When Gladiator arrived in theaters in May of 2000, there was about to be a changing of the guard in U.S. politics. That is to say, being whiplashed from the Clinton 90s years and into the much more fraught Bush II 00s years. In a similar—though much more extreme pattern—Gladiator II arrives at yet another “tipping point” moment in U.S. politics when there is about to be a changing of the guard. And it’s a guard that wants to remain very, very old. And very, very “masculine.” Or rather, what amounts to the antiquated perspective on what constitutes masculinity: brute force. “Strength and honor,” as it is repeated often throughout Gladiator II. Granted, nary a “soul” in the forthcoming Trump administration possesses either of those traits (let alone a soul).
What they do possess, however, are the characteristics that appeal to a certain kind of “neglected” male in modern society. The male who yearns for the “glory days” of patriarchy, when “men could be men” without having to answer to some “bullshit” moralizing from the media peanut gallery. And some of those key characteristics include, but are not limited to, a penchant for war, hoarding wealth for the sake of gaining more power and subjugating women and so-called minorities (as branded by white folk). These traits, in fact, were integral to the pinnacle of the patriarchal society that was the Roman Empire. A patriarchal pinnacle that Trump and his acolytes are keen to reinstate, albeit with far less intellect or concern for art and philosophy involved. And being that, just last year, a “micro-trend” was to ask men how often they thought about the Roman Empire (the answers generally amounting to: “quite a lot”), perhaps there was more foreshadowing than naively optimistic people thought about the result of the 2024 election. Which has served, like the 2000 election, as yet another telling confluence with the release of a Gladiator movie (on a side note, the third installment has already been greenlit).
While Gladiator II’s lead actors, Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal, might be slightly more, shall we say, twee than Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix, they still embody characters designed to exude the “alpha male” qualities that have, once again, fallen back into fashion after a brief period that can be described, for lack of a better term, as “emo-friendly.” But all that “softboy supremacy” has gone out the window now (even if softboys were also just fuckboys in a thinly veiled disguise). Granted, Lucius a.k.a. Hanno (Mescal) radiates plenty of “sensitive” qualities, not least of which are his raging mood swings (as his slave owner tells him, he oozes rage “like milk out of a whore’s tit”…um, okay). This, contrary to popular belief, being a symptom of hyper-sensitivity in males. And it’s a hyper-sensitivity that flares up in Hanno after he witnesses the death of his wife, Arishat (Yuval Gonen), as the Roman army—under the leadership of Acacius (Pascal)—takes over Numidia, a North African territory dominated and colonized by the Romans in real life.
As he goes through a familiar “almost in the afterlife” scene as Maximus (Crowe) in Gladiator, he, too, isn’t yet taken by Death. Apparently still having more business left to finish before he can join his wife in the presumed hereafter. And, needless to say, that business pertains to returning to Rome—whether he wanted to or not. Considering he’s taken there as a prisoner (again, à la Maximus), he wasn’t exactly “willing” to go back. Much the same as Simba in The Lion King (and there is a lot of that vibe in this particular script from David Scarpa), who has to be coerced into returning to the kingdom he was told to abandon in order to reclaim what is his as the rightful heir to the throne.
For Hanno, however, there is absolutely no desire (or “sense of duty”) to take over Rome—only a desire to seek vengeance against the entire city in the form of one man: Acacius. Not just because Hanno deems him to be the party solely responsible for the death of his wife, but because he sees him as a symbol of all that is wrong with Rome in its role as Domineering Colonizer, perennially ignoring the will of the people (which is precisely what Marcus Aurelius [Richard Harris] in Gladiator didn’t want to happen after his death). What Hanno doesn’t realize is that even Acacius is disgusted with the actions he’s forced to carry out in the name of co-emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). Because, this being a big Hollywood movie, of course the viewer is told to believe that Acacius has a conscience about it.
But Geta and Caracalla more than make up for Acacius’ sense of morality by being two completely soulless “entities” (sort of like Trump and Elon Musk—except younger and more pleasant to look at). It is Geta, more than Caracalla, who takes a shine to Hanno when he sees him fight one of Senator Thraex’s (Tim McInnerny’s) best slaves in their court. Especially after Hanno recites lines from Virgil’s Aeneid, giving himself away yet again as being no ordinary “slave find” by the likes of Macrinus (Denzel Washington, who always “plays” an asshole very well). Those lines being, “The gates of hell are open night and day;/Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:/But to return, and view the cheerful skies,/In this the task and mighty labor lies.”
Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, among the only main cast members from Gladiator to return) recognizes those lines instantly when she overhears Geta repeating them at the Colosseum as he and his brother watch Hanno battle it out with much interest. Hearing that Hanno was the one who said those lines before, Lucilla gets the chilling suspicion that this is her long-lost son, returned to his native land. Because, yes, Gladiator II takes some big storytelling liberties with regard to making the audience need to suspend a lot of disbelief about what would have happened after the death of Commodius (Phoenix). It also seems to exist largely as a means to take advantage of the opportunity to include certain fight scene ideas that there weren’t time for in the original one (plus, the special effects at that time were perhaps not advanced enough to believably execute such ideas). Among such scenes are Hanno’s feral fight with a baboon and the Colosseum being filled with water and sharks as Hanno and his fellow gladiators are put on a rival ship against the Praetorians.
Despite the “leveling up” fight scenes and glaring attempts at “honoring the original,” Gladiator II suffers from the same issue that most current sequels, reboots and remakes do: it lacks the heart and human touch of its predecessor. As for its parallel to what appealed to men in the 2024 U.S. election, well, it’s pretty bad if one can say that Bush II also had more of a heart and human touch than what a certain Republican “sequel” is offering.
