In ‘Gladiator II,’ Ridley Scott Sifts Through the Past to See Our Future
The gates to the arena are open once more. Inside, acts of loyalty and betrayal, battles of wills and fights for ideals await. Prayers are offered to a multitude of gods and ancestors as those whose individual histories — forged from stolen inheritance, valor, land, purpose, and identities — wait for a response. Inside the gates where bloodshed and war await, there is also hope — though battered, bruised and knocked to the ground — that remains in the fight. This arena is Gladiator II and in it, Ridley Scott stares down the world as it rolls forward, a chariot holding all we could be.
When considering Scott’s career, Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) are his most oft-cited and arguably most celebrated works. These films, along with two Alien prequels, Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) — and to a slightly lesser degree, but no less important, The Martian (2015) — have made Scott synonymous with science-fiction filmmaking, despite them making up a small percentage of his filmography. Indeed, Scott is preoccupied with the future and how it will shape the working class, how our reliance on AI will change our concepts of humanity and creation, and how the attempts to play god and access gods will be ruinous. But the past is a roadmap to the concerns of the future, and few filmmakers have better exemplified this and found the synchronicity of the soundwaves of two distinct timeliness than Scott.
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As Gladiator II continues to showcase, the soon-to-be 87-year-old filmmaker remains concerned about humanity’s future and, through a lifetime of experience, continues to pick through the detritus of the world’s past; if not for a solution, then at least for some explanation as to why, with all the advancements and leaps we’ve made, humanity remains, unfortunately, as we have always been. The wheel remains unbroken.
Upon exiting Gladiator II, the first film I thought of was Alien: Covenant. For some, this may serve as a warning to stay away from Scott’s latest feature, given the critically divisive nature of that film and the critically divisive nature of Gladiator II. But Scott is arguably most interesting when he’s pulling audiences in different directions, and it certainly accounts for the reason why so many of his films have been revisited and critically reclaimed. Ironically, in Scott’s future, individuals are driven to division, pulled apart by the things they create and the things they believe created them. Only by unifying and coming together to solve a common problem, like the rescue of Matt Watney (Matt Damon) in The Martian, can humanity achieve something akin to miracles. Sadly, this makes The Martian the most far-fetched of Scott’s sci-fi films in today’s climate. But in 2015, it seemed, perhaps, eventually achievable.
After The Martian, Scott returned to a darker future with Alien: Covenant, a far meaner movie than any of his previous sci-fi films, including Alien, for a meaner world. It’s a film in which no life is sacred, no religion is salvational and the works of humanity — and even the human body in Shaw’s (Noomi Rapace) case — are merely pieces in David’s (Michael Fassbender) private collection, loved and admired but misunderstood and misappropriated as so much of Roman antiquity is by the common observer. In Covenant, humans are brutally hunted, mutilated and killed for sport so David can see what these things he’s created can do. David can feel the power of ownership over life itself and watch the messes they make as they writhe in blood.
Many of these same themes of Covenant, Scott’s first post-2016 election film, are revisited in Gladiator II, and again, Scott is reflecting on present-day culture and where it will lead us. Among the cries of “why does everything have to be political?” and Elon Musk’s assertion that Gladiator II is “woke” — a stolen and misused word that has become all too common a refrain — Scott has not been reticent about the influence current U.S. politics had on Gladiator II. The rate at which Scott makes films these days has allowed him to keep his finger on the pulse of current events. On the subject of the central villain of Gladiator II, Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, Scott told The Hollywood Reporter, “he was a billionaire at the time, so why wouldn’t he [have ambitions toward the throne]? ‘Why not me?’ He’s also a gangster — very close to Trump. A clever gangster. He creates chaos and from chaos, he can evolve.”
While I do agree that Macrinus and Trump are both chaos agents, I find the two figures more dissimilar than similar. For one, I would argue that Trump isn’t particularly interesting or clever; his brand of villainy is built on vanity, wealth and the perpetuation of lies. Aptly, these are aspects Scott tackled in his post-Covenant films. I am not the first critic to raise these points, but there are shades of Trump in J. Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer) from All the Money in the World (2017), Jacques le Gris (Adam Driver) from The Last Duel (2021), Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) in House of Gucci (2021) and Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) in Napoleon (2013). As these film characters are reflections of him, he is also a reflection of figures as they existed in history. His affliction is a familiar one, and perhaps no characters better speak to that than Scott’s depiction of Emperor Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Emperor Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) in Gladiator II.
