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So Ridley Scott is directing a Gladiator sequel...


Muad'Dib

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15 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

How can anyone who loves Gladiator watch with equanimity as...

 

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Sir Derek Jacobi's Gracchus whimper pathetically before a roman soldier unceremoniously butchers him?

 

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That image will not leave me for a while. :crymore:

 

People say its like the sequel trilogy. But I don't remember the sequel trilogy carving Sir Alec Guinness up...

 

He was corrupt and decadent and therefore portrayed as weak and wimpering.

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He was no such thing!

 

The characters returning from Gladiator - Gracchus, Lucila - were not only treated horribly, but they were depicted as feeble and guileless. Lucila was deeply distraught for much of Gladiator, but she was steely and unbending. Here...it's like her balls dropped off.

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3 hours ago, Thor said:

I don't understand the negative comments here, regarding the film itself. Most reviews have been positive, and I share in them. True, my estimation of the score has plummeted from what I heard it in the film to what I heard on album, but the relatively high estimation of the film itself still stands. MUBI (where my 2024 list is) is down right now, but it was definitely top 20 out of the 60-70-something new films I've seen so far.


I went to see it again today (with my dad) and, weirdly, I enjoyed it more on a second viewing. Noticed the score a bit more too. Still not excellent but passable.
 

I don’t love it. But there is much to like.

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It's interesting to compare both Thor's and Chen's approach to media.

 

In Thor's case, if he (and others likeminded - which I think are the majority, but I could be wrong), if he enjoys a world, the stories set there, the worldbuilding, anyway, if he likes a franchise he has no problem with that franchise getting new chapters. He feels like if he appreciates a fictional world and its inhabitants, then it's desirable and even commendable that the creators produce new stories set within that world. Hence his admiration for the sequels/prequels/etc to Alien, Terminator and now Gladiator.

 

Of course, if a franchise he loves gets a bad new chapter (see the Jurassic World films, which I think he dislikes), then yeah, it's a disappointment. But that shouldn't stop the creators to keep producing more installments in the Jurassic saga, or Alien, Gladiator, Star Wars, etc.

 

In contrast, Chen is more about clear and definitive arcs with a beginning, middle and an end. His philosophy is summed up by the tagline to The Matrix Revolutions: "Everything that has a beginning has an end". If he likes a fictional world and its characters, then it's for the best that their journey ends when it's supposed to end. No legacy sequels set decades after, nor anything like that. His sagas need to have a clear ending where it all stops and then we move on to other stories.

 

After all, our heroes suffered so much to defeat the villains, they went through pain and sacrificed so much to triumph over evil, even if symbolically (see the end to Braveheart). So it's depressing to him to see all of the heroes' achievements get undone and we catch up with them years later and they're miserable, defeated, crushed, the evil they fought against is back and more powerful than ever.

 

I don't think one approach is inherently right or wrong; there's merit in both. In the end, how you react to a work of art is entirely personal. Whether you'd like to stay a bit more in that fictional world or end your relationship with it after the story reaches its first proposed ending, that's your choice.

 

However, we should keep in mind that we live in a ultracapitalist society and pretty much all the stories we love are property of giant billion-dollar corporations who, in order to please their shareholders, must keep milking the same cash cows for ever and ever. After all, is theoretically simpler to keep making sequels to Star Wars than try to find a completely new Star Wars or a equivalent.

 

So Thor has the studios on his side... At least for now. They want that stuff that was relevant decades ago still is in this day and age because it's simpler than finding through trial and lots of errors new stories to tell.

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I came up with a good analogy for this film - and more generally these kind of sequels-afte-the-last-sequel films. Imagine if you were watching Casablanca through to the end...and then there was an epilogue "...and then Nazis caught Laszlo and killed him and ran a train on Ilsa, but its okay because something good came out of some other character."

 

How would that not ruin the movie?!

 

And yet that's essentially what Gladiator II does to Gladiator. It's also, to some extent, what the Star Wars sequels do to Return of the Jedi. It's what Dial of Destiny does to Indy. It's what the Willow sequel series did to Willow.

 

18 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

In contrast, Chen is more about clear and definitive arcs with a beginning, middle and an end. His philosophy is summed up by the tagline to The Matrix Revolutions: "Everything that has a beginning has an end". If he likes a fictional world and its characters, then it's for the best that their journey ends when it's supposed to end. No legacy sequels set decades after, nor anything like that. His sagas need to have a clear ending where it all stops and then we move on to other stories.

 

Another way to look at it is: "If I took ALL these entries, in the story order, and condensed down into a single long film, would it be a film that makes sense?" I DEFINITELY try to analyse film series in that way, sometimes very rigorously, sometimes more abstractedly.

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4 minutes ago, Tom Guernsey said:

and let’s face it, it’s always the ones made years later that fuck it up the most…

 

I don't think the core issue is that it was made so much time AFTER Gladiator. The core issue is that Gladiator just...doesn't lent itself to sequels. It ends with a full cadence.

 

What CAN a sequel do, then, if not to douse that cadence with cold water? That's just inherent in the act of making a sequel to Gladiator. Granted, it didn't have to drag legacy characters through hell like it did, but the basic idea is flawed regardless.

