The Gladiator II trailer is upon us. Compared to the recent Beverly Hills Cop sequel (40 years since the original, 30 years since the last sequel) and the upcoming Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (36 years since the original), this return to ancient Rome is practically timely. It also has arguably better source material. The original, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe, written by David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson, was released in 2000, going on to win five Oscars (out of 12 nominations) and was the second-highest grossing film of that year (behind Mission Impossible 2).
Now the ageless Ridley Scott (okay fine, he’s 86) returns to direct Gladiator II, from a script by David Scarpa (Napoleon, All The Money In The World), with Paul Mescal in the lead. God, how refreshing is it to just have a number after the title?
Set to be released November 15th in the U.K. and a week later in the US, the first trailer just hit, clocking in at a supersized 3:09.
Reportedly budgeted at $250-$310 million, Gladiator II stars Mescal as Lucius, whom we learn in a flashback is actually the grown-up version of a character we met in the original— the precocious nephew (played by Spencer Treat Clark, who was 12 at the time and currently still working) of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus, who also idolizes Russell Crowe’s Maximus. A former heir to the crown, Lucius has since been kidnapped and sold into slavery and is now fighting for his life and freedom in the gladiatorial pits. Life comes at you fast in ancient Rome.
The sequel certainly doesn’t lack for star power. In the role of the mentor, first played by Oliver Reed (who died in Malta while filming the first one, allegedly after challenging a crew of British sailors to a drinking contest, according to David Franzoni, who says he still has the bar tab), we now have Denzel Washington, who’s actually eight years older than Reed was, though you’d never guess it. Washington looks great in guyliner and leopard fur, and the trailer seems to tease an expanded role for his character, compared to Reed’s Proximo in the original.
Pedro Pascal plays Marcus Acacius, a protégé of Maximus who seems to be neither full villain nor hero, based on the trailer. Connie Nielsen reprises her role as Lucius’s mother, though she has apparently been estranged from him for all the intervening years. And of course it wouldn’t be Gladiator without shitty little nepo-boy rulers, in this case Geta and Caracella (based on real guys, brothers who co-ruled Rome from 209-211), played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, who was so brilliant as the weird brother in the first season of White Lotus.
Paul Mescal, red-hot heartthrob and king of slutty gym shorts, makes perfect sense as the star of a swords-and-skirts epic. He doesn’t look like Zac Efron in The Iron Claw (which is to say all swole-d up and vascular), which would probably be distracting in a Roman period piece anyway. Instead, like Crowe in the original, he has a natural sort of sturdiness that allows him to look plausibly capable at wielding a fat, short Roman chode sword. If one thing hasn’t changed since 2000, it’s that Aussie/Kiwis like Crowe and Irishmen like Mescal are a great fit for all the roles American actors their age are too pretty for.
Meanwhile, the action looks like a more expensive version of the original. Sure, we still have a protagonist gritting up his hands with some arena dirt, but now the fights include naval battles (!!) and a charging rhinoceros. If the original saw Ridley Scott experimenting with grainy, high-speed film stock and quick cuts during the action sequences (arguably inspiring the aughts/20 teens’ trend of ubiquitous “shaky cam” action), this new one looks more straightforward (albeit with a contemporary soundtrack, featuring a reworked version of “No Church in the Wild” by Kanye West and Jay-Z).
Which is nice. When a studio spends $300 million on a movie, you want to be able to see all of it on the screen. And these days, no one is better at making a movie look expensive than Ridley Scott.