Gladiator II 4K 2024

The father of one of the major stories about Ancient Rome gave out something so bad that you even want to gloat.

The movie tells about the fate of Lucius - the grandson of Marcus Aurelius and nephew of Commodus - two emperors of the Roman Empire from the first part of the movie. By the will of the scriptwriters, he finds himself among the gladiators in the arena in Rome. The details of the plot can be discussed longer than the movie itself goes on, but the general conclusion is that the story just doesn't make sense. If I slapped myself on the forehead in a frenzied facepalm every time another stupid thing happened, I would turn into one of the emperors of this part of the movie - a demented moron.

The characters. They have two problems: flatness and a lack of empathy for them. The first movie may have many sins, but almost all of them are easily forgiven precisely because of the strong empathy for the main and secondary characters. Here, however, if the hero is nominally bad, he will be so in every situation. If the hero is insane, he'll be pissed off every second of screen time. The two exceptions are General Acacius and Macrinus, played by Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington, respectively. The former goes against his image for the first few seconds of the movie during the opening 20 minutes of the movie, the latter reveals his mysterious nature near the end, around this among other things the plot plot plot twist is built. Paul Mescal, who plays Lucius, performs in an atypical role for himself, but still plays a rather flat character, it is difficult to evaluate his acting in such a movie. If the protagonist of the first part - Maximus - was an outstanding general (heh heh) and a skillful warrior, Lucius just wants to defeat everyone very badly. We're told this from the beginning, by the way, to lower expectations of his talents. This will to win, by the way, is somehow enough for his brothers in misfortune and arms to see him as their leader. The actors in the secondary roles suffered an even worse fate - they weren't invested in them at all, they are more often a plot function than characters in the story.

The Picture. The whole movie is an attraction that can be broken down into 2 types of shots: some brutal chopping and conversations in mostly small dark spaces. Fight, discuss how to move on to the next plot phase, fight again, discuss the setting for a future fight again, fight again, and so on. There are plenty of graphics and fight choreography in the action scenes moments. If you turn off your brain and see the movie as a two and a half hour tick-tock, it's beautiful. The main thing is not to ask yourself why the monkey looks like a hypertrophied mutant, who apparently came from a baboon, why and how Roman galleys are sailing around the arena surrounded by sharks, what an enraged and wounded rhinoceros does when two gladiators fight each other under the roar of the crowd. By the way, there is a lot of brutality in the film, which I found no explanation for, other than trying to impress the viewer with the colorfulness of the deaths.

I got the impression that Ridley Scott equates moviegoers with the audience in the arena, who have come to watch the senseless chopping to please the crowd. If that's the case, catch my rotten eggs and rotten tomatoes in the form of the text above, your spectacle did not impress me.