I just did not like this movie. It was almost, but not quite, fun watching how bad it was and thinking of all the reasons it was bad.
• What the heck is Paul Mescal’s character’s emotional throughline? It’s totally inconsistent. We know his wife for 90 seconds and then she dies, and that’s supposed to be his big motivation, he’s crushed at losing her—but he gets over wanting to kill Pedro Pascal in retaliation the second Pedro calls him by his original name and he realizes that Pedro isn’t loyal to the emperors (presumably—I don’t even know why he changed his mind so quickly)? Pedro literally called to his men to shoot Paul Mescal’s wife, you don’t get over that in two seconds even if it was a “misunderstanding.” And I get running away to be safe, but Paul Mescal wasn’t just distancing himself from Rome, he was actively leading the fight against them, talks about how Rome is diseased, and then by the end is totally happy to fight for Rome’s “strength and honor”? What? How much did you actually care about your wife, sir?
• The original Gladiator was actually good, right? This movie has me doubting that. But it was good. It was a movie that acknowledged that, even going back thousands of years, most of the bad things that happen to us have complicated, structural, political reasons behind them, and it was a fantasy of being so special and powerful and skilled that you can fight those structural reasons with your fists and fix things.
• But by taking place 19 years later and having basically the exact same problem (comically evil emperors acting with impunity and a lack of accountability), this story ruins the original Gladiator by showing that all of Russell Crowe’s efforts didn’t actually fix anything.
• Joaquin Phoenix’s performance was great because you saw him become/be revealed to be crazy and evil gradually over time. The emperors’ schtick would have been interesting if it was the last 5-10 minutes of the movie, their final depravity, but they started out just SO comically evil.
• And how did they get into power? For a movie about how power is available in Rome for those willing to fight to get it and keep it, the formally most powerful characters are a pair of dweebs incapable of fighting for anything. Completely unaddressed who they are, how they got into power, why anyone is loyal to them. Are Rome’s institutions somehow strong enough that it’s really hard to marshal anyone to stand up to these dweebs and their supposedly legitimate claim to power, but simultaneously not strong enough to place any institutional checks or guardrails on their out of pocket behavior? That would be a really interesting and timely thing to specifically address in the film, rather than just being like, “Despite Russell Crowe’s heroic efforts, things have gotten bad again in the exact same way they were before and no we’re not going to explain how that happened.”
• This movie felt ahistorical to me. The characters felt like they shared the values of modern westerners and didn’t have the specific values that Romans would actually have. Paul Mescal talks about the Roman Dream, a thing that I am not confident actually existed or was talked about at the time? Rome in the imperial period was ABOUT POWER. It was about bread and circuses, and spreading glory, and feeding the populace and honoring the gods through conquest and killing as many people and taking as many slaves as you had to in order to do it. At one point Paul Mescal says something about “if a man isn’t free, then what is Rome for?”, a just BAFFLING thing to say about a city where, again, a massive quantity of residents at any given time were slaves.
• (Minor note on the ahistoricity but, I know it’s an English language film, but can the writing/engravings be in Latin? So jarring to see them be in English, it just looks wrong. I did see some graffiti which said “IRRUMABO EMPERORES”, if I remember correctly, and look, I love a good “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo” Catullus moment but why go Latin for the irrumabo but not follow it with imperatores? Latin may be a dead language but it’s more studied and understood than many living languages, people will notice these things and it will take them/me out of the moment! Also it was far from the worst in terms of Hollywood movies but it did have some set pieces that were already ruins and it’s like—no, the gate to the city would be well maintained, it wouldn’t already be crumbling stones with big gaps.)
• I didn’t like how this movie presented the violence/fight scenes. First of all, it wanted Paul Mescal to seem a little bit pacifist by being hesitant to fight at first. At one point he calls another gladiator brother while trying to convince him they don’t have to fight to the death for the entertainment of wealthy elites, but he quickly gets over it! Which I do get, he’s fighting for his life, fine, but why include that gesture to pacifism at all? Just to make his later violence a little more sympathetic? It felt like a gesture to the first movie where Russell Crowe didn’t fight at first when taken to the gladiator training place thing and was underestimated for that reason, but this is a different movie! You don’t need to match all the most popular/affecting beats of the first movie one-for-one, in fact, it would be far better if you liberated yourself from the first movie and embraced making something different!
