This is a guest post from B.B. Inglis. He is a pastor and writer from Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, and is in the midst of completing an MFA from New Saint Andrews College in Idaho. He also writes semi-regularly for a column at Dominion Press.
The greatest evil is to betray one’s country . . . the second greatest evil is to make a sequel where none was required.
- Dante Alighieri, probably
I don’t go to the theatre often. It’s loud, underdressed (at least the people are), and expensive. Recently, after already paying $13 for a small envelope of popcorn, I was asked if I wanted to pay another $2 for real butter. “How is butter not included?” I asked the popcorn clerk. “There’s butter flavoring in the dispensers if you’d like,” she said. I looked over and noticed two steel vats that looked like those used for transporting liquid strychnine.
I paid the $2.
All of this to say that when I DO go to the theatre, I at least want to enjoy the movie. By the end of Gladiator II, however, even the faint hopes I’d been nursing had been flung from the Tarpeian Rock like a bunch of common criminals. And I had a popcorn kernel lodged next to my third molar.
There are many ways in which Gladiator the Twoth is an inferior movie in itself — I could go on about the uninspired speeches, the uninspired casting, and the demotivational storyline — the fact that it follows the towering spectacle of its predecessor makes it something almost twice dead. Gladiator II is a microcosm of the blight that has come to define nearly the entire film industry — not just in terms of its moral bankruptcy (which is evident) but also in terms of its existential bankruptcy (which isn’t as evident). Most modern films not only fail to answer man’s deepest questions; they are positively phobic of even asking them.
Fifty years ago, jazz critic and art historian Hans Rookmaaker could say the following:
Many of the films people see today are good entertainment and often have somewhat of a moral point. Yet they are bad. For they depict as true a world which is limited and superficial, one without God, without the deeper questions in man’s heart, without real matters of life and death, for life and death are reduced to sentiment, or adventures, or crime or violence or cruelty, without any sort of judgement expressed.
This is a good place to start. Most modern films are “bad” not because they aren’t entertaining but because they stop at the level of entertainment. The Marvel franchise is the peak illustration of this, with Dr. Strange’s Multiverse of Madness arguably occupying the peak of peaks.
In it, viewers are assaulted with a shameless barrage of acid-induced CGI: Colors! Explosions! Action! At no point is there any attempt at a cohesive storyline. At no point is there any attempt at genuine human experience. Despite the screenwriter's attempts to convince us of an endlessly complex multiverse, everything ends up feeling “limited and superficial.” We feel as if we’ve just endured a two-hour conversation of nothing but small talk. We watch the end credits roll and find ourselves asking, “So . . . Is that it?”
Romantic comedies and hallmark specials often do the same thing, except they swap out CGI with sentimentality. Take The Santa Clause. The film ends with a heartwarming scene in which Scott Calvin, now accepted in his role as Santa Clause, gives everyone the gifts they always wanted. See? Charlie is vindicated, a peaceful snow is falling, and Neil gets his weenie whistle.
Everyone’s happy darn it. But we’re not actually happy, are we? Scott still loses his kid and Charlie still has a broken home. It doesn’t matter how many tears, snowflakes, and diffusion filters are used. We are painfully aware of the discord.
Just close your eyes and imagine it’s good
It’s clear that Ridley Scott wants us to take his Gladiator sequel seriously.
But can we?
In short — it’s not easy. And it’s not easy because everything just feels so damn contrived. And by contrived, I mean what happens when a movie tries to make you feel something you wouldn’t feel if the movie wasn’t trying to make you feel it.
When Lucilla dies, we know we’re supposed to feel sad. We’re not sad — mostly due to a shoddy script and lackluster motives — but we know we should be. We hear the sad music, we see the slow motion, we see her son wailing. When Lucius tries to rally his fellow gladiators, we know we’re supposed to feel stirred. We’re not stirred — at this point we really just want Lucius to be eaten by lions — but we know we should be.
Perhaps Scott could have gotten away with one or two contrivances, but what we’re dealing with here is contrivance within contrivance. It’s contrivance inception. Just like the film of the same name, you can only play with people so much before they start to wake up. At some point, the spell breaks, and the ride just isn’t fun anymore. For Gladiator 2, this point was somewhere around the 13-minute mark.
And then there’s the contradictions.
