Who will Ridley me of these troublesome sequels | Gladiator II (2024) Movie Review | #OscarsHomework
Thomas Becket? Henry II? History? 📜
Ordinarily, I bleet my movie reviews live on BlueSky, and then piece them together here, but I watched Gladiator II in November of 2024, predating my BlueSky account. Follow me on there for more LiveSky reviews going forward or on Letterbox’d for more of my shenanigans. — Kay and the cats
I can’t stand doing homework.
As I described in my Conclave and A Different Man reviews, even self-imposed, no-one-to-blame-but-myself #OscarsHomework makes my skin crawl.
So, halfway through my The Brutalist (which Adrien Brody should win Best Actor for, easily) watch, I remembered that I saw not just Conclave, but also Gladiator II in November, before I started really bleeting whole movie reviews, but not before I started my BlueSky account.
In fact, in looking back at these, this was clearly where I had the genesis of this idea, to live-tweet movie reviews (like a right prick; these things are usually empty, though, and Gladiator II certainly was) and then use those as my notes to piece together my full reviews.
So in that sense — and in that sense, alone — this movie is kind of special to me.
My expectations going in were low. I brought a new friend with me, and he promptly fell asleep, and I believe slept through the entire thing until the climactic battle (spoiler alert: there’s a climactic battle!) woke him up, and he tried to pretend as though he had been awake for the entire thing. Even though I had bleeted several times about him being hilariously asleep. He would later run me over with a car, twice.
I’ll cover that in my The Brutalist review.
I’ve mentioned before (Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice and Mufasa: The Lion King, recently) that I think very little of sequels, on the whole.
I’ll write this up eventually, too, but I think there is precisely one good Star War, and it was shown to people in theatres in 1977.
Raiders of the Lost Ark — a real film. Any other Indiana Jones movie? Basically a live-action Saturday-morning cartoon. Not for nothing, I think Spielberg and Lucas kind of feel that way, too.
Oftentimes, my feelings with sequels is, basically: ‘what are we even doing here, folks?’ Like, obviously, the studio wants the creatives at their, I don’t know, desks or drafting tables or whatever, and wants the paying customers in our theatre seats, but like… why are we all obliging them, just because they happen to own the IP we’ve all tied ourselves to?
So a sequel has to be pretty solid for me to take it seriously, and moreover, needs to kind of know what it’s about. Another good contemporary example (notwithstanding that the movie was cobbled together from episodes of a proposed television show) would be Moana 2.
Both Moana 2 and Gladiator II speedrun through big chunks of their stories (‘we’ve all seen Gladiator I, so heads on a swivel, lads, we’re at the scene where they fight animals now, action!’) and — if we’re doing this whole sequel thing, and I guess we are — let’s have some fun with it.
Tone-wise, Gladiator II has the good grace not to be nearly as ponderous or self-important as its predecessor. I would argue this is kind of a fun romp.
Dead wife, reason for vengeance, yada yada yada, Denzel Washington plays Alonzo Harris in 2nd-century Rome, the twin ginger emperors are a fuckin’ hoot, let’s go. Get to the good stuff.
And it does! Gladiator II was a delight.
The first film was nominated for 12 Oscars, eventually winning 5, including Best Picture.
Gladiator II was nominated for a single Oscar (like its #OscarsHomework buddy Conclave): Costume Design.
That’s probably about right.
I do not care who wins Best Costume, and every other film in the nomination field probably has a better argument, and it doesn’t matter at all. But this still counts as doing #OscarsHomework!
Gladiator II gets what a sequel should be — and what it shouldn’t be, which is: taken that seriously.