• The fight scenes were also just baffling to me. I can’t tell if Paul Mescal is actually supposed to be good at fighting. Every time he fights it seems like he’s barely winning, even when he’s fighting against people who, to our knowledge, have far less experience. It just seems like the movie thinks a really close fight is the most visually interesting, so that’s what they gave us every time, but there are interesting ways to choreograph fight scenes that show that someone is an exceptional fighter without it being boring and the fights always being over in two seconds. ALSO, I know this is just a movie thing but holy Jesus the amount of blows that Paul and other characters take that should absolutely floor them and they get back up—his surrogate father gets a compound fracture and with a basic splint and NO ANTIBIOTICS somehow survives the long journey across the Mediterranean to Rome only to be murdered by a baboon? Characters can be a little tougher in movies to heighten the action without going so far as to have Paul Mescal get punched in the face repeatedly with a metal spiked gauntlet and not having any scratches to show for it.
• Another thing is we never see Paul Mescal training for anything. It’s kind of implied that he must be a good fighter, and a good military leader, and a charismatic person, but except for the last, it’s all kind of told, not shown. Maybe it’s just that I like a good training montage, but it really helps me feel for a character when I see them trying, and Paul just shows up good at everything he needs to be good at. He even gets the loyalty of enough of his fellow gladiators just through laughing along when they make fun at him one time to stage a rebellion against the praetorian guard? At the very least you could give us a scene of him building his connections, earning that loyalty.
• That kind of ties into the fact that Paul Mescal(‘s character) is actually shown to be bad at everything. He never actually saves anyone he wants to save. His wife, surrogate father, Pedro Pascal (when he apparently immediately decides he doesn’t want him dead because he knows his name), his mom—they all die so quickly without Paul’s attempts to save them even being a factor, really. That could be interesting if it was an emotional focus of the film—”I’m so good at fighting, I’ve been in a hundred deadly situations and I’m still standing here, but it isn’t good for anything because I can never save the people I care about.” That would be an interesting emotional journey for him, but it doesn’t come across that way, it just comes across as “Well, they need to die now for the story, so.” The only thing he can save, in the end, is Rome which, given his backstory of Rome killing his wife, dad, mom, surrogate father, and Pedro Pascal, and proving once before that even when a heroic gladiator ousts the corrupt emperor it can and will go bad again, WHY DOES HE WANT TO SAVE ROME?
• This is a really minor thing but there’s a lack of precision about what words mean. At one point Paul Mescal says, “I’m not a general, but we’re all soldiers,” to a bunch of gladiators, and that’s just patently untrue? He was shown at the beginning to be commanding the forces at the town he was defending, if he didn’t literally have the title of general he was at least a military leader. And gladiators aren’t soldiers! Gladiators were professional athletes, good at fighting on their own and making a show of it. Roman soldiers were a very different thing, disciplined and making smart use of military engineering and fighting in precise, overwhelming formations. Words mean things! It would be really interesting to actually contrast what it means to be a soldier versus a gladiator, maybe have Paul Mescal be bad at being a gladiator at first, an underdog, not good at fighting one on one or not good at making a show of it and winning the people over to his side and he has to learn, and then at the end once he’s won over his battalion of gladiators everyone’s shocked at how good he is at strategizing and his followers are like, “Oh, I see, you’re more used to operating at this level.” I would find that more interesting, at least! But the movie seems to operate on one continuum which is good-at-fighting to not-good-at-fighting, and there’s one kind of fighting that everyone does, and it’s just boring.
• I think my problems with this movie may ultimately come down to politics. It’s about a collapsing empire. We know the Roman empire isn’t around anymore, we know they’re ultimately fighting a losing battle, with the perspective of history we can all probably acknowledge that no empire lasts forever. Paul Mescal has seen perfectly how even the heroic efforts of capable people can’t change the empire’s corrupting nature. But it seems like the story wants us to buy into the idea that this time will be different, he’s special and will be able to change things.
• “Well Emily if you’re so smart, how would you fix the movie?” I’m so glad you asked, the answer is right there, it’s the person I haven’t mentioned yet and who should actually be the main character—Denzel Washington.
