“Gladiator II” in the cinema: fighting monkeys among themselves

Fame and honor. Honor and strength. Men like us – Wicküler beer. Yikes, the last slogan doesn’t fit… Or maybe it does. Because the values ​​that are defended to the death in the new film by the almost 87-year-old “Alien” and “Blade Runner” director Ridley Scott are anachronistic, hollow attitudes that have a lot to do with a certain image of men and little with that have to do with reality.

“Gladiator” with Russel Crowe won five Oscars

Now “Gladiator II” is not set in the present, but 16 years after the end of the first Gladiator monumental work, with which Scott revived the sandal film in 2000 using digital electroshock therapy, and for which there were five awards at the Oscars, including one for Leading actor Russell Crowe as Tribune Maximus.

Meanwhile, in the CGI Rome set around 200 AD, the Kintopp narrator David Scarpa (screenplay) and Scott rule two crazy Caesars at once. The brothers Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) serve the crumbling, but still megalomaniac “eternal empire”, more badly than right in a “dual empire” and beat the time with bread, circuses, wine and the blood of the others dead.

Her long arm, Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), has become a folk hero through his brutal conquests. He was able to capture the gifted and fearless warrior Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal) during the last slave hunt in Numidia, and now wants to train the mourner, whose wife was murdered by Acacius’ soldiers, to become a gladiator.

Fighting in Rome lasting several days

Lucius’ unusual fighting spirit attracts the attention of schemer and gladiator pimp Macrinus (Denzel Washington) – and what happens is as it has to happen: Lucius is forced to prove his skills in a multi-day gladiator competition in the Roman Colosseum.

So everything is as usual in a monumental film: strong men whose only weakness may be their love for a woman (sometimes it’s a lover, sometimes, as in Lucius’ case, an estranged mother). They show off their legs in their Roman skirts and let their biceps bulge out from under their armor. They grit their teeth when a human opponent, a fighting monkey, a rhinoceros or even a shark bites their nose off. Because you have to give it to Scott: With this film he has taken the Colosseum to another, submarine level, at least as a battle stage.

In an expensive scene, the crews of two combat ships assassinate each other in the water-flooded arena to the amusement of the rulers and the bloodthirsty people – and surrounded by predatory fish that immediately tear apart anyone who falls injured from the ship. The sharks literally bite the last one.

Generic violence

The historical accuracy of the many Colosseum scenes is a given – how the huge galleys get into the shallow waterbed, or why the rulers’ statements can be understood purely acoustically in the entire, open arena filled with tens of thousands of screaming people, can be seen from the large format. than-life narrative can be wiped away.

What’s really annoying, on the other hand, is the generic nature of the violent narrative itself: Is the precisely depicted chopping off of body limbs, the piercing of ear canals or the bestial killing of a living person – now using CGI – really so cinematically great that you want to show it and, above all, see it? What is the added value of the age-old man-want-revenge story if the protagonists remain interchangeable?

Because Scott and his author Scarpa hardly give their characters any interesting, motivating character traits, certainly not humor, all the love interests are dead. The only feelings that drive them are revenge, megalomania and male solidarity. You look for weaknesses and ambivalences in vain. The fact that the imperial brothers are also connoted as “feminine”, namely as constantly heavily made-up, irrational little souls covered in jewelry, gives the big ax spectacle the stupid rest.

The pathetic, unimaginative film score does the rest. And the motto “Honor and Strength” mentioned at the beginning, which Lucius, passionately embodied by Irish actor Paul Mescal, actually tells his men at the end, has never achieved anything. Heroizing such a motto instead of exposing it is the film’s great weakness.