Chen G.

We get this a lot recently: sequels to stories that, whether told in one entry or more, ended on a full-stop. Off the top of my head: Indiana Jones (sorta) Toy Story (sorta) Star Wars The Matrix Marvel (post Endgame) Hollywood had developed a topical allergy to finality.

But it is a sequel to Gladiator! They basically nabbed anyone of the veteran cast that they could, and I seriously doubt they're there for cursory roles.

And even there, I feel, it would have been better served by having Endgame be the actual, err, Endgame. An audience knows a climax and coda when they see it, and once that cadential feeling had been fired-up, it can't be taken back.

Yeah, I find it depressing. What does Gladiator ends with? It ends with the sad but heroic sacrifice by the main character and, like all the best dramas, it ends with a sense of promise for the future and we're left to imagine a rosier Rome and, for all they've weathered, a "happily ever after" for Lucila, Gracchus, Juba and Lucius. By making a sequel - not "another film set in that world", a sequel - you're forced into going "well, actually!" and show that those characters still have terrible trials and tribulations to go through, if they manage to go through them at all... It ruins it.

Good sequitur: if The Fellowship of the Ring was ABOUT Middle-Earth, then no sooner would Frodo arrive in Rivendell, ol' Figwit/Lindir would have taken him on a guided tour through the entire place. But he doesn't: Because that's not the point of the movie. Of course, you're not going to go to the trouble of making beautiful visuals and not give them a chance to breath (see every David Lean film ever), but there's a difference between a film taking its time, and a film misplacing its focus from the story to the setting. I honestly can't see many people lining up to see a mockumentary/travelogue of the geography of Tatooine or Khand or what have you. What's more, Gladiator itself is not the kind of movie Thor fancies: Gladiator is a plot-oriented movie, and I'll bet Nick's house that the sequel will be that, as well.

I think we just define "story" differently. I don't mean story strictly in the sense of plot mechanics unfolding. I mean story in the sense "characters going through something."

See, to me "worlds" exist to stage stories in, rather than stories existing to "showcase" worlds.

I think a story - as told in a film or in a series of films - has to have a certain dramatic shape. Gladiator's dramatic shape is complete. To make a sequel would mean to take the bow that had been wrapped over this most wonderful present, and unravel it anew. I find those kinds of films - we're getting many of them nowadays - depressing.

Some films lend themselves to having sequels. Gladiator is not one of those.

It has Lucila, Gracchus and an older Lucius... Its not a standalone vignette of Roman history. Its a sequel.

All the more reason to do more Roman epics that aren't directly tied-into Gladiator. Just like Robin Hood isn't trying to suggest its a sequel to Kingdom of Heaven.

I guess part of the issue is that the whole point of Gladiator is Maximus gives up his life for what we are led to believe is a better future for Rome. Throwing us into another movie where things invariably goes to pot, casts a pall on the radiance of that ending.

I guess I just don't see the point of taking a historical (okay, using that term loosly here) film like Gladiator and making a sequel to it. I mean, by that token, Ridley could have cast Iain Glenn as the King Richard in his Robin Hood film, and thus present it as a sequel to Kingdom of Heaven. But he surely realised it served little to do it that way, and so he didn't do it.

I might go as far as to say someone who is set to make a Gladiator sequel probably kinda misses the point of Gladiator. The same is applicable to other movies. Ahem...

Good! For my part, I never had that desire to know: Jackson interperates the Rings as giving their wielders power of domination. Tolkien explains their power is one that preserves Middle Earth for the Elves. But to get more into the mechanics of it... its one of those things that ultimately boils down to "its a thing because we need it for the plot to happen." For me, whatever successes the show does contain - and they are limited successes in my mind - is in places where it succesfully illuminates and explores concepts, visuals and story elements not explored in other Tolkien adaptations: The hyper-urbanism of Armenelos and Eregion, and a slightly different take on the Orcs, most notably. But hey, horses for courses!

I realise more and more that "counting" and designating the motives, in and of itself, is a rather reductive exercise. Of course there'll be a difference, in a score of a given length, between one with a four or five "signifying" motives like Euryanthe to one with several dozens like Das Rheingold, or between a cycle with 60 motives (Star Wars) and one with 180 (The Ring). But when its more on points (say, squabbling over whether there's 55 motives or 86 motives which can be quite elusive), its really not an exercise that gives you a lot of insight as to how the score functions. The defining structural conceit of Williams' score is less the individual motifs, how many they are, or how we name them, but rather the way they musically fall nicely into being either "Sith/Empire" motives or "Jedi/Rebel" motives, and how these two musical factions are juxtaposed. You can think of it a little like the contrasting theme groups of a symphony, although it has antecedents closer at hand in programmatic music a-la Freischutz or Lohengrin, and certainly in previous Hollywood scores.

Good! ... What did you like? And what did you think you understood?

I seem to remember that in an interview from the time of Attack of the Clones, he also gave a kind of estimate on the number of the themes. Can't remember how many he thought he was up to then. The latest version of Frank Lehman's document lists 70 themes across the nine films, Adventures of Han, Kenobi and Galaxy's Edge.

And some of the opening sequence: the oner that starts the film is pure Spielberg, and is unlike anything in Lucas' oeuvre. I think Coppola also gave the rough cut a look. Its another failing of the "The prequels is what Lucas flying solo looks like" narrative.

I do! But I just found Jessica - in Part One - more relatable on a human level.

That's true. Although it didn't resonate as strongly with me, personally.

That's probably a huge reason why I liked Part One more. The character I felt I could relate to in Part One was Jessica: Paul's predicament, in both parts, is much too cosmic and kind of beyond us, to be relatable on a human level. Jessica was just the worried-sick mum. In this, she's that for, oh, ten minutes and then she's becomes a personality-less oracle figure.

My understanding is he had shot scenes, but in editing the film Denis cut them clean out of the movie. Yet another thing that makes the two parts feel quite distinct.

This is the first that I've sat through a complete Euryanthe: I don't really know any of the cast, except Wendy Bryn Harmer as Eglantine. The libretto for this opera had often been a laughing stock, but frankly, is it really that much worst than Weber's previous and much-admired Der Freischütz? At any rate, I found it workable. The music is mighty pretty. I was led to believe Euryanthe was only "through-composed" in the sense that it wasn't a Singspiel (that's to say, broken up with segments in spoken dialogue) like Freischütz and Oberon, but that's not the case: beyond the two act breaks, there are virtually no complete cadences a-la Mozart to accomodate for applause, so the story can unfold pretty naturally, except for ensemble singing and the strophic repetitions in the arias. There's no German Romantic Opera or French Grand Opera that I'm aware of that's quite like this until we get to the Flying Dutchman. I have written about this before, but a most unique, quasi-symphonic structural conceit of this opera is the theme associated with Emma's Ghost (the deceased sister of the tenor). Its this tense, chromatic violin divisi in the overture that only at the very, very end of the opera is resolved diatonically. Was Weber thinking of a Beethoven coda?