• It BAFFLES ME that Denzel Washington plays a fun, over-the-top camp, former slave of Emperor Marcus Aurelius who fights and connives and schemes until he has all the power of an Emperor and plans to use it to bring the empire to the ground and HE IS NOT THE MAIN CHARACTER??? How is Denzel Washington not the point of view character, the character we’re supposed to be rooting for? WHAT??? How is it specifically stated on screen that yes the “good” “benevolent” Emperor Marcus Aurelius owned slaves and yet the happy ending is Aurelius’ grandson getting power and committing to returning things to how they were in his granddad’s day?
• You could barely change this movie and have it be great just by making Denzel Washington’s character the main character. He starts from the bottom and works his way up and he does all manner of terrible things to get there, but he isn’t going to do terrible things to stay there. He’s seen what Rome is, and what power is, and how power inevitably corrupts, and he wants it all to come to an end. Denzel Washington uses Paul Mescal and his belief that he can fix Rome once he’s in charge of it as a tool, but the whole time he knows Paul Mescal is just being naive and neither of them could fix it by being in charge, you have to break the cycle.
• Because Gladiator is a power fantasy about solving big structural problems with your fists and your sword, and the big structural problem here is that Rome is a voracious empire and it constantly needs more land and more food and more conquered peoples to serve in its army and be slaves in its fields and bathhouses and fine homes, and the way you fix that system isn’t by putting a morally good person in charge of it because by definition any person in charge of that system, any person who wants to be in charge of that system, isn’t morally good. Denzel Washington’s character knows that the way you fix that system is by breaking it, even if breaking it breaks you in the process.
• So it can either end with Denzel Washington dying, as he did in the movie, but with more emphasis on how he believed in his goal and he knows that the world will get there someday, he’s one of a line of people who will try and try and try before finally Rome’s insidious power is broken, and maybe Paul Mescal lives but he understands Denzel Washington’s concerns and having lost everyone he cares about and having his image of Rome forever tainted he’s burdened with doing the one thing he never thought he’d have to do, given how dangerous his life has been, living a long, healthy life using politics and bureaucracy rather than his fists to solve problems and make himself and his family line worthy of the power they have (maybe you even have him acknowledge to Denzel Washington before he dies that he’s right, but you have him say something about, “It’s too soon, Rome is still too much, the sudden instability would be worse than the slow decline.”).
• Or you have Denzel Washington win and become emperor and march into the Senate and declare slavery is illegal and reparations for all and we’re going to cede back these colonized territories and everything devolves into chaos and he knows that these things can’t happen peacefully within the Imperial system because the Imperial system depends on its slaves and colonies but the point isn’t to actually have them happen, the point is that they should happen so he’s going to try to make them happen and happily watch the empire buckle and fall apart from its fundamental incompatibility with justice. And we end on a shot zooming closer and closer into Denzel’s face as he smiles with satisfaction, as the senators’ debate gets more and more chaotic.
• Seriously the more I think about it the crazier it is to me that they made a movie about a former slave cleverly amassing power to conquer and eventually topple the state that enslaved him AND YOU MADE HIM THE BAD GUY? YOU MADE DJANGO UNCHAINED SET IN ROME BUT DJANGO’S THE VILLAIN? WHAT??????????
• I’m a little over villains being queer coded but Denzel Washington is so fun in this movie I’ll give it a pass.
• I want to acknowledge that I’ve advocated for a vision of this movie with a very specific political point of view and I think that the fact that the movie is a hair away from actually having a coherent message is part of what makes it so infuriatingly, bafflingly terrible, but ultimately even if I supported the “loyalty to institutions over all, even if those institutions support slavery and colonization, what exists and has existed must always exist” point of view that this movie seems to be furthering, it would still be a bad movie because, again, Paul Mescal’s character’s emotional journey makes no sense. Why do you need to give him a dead wife. Just to mirror the first movie? Why would it not be enough to just have him sneak back into Rome as a gladiator and have to try to work his way up until he can get an audience with his mother and plot overthrowing the emperors? Why give him a backstory that, rather than explaining his motivation for the rest of the film, actively doesn’t make sense with what he does at the end of the film?
As many have said, the sharks were cool. And many of the performances were actually great! They were just great in a terribly written film.
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