Please don’t ask me for the meaning of the title. It came to me in a dream, and wouldn’t leave me till I wrote it down.

By Emad Aysha

I forced myself to watch Gladiator II (2024), on a long, long day, then fell asleep before I could write anything and got that strange title. For what it’s worth, it’s not a bad movie, just unnecessary, overly long and overly gory and with too much wasted potential.

The genius of the original Gladiator (2000) was really twofold. One is that it wasn’t about anything in particular, and so resonated with everybody – we could all relate to it on some personal level. The second point of genius was the movie score and the fact that the director, Ridley Scott, had set up the pacing and storyline to facilitate the dreamy, tender and epic soundtrack.

Neither strongpoint operates here. The music is exciting and befitting of an action flick but it has no depth, whether cruelty or elation. And with all the action the pacing is all over the place and you feel the length of the movie with no real emotional payoff.

DAY OF THE JACKAL: Devious Denzel steals the limelight here, even in the absurdly badly lit scenes!

As for the story, it’s too explicitly political. The story begins in Numedia with a thinly disguised Lucius (Paul Mescal) as some inept farmer dude unsatisfied with the bounty of his land. The Romans come a knockin and he and his not terribly beautiful farmer/warrior wife are summoned to the city gate to mount a defence.

As you might expect the city is taken and his wife is killed, by an arrow, and he gets sold into the gladiator games. His promoter is none other than Macrinus aka Denzel Washington, a wheeler dealer with designs of his own.

The boy prince wants the head of the general who killed his wife, Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), but little does he know that the man is married to his mother and secretly plotting to overthrow the duo emperors driving the empire mad.

What follows is a mixture of good acting and bad writing. There’s lots of good lines, mostly plucked from the first movie, but you feel there were successive rewrites leaving their telltale signs here in the form of inconsistencies.

The emperor asks Lucius, or Hanno as he calls himself, for his name and he doesn’t answer. His promoter explains he doesn’t speak Roman, but just a minute ago we heard him talking to his rival gladiator.

In the first coliseum battle he tells his fellow gladiators to stand as one – nostalgia bait again – but the rest of the time he’s a loner who shuns leadership when training. The movie is just plain rudderless. They don’t know what to do with it. The closing scene has him asking his father for guidance, the fallen Maximus (Russell Crowe), in the coliseum typically. But that’s it.

Now for some other problems. Like everything in Hollywood nowadays, it’s part of a franchise that not only lives off nostalgia – Connie Nielsen and Derek Jacobi hardly do anything here – but criminally retcons the previous epic.

MEDITERRANEAN COMPLEX: Connie Neilsen's complexion in the new movie is wrong too, leaving her looking too Scandinavian. In the original she was positively 'golden'.

You see this in the offensive scene where Macrinus is checking up on Lucius’s background. The boy's father was a queer and so Lucilla had to do-it with her own bother, while we really suspect the father was Maximus all along.

Lucius’s father was a good man, in the previous movie; Maximus spoke well of him and Maximus was a man of honour who didn’t go around bedding other men’s wives. Remember that he was so committed to his wife, in the afterlife, he didn’t do it with Lucilla – despite their original love story.

Having Lucilla smuggle her son away so he wouldn’t be killed also deflates what happened in the previous movie.

They even retcon Marcus Aurelius, if you can believe it, with Denzel Washington wanting to destroy the empire from within through corruption, deception and murder, because he was personal slave for the late great philosopher emperor. Reverse colonization anyone?!

Now some more positives and negatives. Visually the movie is stunning but the overly high resolution makes things look dark and you never seem to get close-ups of people’s faces, which make it all so uninvolving. And the gladiators, as big as they are, look tiny because of this.

Rome is magnificent as ever but it’s also portrayed as in a state of decay, and tinged with insanity, even with the lavish sets. People look unhealthy, their voices constricted to the point that the announcer in the coliseum can’t be heard. Even Pedro Pascal, buff that he is, looks tired.

DOUBLE TROUBLE: I won't even bother with the names of the inept twins who, interestingly have Marcus Acacius (in the middle) killed with treacherous arrows.

This is overcommunicating if you ask me. The special effects are really good, such as the invasion scene in the beginning, the mock naval battle in the coliseum, and the monkey attack scene all really stand out.

The actor who really stands out, despite his American accent, is Denzel Washington. He’s disarmingly charming and sinister and does some of his best stuff with Ridley Scott. Tim McInnerny, who famously played Percy in the Blackadder series, is also really good.

The twin emperors are a waste of time, no match for Joaquin Phoenix in the original. Now for my title. Gotham is another name for New York, if you must know, which is what helped me understand the so-called political subtext here.

The movie is about regenerating the country’s flailing democracy and stop it being an empire sacrificing its sons for the imperial reputation. That explains the numerous ‘immigrants’ here competing for bread with the starving Romans.

America’s rulers see themselves as the new gods, keeping all spoils to themselves, and we all know who is ultimately to blame for the situation in the Middle East.

If this movie helps correct that fate accompli, then I’ll put up with the too many flaws. But curse Hollywood nostalgia in the meantime!!