Is this movie accurate history? No. But it’s good history.

Let’s get this out of the way right away: No, the Romans never introduced sharks to the Colosseum.

Without giving away too much of the action in Ridley Scott’s new epic Gladiator IIthe sequel to the beloved first episode that made Russell Crowe an icon back in the year 2000, one long action sequence actually revolves around flooding the Coliseum. Long shots focus on the unlucky ones who end up in the water, only to be torn apart by aquatic predators, much to the delight of the bloodthirsty crowd. It’s not subtle or historically accurate in the pure sense, and it’s not meant to be. That said, it’s pretty cool, especially on an IMAX screen.

During its centuries of use as a venue for some of the most extreme violence ever dreamed up by mankind, the Colosseum has never (as far as we know) played host to sharks. The Romans actually flooded the Colosseum to host a miniature naval battle. Elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, tigers, bears, wolves, Christians, convicted criminals and of course gladiators all bled and died to the delight of the crowd; no sharks though.

Still, it doesn’t really matter, just as it doesn’t matter that the Romans didn’t have newspapers or cafesbecause Gladiator II– like most of Ridley Scott’s epic historical films – does not attempt to be a faithful recreation of the era, in this case of Rome in the late second century AD. To judge his films by that standard is to fundamentally miss what Scott is trying to achieve the kind of film he envisions for years or decades, spends huge amounts of money to produce, and then directs. He creates epics with messages so straightforward they’re impossible to miss (masculine strength is generally good, intolerance of any kind is bad, and so on) and fills them with some of the most incredible action sequences ever shown on the screen. The historical setting is more of a backdrop than something baked into the project’s DNA.

Ridley Scott, as he will happily tell you, is not a historian: “Get a life,” he said, when confronted with professional criticism of his prior efforts, the rather vilified Napoleon (2023). It doesn’t help when he makes a film that accurately captures true events and period-accurate attitudes, as he did in 2021’s The final duel, very few people wanted to see.

The first one Gladiatordespite its opulent surroundings and beloved reputation, had almost nothing to do with Rome as it actually existed in the time of Marcus Aurelius and his villainous son, Commodus. It was a sword-and-sandals-costume epic, one that dressed up a fantastic plot and modern values ​​in ancient trappings. The film invented characters that never existed, including Russell Crowe’s general-turned-gladiator, Maximus. The real Commodus wasn’t a good guy, but he didn’t murder his father or die in the Colosseum; his personal trainer, a wrestler named Narcissus, strangled him in his bedchamber 15 years into his reign. We could go on and on, but the bottom line is that the film offers a purely fictional account of the events surrounding and following the death of Marcus Aurelius.

At a more fundamental level, Gladiator‘s values ​​were fundamentally contemporary. It had a lot to say about “freedom,” but its “freedom” was distinctly late 20th century.^th-century vintage. There is no indication that the historical Marcus Aurelius had any interest in returning Rome to a republican form of government, as the character in the film did, or that such an effort would have had any support among the empire’s elite or its population. Using the “Senate” as a stand-in for the Roman people, as the story does in Gladiatordistorts the character of the institution beyond the point of recognition; its members at any period, republican or imperial, were blue-blooded oligarchs in the purest sense, not representatives of the popular will. As convincing as Gladiator was and will be, it was convincing like a movienot because of what it had to say about ancient Rome. Rome was a dream—a good dream, Scott’s characters said, over and over—and if only they could remove the corruption and the tyrannical leeches, all would be well again.

That’s what does Gladiator II surprisingly interesting. In its basic format and approach, it shares much with its predecessor: arresting action, broadly drawn but generally effective characters, and themes that are very much intended to resonate in the present. But at the heart of the film is an essential argument about what Rome actually was and whether it was a good thing. Who benefits from the empire’s brutality, and who pays the price in blood? Is it possible to make something positive out of a city built on the bones of the conquered? Was Rome even worth saving, either from its worst leaders or from itself? The original Gladiator pretty much took all of this for granted, even as it made its protagonist an enslaved man fighting for his life and revenge in front of a roaring crowd. It occasionally paid lip service to the deeper price the Empire exacts from its perpetrators and victims, but not with much conviction.

Gladiator II‘s subversion of the first film’s core message is built into its structure from the very beginning, quite literally in the title sequence. We find out that Maximus’ efforts were for naught. He gave his life for a cause that went nowhere in the 16 years that separated the events of the first Gladiator from the opening of the second. Instead of nameless, if somewhat noble, Germanic barbarians, whose motivations are largely unexplored, the Romans have Numidian opponents in the stunning battle sequence at the film’s opening are clearly justified in their opposition to Rome. Our protagonist, Paul Mescal’s Hanno/Lucius, fights not for Rome, but against it. Pedro Pascal’s general Marcus Acacius, who we first see inflict a crushing defeat on Hanno and Numidia, is completely ambivalent about his role in the conquest, tired of war, not because he wants to see his family again (as Maximus did), but because he questions the whole enterprise.

