THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
To go out Gladiator (2000) resurrected a genre that we no longer thought we really needed: the peplum, a veritable machine for producing spectacle and testosterone – and what if, for Ridley Scott, it was basically the same thing? However, we believed the filmmaker was on the path of self-criticism tailored for the times: we saw him try his hand at a post-#metoo chivalry film (The Last Duel2021), where he liquidated the last remnants of toxic masculinity. Will follow Napoleon (2023), depicted as a big chubby baby, lost in the scenery of his own ambition. The film made much of the sterility of Joséphine de Beauharnais, who fell into disgrace for not being able to give her man offspring. Precisely, it is a matter of victorious and perfectly accomplished filiation which is the heart of Gladiator II : sons exist, and they continue the work of the fathers. We are reassured.
Read the review (2000): Article reserved for our subscribers Media battles in Antiquity
Read later
We are sixteen years after the events of the first part which saw Maximus (Russell Crowe) stabbed to death by Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal), son of Maximus, who was left behind as a child, has become a warrior who lives with his wife in Numidia, an ancient kingdom in North Africa. As the film begins, Roman soldiers, led by General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), invade Numidia. They kill Lucius' wife and take him prisoner. Reduced to slavery, the young man follows in his father's footsteps: his bravery in combat allows him to become a gladiator for the circus games. While his mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), enlightens him about his origins, Lucius confronts Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), bloodthirsty emperor brothers who rule Rome with an iron fist. Against a backdrop of political tensions and internal plots, the warrior makes it his mission to return Rome to its people.
Political negotiations, virilism and hemoglobin, war scenes and bloody fights in the arena. If Gladiator II was an attraction, it would be a time machine. Nothing has changed in the land of firefighter academicism bathed in the formalin of its old values. The peplum, or when the world and the show were simple, clear, decipherable. Women are non-existent. There is one, passive, maternal and crying. On the other hand, men are men, they fight, betray each other, love each other and suffer in an explosion of hemoglobin and deafening noises of swords penetrating flesh, cutting an arm or a throat. To play Lucius, Ridley Scott did not choose Paul Mescal by chance. The young 28-year-old actor, noticed in the indie film After sun and the series Normal Peopleembodies a very contemporary kind of gentle masculinity. He goes through the film like one would enroll in a revitalization course. The film is his Hollywood baptism which transfigures him into a junk superman.
You have 45.43% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
