Let the games begin – Gladiator II is on the way

The Paris Olympics may begin in less than two weeks’ time, but the games Rakewell is really looking to are Roman. The trailer for Ridley Scott’s stolidly titled sequel to Gladiator (2000) has dropped and your correspondent couldn’t be more excited. While there’s no arguing with Paul Mescal’s muscles, as an enthusiast for ancient Rome on film, Rakewell would like to draw your attention to a few other points of interest in the trailer. First up: welcome back, ‘No Church in the Wild’! This banger by Jay-Z and Kanye West, with Frank Ocean and The Dream, also featured on the trailer for The Great Gatsby (2013), directed by Baz Luhrmann. Even though that film was produced by Jay-Z himself, the trailer had Leonardo Di Caprio talking over it and gave way to other, inferior songs. However, it now has the Gladiator 2 promo to itself, which seems fitting for any song whose writers had the forethought to write a lyric referring to blood staining the Colosseum doors.

Secondly: has anyone looked better in a toga than Denzel Washington does? It’s hard to make out if Washington’s gladiator-owning Macrinus will end up on the side of the masses, but he seems to be having a ball in what is usually a plum role for actors. See: Peter Ustinov’s Oscar-winning turn as a slave-owner with a heart in Kubrick’s Spartacus (1961) or Oliver Reed’s performance – some of it from beyond the grave – as the trainer who eventually does the right thing by Russell Crowe. Gladiatorial training looks rather harsher in Gladiator 2 than it did in Kubrick’s film, or even Scott’s earlier effort. When Ustinov’s Lentulus Batiatus first addresses his charges, for example, he makes ‘gladiatorial school’ sound like a spa: ‘The gladiator’s like a stallion, must be pampered. You will be oiled, bathed, shaved, massaged…’ When Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus starts his actual training, he and his fellow gladiators bear a marked resemblance to the buff and bryl-creamed Olympic team surging around Jane Russell in the cruise-ship swimming pool in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Viewed more than 60 years later, it’s not entirely menacing…

Back to those biceps, though. Anyone who’s been near the internet recently can see that being swole in a film in 2024 is a very serious business. If the muscles are more believable than ever, the scenery, however, is much faker. Gladiator’s use of CGI was pioneering at the time – and we’re sure Gladiator 2 is state of the art. But we can’t help wishing that film-making were still about building massive sets and employing thousands of extras – a truly heroic form of mimesis to challenge and, at times, comment on the viewer’s sense of reality. Gladiator 2 is filmed, like its predecessor, in Malta and, er, Surrey – but will there be any moves as audacious as, say, making Laurence Olivier’s Crassus live in the real Hearst Castle in California, formerly home to the model for Citizen Kane? We look forward to November to find out.