As for the value of Marcus Aurelius’ dream of Rome, one character—Denzel Washington’s deliciously villainous Macrinus—openly scoffs at the concept. Rome is blood and power, nothing more. The city’s streets are filled with poor people, while its highest elite, made up of unworthy dilettantes, party boys and gamblers, force gladiators to fight to the death at an impossibly lavish dinner party. The pro-Roman argument comes into play via a former gladiator turned doctor (Ravi, played by Alexander Karim) from somewhere in the Far East who was enslaved but won his freedom in the arena and married a woman from Britain . Only in Rome, says the former slave, could he have built that life. It is not an abstract concept of political freedom; it is the stuff of life itself, albeit at the expense of all that the former gladiator’s life might have been if he had never been enslaved. Even at the end, after the bad guys are defeated, we are left asking who was right.

It’s a far richer animation concept than one that takes Rome’s glory and justice for granted, as in the original Gladiator. The tension between ideology and reality, the fictions that allow spectators to go to a gigantic Colosseum and watch humans and animals tear each other apart for their entertainment, runs throughout the film. The first one Gladiator recognized the power of the Roman mob, even as it saw their taste for blood as an exotic facet of a bygone era; the other asks why the thirst for violence as a spectacle existed, and for whose benefit.

Because this is a Ridley Scott epic, Gladiator II does not ask these questions subtly, but it does so in ways that indicate a more than passing familiarity with what people living in the Roman world actually thought. Macrinus quotes the orator Cicero’s famous line that the former slaves sought not to demolish slavery as a system, but to have slaves of their own. Another echoes the historian Tacitus’s equally familiar statement that the Romans brought not civilization but destruction: “They make a desert and call it peace,” said Tacitus, an insightful critique of imperial conquest for its own sake. The Romans were not ignorant, accepting without question what they saw around them, but human beings of flesh and blood, perfectly capable of recognizing the contradictions and cruelties of the world they inhabited.

In that sense, despite the sharks and all its other historical inaccuracies, Gladiator II has something really valuable to say about the period in which it takes place. Empires are not automatically good just because they cover a large portion of territory on a map, or because they construct lasting monuments like the Coliseum, or because former slaves can make new lives for themselves. If thousands must die on battlefields to satisfy the ambitions of the powerful, and thousands more must die in a great temple dedicated to violence to remind ordinary people of their place in the social order and prevent them from rebelling, that is something worth saving ?

Gladiator II does not live and breathe in a real historical world in the way that some of Scott’s other films do: The supremely underviewed Last duel is perhaps the best portrayal of medieval knights as ignorant, violent, honor-obsessed fools ever put to the screen. The duelistshis 1977 production about two Napoleonic French cavalry officers who fight each other many times over decades similarly attacks a rich vein of past reality. Gladiator II does not reach those heights.

It doesn’t try to. To judge it by that standard, or one where a pedantic version of historical accuracy takes precedence over the essence of a time and place, misses the point. Gladiator II captures the atmosphere of ancient Rome quite well. It asks intriguing questions about power and its costs and the legacies we inherit from the past that force us to deal with the brutal reality of the Roman Empire as it actually functioned. That is a far more valuable contribution than getting sequences of events nearly 2,000 years ago precisely correct.

When TikTok and Instagram turn men thinking about the Roman Empire into a meme, the historian’s job is not to list the names of consuls and emperors or the years in which the battles took place; it is to use it as a chance to see Rome as a mirror for the present. People who lived long ago operated on principles that were not our own, but the choices they made and the worlds they built show us something essential about what humanity can be. If we do not thoughtfully engage with them, we do them and ourselves a disservice.

Whatever its shortcomings as a film or as a description of the past, Gladiator II accomplishes that task. If you’re aware that, despite the abundant misery, Denzel Washington had the time of his life as a scenery-chewing villain, and of course the sharks, you’ll leave the film with a far deeper grasp on Rome than it actually was. . People really lived and died on the sands of the Colosseum. Some benefited from it. Other ranks. While some will certainly hate it for this, Gladiator II is surprisingly ambivalent about the Roman Empire. So are most of the people who spend their lives researching and writing about Rome. It’s not because they or the film lack perspective, but because knowing Rome—really knowing it—requires us to grapple with both spilled blood and beautiful marble.