Gladiator II | Is this the first post-January 6th blockbuster?

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In Gladiator II, all is not well in the world’s largest military superpower. We couldn’t possibly comment…

How often do you think about the fall of Rome?

Trot over to Bluesky, Threads or any of the other social media giants growing out of Twitter’s corpse at the moment, and you’ll find plenty of people with it at the front of their minds. “It’s the end of an empire,” one Bluesky user says, “but at least the content is tremendous”.

It’s appropriate, then, that Gladiator II arrives in UK cinemas this week. Big, violent, and with blockbuster spectacle shimmering from every frame, ‘content’ doesn’t get much more tremendous, or more Roman, than this.

But just as the decade following 9/11 saw Hollywood grappling with America’s newfound paranoia, Ridley Scott’s latest epic (the script for which was completed in 2021) finds what will undoubtedly prove one of the year’s biggest films facing down the legacy of another of the country’s many defining acts of violence. As Ryan Lambie noted in our review, Gladiator II “is full of post-January 6th angst” – insurrectionist plots, power-mad emperors and mobs baying for blood populate a vision of martial strength on the verge of collapse.

The Rome of today’s sword and sandals sequel is a very different one to its predecessor. As Paul Mescal’s Lucius is drawn towards the Colosseum, he passes row after row of the plague-ridden and the poor. Rome’s great marble monuments still stand; its armies continue to dominate the Mediterranean and beyond; as an outsider, Lucius first sees the Roman legions as a unified, unstoppable mass; it’s only when he comes closer that he sees the whole empire is rotten to its core. The dream that is Rome – a phrase which sounds very different now versus its deployment in 2000 – has fallen sick.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a 2024 film has dealt with the subject of a faltering democracy. Megalopolis, with its society big-wigs talking grand ideas in meme-speak while a psychopathic populist incites a mob at their gates, is a much more avant-garde interpretation of the same theme. Even Deadpool & Wolverine, as two decades of storytelling literally crumble around its protagonists, seems to chuckle at a faltering culture with the same nihilism as Nero and his famous fiddle. Civil War more obliquely takes a moment of intranational conflict to its logical conclusion, but what makes these other films stand apart is the way they each capture the experience of living through the moment a society teeters on the brink.

The change in perspective from even a few years ago feels profound. The Trial Of The Chicago Seven, released on Netflix just over a month before the 2020 presidential election, attacks the same subject from a very different angle. Set around the 1968 Democratic National Convention, following a year of political violence, turmoil and increasing polarisation, the same sense of prosperity going to rot pervades Aaron Sorkin’s courtroom epic as it does in Scott’s semi-nude slaughter fest.

But where The Chicago Seven ended with Eddie Redmayne’s student activist Tom Hayden reading aloud names in a courtroom – defying an act of anti-democratic injustice by upholding the idealised vision of American democracy – Gladiator II paints political change as a far bloodier, more chaotic affair. The dream of Rome is now too far gone, its wounds too deep to be revived by oratory. The problems facing Lucius and his allies feel too great to be solved by one person alone.

The anxiety of post-9/11 blockbusters like War Of The Worlds and The Dark Knight saw a country fearful and jumping at shadows, but still broadly united against what it saw as a foreign threat. In 2024, we might just be seeing Hollywood adapt with a new kind of fear: what if our malaise isn’t down to a few bad apples? What if the whole empire has rotted to its core?

Gladiator II is in UK cinemas now.