“This city is diseased.”
Paul Mescal's Lucius delivers this line off-hand as he’s brought back to Rome in chains, a scene reminiscent of one in Gladiator, in which the heroic Maximus (Russel Crowe) is similarly enslaved. What Ridley Scott depicted in the 2000 original echoes in 2024 with Gladiator II, but the dialogue in question is a coda to not only what differentiates both movies, but to why Scott's pseudo-remake might be necessary in the first place. It's a darker, more vicious film for a darker, more vicious time, a relevancy that has only grown in recent days. The sequel arrives more than two decades after the relative romanticism of the Clintonian late '90s — the first Gladiator pre-dates September 11th and the Forever Wars — and hits theaters in an era rife with wannabe dictators and rightwing strongmen the world over, from Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Xi Jinping in China, to the recently re-elected Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the USA. The tyrannical villain Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), Lucius' maternal uncle, may have been defeated on-screen in Gladiator, but it hardly feels that way in real life. And so, the series can't move on.
