LE MONDE’S OPINION – WHY NOT
When it came out, Gladiator (2000) resurrected a genre we did not really think we needed anymore: the epic, a real machine for producing spectacle and testosterone – and what if, for Ridley Scott, it was basically the same thing? Yet we thought the filmmaker was on the road to self-criticism tailored to the times. We saw him try his hand at a post-#MeToo chivalry film (The Last Duel2021), in which he liquidated the last remnants of toxic masculinity. It was followed by Napoleon (2023), depicted as a big, chubby baby, lost in the scenery of his own ambition. The film made much of Josephine de Beauharnais’ sterility, who fell from grace for failing to produce offspring for her man. Gladiator II is all about victorious, perfectly accomplished filiation: Sons exist and they carry on the work of their fathers. We can rest assured.
And we are 16 years after the events of the first part, which saw Maximus (Russell Crowe) stabbed to death by the emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal), Maximus’s son who was left behind as a child, has become a warrior living with his wife in Numidia, an ancient kingdom in North Africa. At the start of the film, 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 battle enables him to become a gladiator for the circus games. While his mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), sheds light on 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 conspiracies, the warrior sets out on a mission to return Rome to its people.
Political dealings, virilism and hemoglobin, war scenes and bloody battles in the arena: If Gladiator II were an attraction, it would be a time machine. Nothing has changed in the land of pompous academicism bathed in the formaldehyde of its old values, or the peplum – when the world and the spectacle were simple, clean and decipherable. Women are non-existent. They are passive, maternal and weeping. Opposite them, the men are men. They are fighting, betraying, loving and suffering in a deflagration of hemoglobin and the deafening sound of swords penetrating flesh, cutting an arm or a throat. Ridley Scott did not choose Mescal to play Lucius by chance. The 28-year-old actor, spotted in the indie flick After sun and the series Normal Peopleembodies a very contemporary kind of soft masculinity. He goes through the film like one would sign up for a revitalization course. This project is his Hollywood baptism, transforming him into a shoddy superman.
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