The older Ridley Scott gets, the less he cares about habits and expectations. There are only stories, and the thrills they elicit in his audience. How lucky we are to have that bravura. Gladiator, released in 2000 and currently at the bow of a miniature revival of the classical epic, was a relatively sombre and serious work. It threw grit in history’s eye.
Gladiator II is equal in scale and spectacle, and weighted with metaphor, but it’s also shot through with the kind of wry, absurdist slant that’s come to dominate Scott’s work of the last decade and a half, from Napoleon to Alien: Covenant. At times, Gladiator II is pure camp. To insist that it shouldn’t be is to hold on too tightly to the dour expectations of the 21st-century blockbuster.
