Gladiator II: the perfect film for America’s declining empire

Is Ridley Scott a good filmmaker? It’s surprisingly hard to say, just like it’s hard to say even after seeing it Gladiator IIregardless of whether it’s a good movie or not. Still the original Gladiator was a perfect movie, in the same way a trashy three-minute pop song can be perfect. A creation of the studio system working at full speed within the constraints of genre, a product designed to appeal to as many people as possible nevertheless achieved a kind of immortality: the purest, almost Platonic form of Hollywood cinema.

The sequel, despite some spectacular violence, not so much. But the differences between the two films, despite their nearly identical plot lines, highlight how the culture has changed in the intervening quarter century.

A titan of industry rather than an auteur, the fascination with Scott is how he absorbs and radiates the wider energies of the culture around him. If Gladiator reinvented the sword-and-sandal epic at the precise moment of America’s imperial zenith, the 2001s Black Hawk Downthrough the eerie prescience of its timing, captured the mood of the global war on terror that was both its outcome and downfall. His more or less explicit War on Terror epic, The kingdom of heavenstill has the power to frustrate and delight in equal measure, to reframe the Crusades through the lens of Boomer liberalism and soak up the worldview of the then-fashionable New Atheism. In 2021 is under-monitored The final duelScott had steered his craft against the #MeToo wave: the excitement of the current zeitgeist enters the director’s mind as raw material and is ground out, processed and packaged as a glossy spectacle.