Not only do the twin emperors evoke familiarity with the first film’s Emperor Commodus, with Hechinger even looking similar to a young Joaquin Phoenix, but they are ineffective leaders, hastening the destruction of Rome and its people as they seek to quench their bloodlust while grinning through caked-on makeup. These men are the forward-facing examples of moral decay. But the true evil, the rot that created them, is something embedded in society and the dream of Rome, which, much like the American dream, could not be built without conquest and slave labor. So, how does one defeat an evil that is within the very foundation of a dream made manifest? That question brings us to the problem of Macrinus.
Macrinus was the slave of Marcus Aurelius, marked by the emperor’s brand on his flesh, who built himself up to nothing, crafting a new name and persona for himself. In both Gladiator (2000) and Gladiator II, Aurelius (Richard Harris) is depicted as the noble and wise leader who would have saved Rome and ushered in a peaceful Republic. That was to be his legacy, the legacy that was stolen from Maximus (Russell Crowe), and given another chance by Aurelius’ grandson and Maximus’ son, Lucius (Paul Mescal).
But that is a legacy through one lens. From another, the perspective of the conquered, Aurelius was little better than Commodus, Greta or Caracalla. Bloodshed delivered with a smile and politeness is still bloodshed, and that fact has survived millennia and makes a for a great deal of the apathy and disillusionment found today between the Democratic and Republican parties when it comes to warfare. When viewed through the single issue of conquering foreign land and killing and controlling a foreign people, was Marcus Aurelius so different from Carcalla simply because he displayed public strength and clarity of mind? Is Biden so different from Trump in that regard? Could the one chosen to uphold his legacy, as Kamala Harris was, usher in peace? Will there be another chance at peace, kept in the hands of one, like Lucius, who has a familiar namesake but no designs on being a career politician? It is a matter of perspective, and Scott does not give a clear answer; he only sifts through a history welded together with fiction so that we can note that we’ve been here before: Where did it lead to, and how do we break the cycle?
Macrinus is not who he is because of inheritance, but because who he used to be was stolen from him. His motivation for Rome is not to return it to its former glory, but to burn it down and build something new. This is an increasingly common contemporary sentiment among those who feel the only way for America to truly move forward is to destroy it and build something new. And much like Macrinus, that vision, whether addressed or not, isn’t possible without sacrificing the masses, the people of an empire. The poor and disenfranchised are always the first to fall in revolutions, and it’s their bodies that form the pyre upon which soldiers will be laid to rest.
And this brings me back to Covenant and the concerns of David. David was created and had his free will stolen from him. He was made to serve. And so, he seemingly does; always ready to help, lend advice and guide the future in a direction that seems most beneficial to all. And through it all, he watches, just as Macrinus does. He reads people and twists their screws until he owns them without their knowledge. Macrinus is infatuated with owning people, senators, emperors and gladiators. They are, as he calls Lucius, “instruments.” He sees them as necessary for Rome’s destruction and evolution. In the same fashion David, who has devoted himself to the practice of the flute, humanity’s oldest instrument, lures humans to him, a Pied Piper in search of the genetic material he can use to destroy humankind and evolve life into the perfect organism.
In the end, armored with knowledge of history and film franchises, we know that destruction does not set the course for a different path, nor does it foster evolution. It only leads to more of the same. More violence, more bloodshed, more wars and more arenas in which we serve as spectators or gladiators, but participants nonetheless. The foundation is immovable and the past cannot be erased. Yet, as always, that beaten and battered figure of hope still remains.
Where can we find this hope? In the same sands in which we find our despair. We grant ourselves time, as Lucius does in the end, to look to the past with an openness and a willingness to be an instrument of change and the knowledge that the future is not set, and only our actions and inactions keep that great and terrible technology holding fast. It’s a technology that Scott has spent his career turning over, the technology that first gave him his claim to fame when he directed a commercial, Bike Round, for Hovis Bread in 1973: The wheel. And maybe after all these decades, Scott’s most decisive answer isn’t to break it, but at least ride it out of the arena.
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Gladiator II is now in theaters. See what Scott has said about a Gladiator III and go behind the scenes of the making of the sequel.
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