We’re to believe that Maximus — who in the first film, even after his wife had been murdered, was unerringly faithful to her tiny wooden figure — also had an affair with his best friend’s daughter. We’re to believe that Lucilla is a serial adulteress, a virtuous woman, and a faithful mother at the same time. We’re to believe it’s Rome’s fault for killing Lucius’ wife and not Lucius’ fault for bringing his wife into battle in the first place. We’re to believe General Acacius truly felt bad for Rome’s nasty colonial streak, that some kind of new empire can rise from the ashes of self-loathing, and that one more scene of Lucius filtering dirt through his hands will infuse some mote of empathy into our burned-out souls.
But the damage has been done. We just don’t care what happens to Lucius, or Lucilla, or Rome, for that matter.
The film occasionally tries to make up for its shallowness by appealing to antiquity. Ok, says Scott, I get you. You want more depth. Well then, how about some *HATCHAA!* Virgil (“The gates of hell are open night and day”). How about some *BLAMO* butchered Epicurus (“Where we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.”) What about *HADOUKEN* some flashbacks from the previous film.
Sorry Scott. We see what you’re doing there.
But wait! he says. How about vague appeals to brotherhood? In what might be called the granddaddy of all contrivance, Lucius, in his final speech, alludes to Marcus Aurelius’ dream of Rome as “a city for the many and a home for those in need.” He then declares that Rome (you know, the one thing uniting them) is dead, and invites the various amped-up factions to throw down their weapons in order “to rebuild a new dream together.” After many meaningless appeals to “hope” and “freedom,” the camera pans towards the grim and grizzled soldiers as slow smiles begin to sweep over the ranks. Then cheers. “Yaah! Unity and . . . stuff!”
Not only is such a scene patently false (when Rome wasn’t conquering others they were killing each other), it lacks all believability. It’s the kind of speech that would have been unforgivable coming from Maximus. From the lips of the lackluster Lucius, we feel as if we’re owed some kind of reparations for even being asked to consider it.
Good stories are always true
You can’t glue wallpaper to an ice-fishing hut and call it a chalet. You can’t smear lipstick over a corpse’s gums and call it Miss Universe. And you can’t dress up a derivative piece of tripe and call it a cinematic triumph. Well, apparently you can — but you really shouldn’t. Bad Variety magazine. Bad.
In most of the reviews I read, a general sense of meh prevails. And no one seems to really be able to explain why. I mean, all the elements are there. They even brought back some of the old actors, reused some of the old quotes, and played some snippets of the old musical score. It’s still Rome. It’s still gladiators. What gives? It’s like purchasing a Great Value™ lasagna from Walmart. All the pieces are there — the cheese, the sauce, the noodles — so why does it taste like a stack of last week’s Costco flyers?
The answer, I believe, goes back to Rookmaker’s thesis. It “Depicts as true a world which is limited and superficial, one without God, without the deeper questions in man’s heart, without real matters of life and death, for life and death are reduced to sentiment, or adventures, or crime or violence or cruelty . . .”
Yes, film is an escape. But it can’t just be an escape. For films are just the playing out of stories, and the best stories are a bit like Edmund and Lucy’s experience on the Dawn Treader. At the end of the journey, you should be able to see your own world a little clearer. It’s true that the religious premise of Gladiator II doesn’t differ greatly from Gladiator I. Even so, there’s a humanity; a weight; a vitality present in the first film that just isn’t the second. The tang of eucatastrophe hangs in the air like an old cheese — the highs are higher (Maximus’ victory over the last barbarian tribe) and the lows are lower (his family is murdered for his loyalty). We have drunk the unsatisfying cup of his vengeance and feel genuine resolution when his final concern is to check if the boy is safe.
The best films and novels don’t seek to bypass, or reconstruct, the human condition, but acknowledge it and deal with its consequences. The reason a work like The Lord of the Rings is so powerful is that it resonates on this level. Powerful people really are tempted to accrue more power. Ignoring evil will definitely encourage it to spread faster. The steadfast courage of insignificant people really can bring down sprawling systems of evil. Once the fundamental pillars of nature are in place, do whatever you want. Make a wizard fly on the back of a moth for crying out loud.
Most modern films are so blinded by delusions of their own grandeur — the grandeur of the human condition, the grandeur of special effects, the grandeur of identity politics, etc. — that they miss these fundamental themes. In doing so, they also miss their audience.
You can find more of B.B. Inglis’ writing at The Jolly Carper.
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I agree with Dante Alighieri, probably. When I saw they were making a sequel, I rolled my eyes. When I saw the trailer, I knew the film would be as bad as most sequels are.
Modern art/entertainment is embarrassing...