might suit the film better, but it then leaves the opposite end of the scale wanting: There is no sufficient antagonist in this reading. The mad brother-emperors Geta and Caracella (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) are barely present in Gladiator II. They are avatars of entropy, there to personify the decline of Rome’s glory. Maybe then it’s best to leave Macrinus in the antagonist role (we’re not going to Cobra Kai this one, sorry).
This is what makes Gladiator II kind of unsatisfying to watch, and also fascinating to think about: It’s not really about any one person. It’s about Rome. An idea of Rome. Or, as many characters say until they’re blue in the face: A dream.
Ridley Scott has spent much of his career contemplating empires, and that’s not just due to his penchant for historical epics. Even outside of those, his films—particularly his latter-day works—focus on the efforts of individuals to establish the machinery of empire to dominate others, or the leveraging of that machinery for personal gain. The grand plans of the Weyland-Yutani corporation, the foundation of the House of Gucci, the loathsome hoarding of Jean Paul Getty: These are all stories that marvel at the terrible power of capitalist domination, and the rot it fosters.
Over the last decade, Scott has been uniquely interested in that rot in particular. While never a cheery guy to begin with, his films have taken a pretty pessimistic turn of late. Gladiator II is his most optimistic work since 2015’s The Martian, breaking a hell of a mean streak that included Alien: Covenant (perhaps the most unabashedly misanthropic sci-fi film from a major studio in recent memory), All the Money in the World (a grim portrait of one of the world’s first billionaires), House of Gucci (which charts the hollowing out of the iconic family name), and Napoleon (the disastrous international fallout caused by one man’s insecurities).
At first, Gladiator II appears to continue this trend. Throughout the film, Scott turns his camera toward the condition of Rome in a way the first movie never really did. In one scene, a rhinoceros head adorns a platter the way a boar’s would at the center of a lavish party. The roaring masses seated in the Colosseum threaten to (and eventually do) turn deadly; crucial to the film’s finale is a subplot involving Lucilla and her husband, General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), organizing a revolt on behalf of the people. Rome is bleeding in the streets, and the main question of Gladiator II is whether anyone can apply pressure to the wound.
Compare that to the first Gladiator, which was full of people who loved to talk about Rome, but only as a backdrop for the mythic rise-and-fall narrative of a single guy. Gladiator II, on the other hand, is expressly about Rome. The introductory text laments the fading memory of Marcus Aurelius’s “Dream of Rome,” which is then invoked by countless others throughout the film—except, ironically, by Lucius.
Lucius spends the movie having mantles foisted upon him; he is not merely the inheritor of Maximus’s populist valor, but the rightful emperor of Rome, a vessel for Aurelius’s dream. This leaves the man with no room to operate in a film that is ostensibly about him. The bulk of his story is rather indifferent to the politicking around him. He just wants revenge against Acacius, who led the assault against Numidia in the film’s prologue that resulted in his wife’s death. He stumbles his way into becoming a figurehead of peace, the result of a secondary revenge quest, this time against Macrinus, the audience’s actual guide through Rome’s fall (and its architect).
It’s not just Denzel Washington’s tremendous charisma that makes Macrinus such a compelling villain, it’s that he sees the dream as a sham. Macrinus sees the rot for what it is, a civilization that built its prosperity on the suffering of others and fosters violent spectacle to keep the populace’s malcontent at bay. As he says when he’s finally ready to reveal his grand Machiavellian plan: He’s just giving Rome a push—the fall was happening whether he came along or not. Ridley Scott, the bard of societal collapse, seems ready to launch into a familiar tune. And then he doesn’t.
The ending of Gladiator II is abrupt and unsatisfying. It is, strangely, where Ridley Scott’s eye for poetic imagery and staggering scale seems to squint shut, and the audience is left contemplating the Dream of Rome via a soggy fistfight between a guy who never really believed in it and another guy who wanted to tear it all down. This is not how you end the sort of grand cinematic power ballads Ridley Scott is known for. There is no haunting Lisa Gerrard vocal track, no speech that will be quoted by TV mobsters.
Even with Scott’s storied disregard for history, it’s hard to believe even he would ask audiences to forget that Rome does fall in the end. Sure, if we were to briefly consult the historical record, that fall is still over two hundred years away—but the end is always on the mind of anyone who brings up Rome. It’s why anyone brings the place up to begin with. And yet, Gladiator II asks the audience to believe that the collapse can be staved off thanks to the grit of a heroic man who doesn’t have the good sense to stay down when he’s beat.
Like many blockbuster movies, Gladiator II arrives at its most compelling and unsettling ideas seemingly by accident. Lucius’s victory and ideological pivot—and presumed offscreen crowning as emperor of Rome—is unsatisfying if, again, you see Gladiator II as a film about one man. But maybe Gladiator II’s most resonant ideas lie on the margins, with those who refused to give up hope that they could claw their nation back from those who had hijacked it for their selfish ends.
A version of Gladiator II more expressly about this might focus squarely on the efforts of Acacius and Lucilla. Midway through the movie, the couple are revealed to have conspired with some civic-minded senators to stage a military coup and restore power to the public. And while Gladiator II’s marketing advertises the crux of the film as a Colosseum showdown between Lucius and Acacius, the movie itself feels constructed as if we’re meant to see the two men as parts of a whole, each a slight refraction on what Maximus represented to the people he inspired. If there’s an extended three- to four-hour cut of this movie (and knowing Ridley Scott, that’s more likely than not), it’s quite possible that this is more than just a hypothetical.
Alas, Lucius’s victory, and the more equitable Rome it presumably brings, ultimately comes from the unseen labor of countless people who did believe in a democratic ideal, and did not think it beyond their grasp; who overcame the cynicism and power the despots and their cronies had attained. This work is hard to dramatize: it is a diffuse and long, incremental grind. Gladiator II doesn’t have the language to convey this, even with a director as unflinching and well-resourced as Scott. But if the film lingers in your mind, maybe those unseen masses are why. Maybe Gladiator II is about them.
