When Ridley Scott Makes a Good History Movie, We Should Give Him His Flowers
Let’s get this out of the way immediately: No, the Romans never introduced sharks to the Colosseum.
Without giving away too much of the plot of Ridley Scott’s new epic Gladiator II, the sequel to the beloved first installment that made Russell Crowe an icon back in the year 2000, one long action sequence does indeed revolve around flooding the Colosseum. Long shots focus on those unfortunates who end up in the water, only to be torn into chunks 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. With that said, it is pretty cool, especially on an IMAX screen.
Over its centuries of use as a venue for some of the most extreme violence ever dreamt by humanity, the Colosseum never (so far as we know) played host to sharks. The Romans did actually flood the Colosseum to host a miniature naval battle. Elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, tigers, bears, wolves, Christians, condemned criminals, and of course gladiators all bled and died for the enjoyment of the crowd; no sharks, though.
Still, it doesn’t really matter, just like it doesn’t matter that the Romans did not have newspapers or cafés, because Gladiator II—like most of Ridley Scott’s epic historical films—isn’t trying to be a faithful re-creation of the era, in this case of Rome at the end of the second century A.D. To judge his movies by that standard is to fundamentally miss what Scott is trying to accomplish, the kind of movie he imagines for years or decades, spends immense amounts of money to produce, and then directs. He makes epics with messages so straightforward that they’re impossible to miss (masculine strength is generally good, intolerance of all kinds is bad, and so on) and fills them with some of the most incredible action sequences ever put on screen. The historical setting is more backdrop than something baked into the DNA of the project.
Ridley Scott, as he will happily tell you, isn’t a historian: “Get a life,” he said, when confronted by professional critiques of his preceding effort, the rather maligned Napoleon (2023). It doesn’t help that when he does make a movie that captures true events and period-accurate attitudes correctly, as he did in 2021’s The Last Duel, very few people bothered to watch.
The first Gladiator, despite its sumptuous setting 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 fantastical plot and modern values in ancient trappings. The film invented characters who never existed, including Russell Crowe’s general-turned-gladiator, Maximus. The real-life 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 gist is that the movie offers a purely invented story of the events surrounding and following the death of Marcus Aurelius.
On a more basic level, Gladiator’s values were fundamentally contemporary. It had a great deal to say about “freedom,” but its “freedom” was of a distinctly late-20th-century vintage. There’s nothing to suggest that the historical Marcus Aurelius had any interest in returning Rome to a republican form of government, as the character in the movie did, or that such an effort would have had any support among the empire’s elite or its populace. Using “the Senate” as a stand-in for the Roman people, as the story does in Gladiator, distorts the nature of the institution past the point of recognition; its members in any period, republican or imperial, were blue-blooded oligarchs in the purest sense, not representatives of the popular will. As compelling as Gladiator was and remains, it was compelling as a movie, not 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 strip away the corruption and tyrannical leeches, it would be good once more.
This is what makes 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 largely intended to resonate in the present. But at the core of the movie is a substantive argument about what Rome actually was, and whether that was a good thing. Who benefits from the brutality of empire, 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 largely took all this for granted, even as it made its protagonist an enslaved man fighting for his life and revenge in front of a baying crowd. It paid occasional lip service to the deeper price that empire extracts 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 Maximus’s efforts were all for naught. He gave his life for a cause that went nowhere in the 16 years separating the events of the first Gladiator from the opening of the second. Rather than nameless if somewhat noble Germanic barbarians whose motivations are largely unexplored, the Romans’ Numidian opponents in the astounding battle sequence at the movie’s start are plainly justified in their resistance to Rome. Our main character, Paul Mescal’s Hanno/Lucius, fights not for Rome but against it. Pedro Pascal’s General Marcus Acacius, who we first see dealing Hanno and Numidia a crushing defeat, is entirely ambivalent about his role in conquest, tired of war, not because he wants to see his family again (as Maximus did) but because he questions the entire enterprise.
As for the value of Marcus Aurelius’ dream of Rome, one character—Denzel Washington’s deliciously villainous Macrinus—openly mocks the concept. Rome is blood and power, nothing more. The city’s streets are filled with impoverished people while its highest elite, made up of unworthy dilettantes, party boys, and gamblers, forces 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 distant east, who was enslaved but won his freedom in the arena and married a woman from Britain. Only in Rome, the former slave says, could he have built that life. That’s not an abstract concept of political freedom; it’s the very stuff of life, albeit at the cost of everything that former gladiator’s life could have been, had he never been enslaved. Even at the end, after the bad guys are vanquished, we’re left to ask who was right.
That is a far richer animating concept than one that sees the glory and righteousness of Rome as givens, as in the original Gladiator. The tension between ideology and reality, the fictions that make it possible for spectators to go to a gigantic Colosseum and watch people and animals tear one another apart for their entertainment, runs through the entire movie. The first Gladiator recognized the power of the Roman mob, even as it saw their taste for blood as an exotic facet of a past time; the second asks why that thirst for violence as spectacle existed, and for whose benefit.
Because this is a Ridley Scott epic, Gladiator II doesn’t ask those 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 formerly enslaved sought not to tear down slavery as a system, but to have slaves of their own. Another echoes the historian Tacitus’ equally well-known statement that the Romans brought not civilization but devastation: “They make a desert and call it peace,” Tacitus said, a perceptive critique of imperial conquest for its own sake. The Romans weren’t ignoramuses who unquestioningly accepted what they saw around them, but flesh-and-blood people who were 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 truly valuable to say about the period in which it’s set. Empires aren’t automatically good just because they cover a great deal of territory on a map, or because they construct enduring monuments like the Colosseum, or because formerly enslaved people can make new lives for themselves. If thousands have to die on battlefields to sate the ambitions of the powerful, and thousands more have to die in a vast temple dedicated to violence to remind the common people of their place in the social order and keep them from rebelling, is that something worth saving?
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Gladiator II doesn’t live and breathe 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 on screen. The Duellists, his 1977 production about two Napoleonic French cavalry officers who fight each other many times over the course of decades, similarly taps a rich vein of past reality. Gladiator II doesn’t reach those heights.
It’s not trying to. Judging it according to that standard, or one in which a pedantic version of historical accuracy takes precedence over the essence of a time and place, misses the point. Gladiator II captures the vibes 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 isn’t to list off the names of consuls and emperors or the years in which battles took place; it’s to use that as a chance to see Rome as a mirror for the present. People who lived long ago operated according to 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 don’t engage thoughtfully with them, we’re doing them and us a disservice.
Whatever its flaws as a film or as a description of the past, Gladiator II accomplishes that task. If you’re paying attention, despite the copious gore, Denzel Washington having the time of his life as a scenery-chewing villain, and of course the sharks, you’ll leave the movie with a far deeper grasp of Rome as it actually was. People really did live and die on the sands of the Colosseum. Some benefited from that. Others suffered. While some will surely 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. That’s not because they, or the movie, lack a perspective, but because knowing Rome—really knowing it—requires us to grapple with both spilt blood and gorgeous marble.
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