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This is why James Bond is the perfect franchise: each movie is a self contained story, no overarching arcs or anything (for the most part) and they change the actor every few years. So they keep telling stories with this character forever! Just create a supervillain with a ridiculous megaweapon, a sexy Bond girl and exotics locations for Bond to visit.

 

It's not an epic saga or stuff like that, you can watch almost any Bond movie you want without needing to catch the ones that came before to understand the story. 

 

Of course, even Bond has been fucked by serialization in the Craig years, so there's nowhere to run right now lol

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8 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

 

I don't think the core issue is that it was made so much time AFTER Gladiator. The core issue is that Gladiator just...doesn't lent itself to sequels. It ends with a full cadence.

 

What CAN a sequel do, then, if not to douse that cadence with cold water? That's just inherent in the act of making a sequel to Gladiator. Granted, it didn't have to drag legacy characters through hell like it did, but the basic idea is flawed regardless.

Oh for sure. I guess it then fails under both the circumstances of being a sequel to something that already had an ending and has been made years later. Maybe we’d have cared less if they had made a sequel a couple of years later and/or it had intended to be a trilogy or something. But clearly neither of these things are true. 


For those not deeply invested in the reboot of tv classic Fawlty Towers, I think my concept neatly fits with the reboot/sequel sensibility of the 2020s and perfectly trashes the original. 

 

The hotel fails to compete with a new Travelodge and goes out of business. Manuel gets deported due to Brexit. After ending up homeless, Basil ends up being murdered by Sybil and Polly for the life insurance money. However they get caught and end up in prison together. The show is about their time in prison and the show is called HM Flowery Twats. The tone is like a less fun version of Prisoner Cell Block H. It’s written and produced by Charlie Brooker. 

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16 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

Of course, even Bond has been fucked by serialization in the Craig years, so there's nowhere to run right now lol

 

The Connery Bonds are a little more serialized than people remember: SPECTRE are revealed as the big bads at the END of Doctor No, and then the remaining films are kind of series of episodes of Bond's continuing tribulations with SPECTRE. But its still a much looser structure than what we find with the latter-day Craig Bonds, or with other film series, these things being a sliding scale (or a series of steps) rather than a binary.

 

Ultimately, there's a genuine, artistic appeal to cycles (where the entries are connected) over anthologies such that even film series that start as anthologies are usually tempted, at some point, into becoming more cyclical. M:I also pulled this with Syndicate and now with their latest two-parter. People forget Star Wars was going to be an anthology, too, until the father reveal changed that.

 

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with Gladiator, but at least it got it off my mind for a few moments. :lol:

 

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20 minutes ago, Chen G. said:

Ultimately, there's a genuine, artistic appeal to cycles (where the entries are connected) over anthologies such that even film series that start as anthologies are usually tempted, at some point, into becoming more cyclical. M:I also pulled this with Syndicate and now with their latest two-parter. People forget Star Wars was going to be an anthology, too, until the father reveal changed that.

 

I was talking more in commercial terms :lol: The best way to keep milking a cow until the end of times is the (pre-Craig) Bond approach: self-contained movies, we change the actor every few years so that the character always stay within an age range. The time where the stories are set is always "the present", meaning movies released in the 60s are set in the 60s, movies from the 90s are set in the 90s, etc.

 

This has worked remarkably well for these animated shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, etc. You can watch almost any episode of these shows without needing to follow a specific order to understand the events. They're always set in the present, the characters are always the same age (even though the Simpsons voice actors are grandparents now :lol:), etc.

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Anthologies are definitely more accessible and they're definitely easier to produce, yeah.

 

But cycles - where the entries are strung together into a larger entity - have appealed more to ideals of artistic unity. e.g. Joseph und seine Brüder or Lord of the Rings.

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11 minutes ago, Nick1Ø66 said:

Well there's a reason "...and they lived happily ever after" has endured so long as a trope in storytelling, whereas "hero ends up old, disillusioned and bitter" has only be around for five minutes and will (hopefully) go the way of the dodo soon enough.

 

And, you know, it's not like Gladiator was some happy-go-lucky kinda blockbuster. It put the characters through absolute hell and cost more than a few of them their lives. Certainly, its not a "they lived happily ever after" for Maximus, not in the usual sense at least! At any rate, it takes it out of the realm of anything that might be considered naive or saccharine and into the realm of the deeply cathartic.

 

The rosier day that literally dawns on Rome is all the more vindicating BECAUSE it was so hard-won. Dousing cold water on THAT, after all the tribulations it took to attain it?...just feels cruel. And dousing it to the extent that Gladiator 2 did, which is effectivelly to hose it down? Borderline sadistic.

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Once again, it is quite bizarre that it's Blade Runner that ended up giving its original hero a much hopeful ending with its sequel, compared to other franchises that aren't explicitly set in such a dour setting (if still bittersweet if we're factoring the loss of his love interest). Sure, I suppose this one depends entirely on the cut, but the point stands that you wouldn't expect Deckard to be better off than Han Solo.

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Having seen the film yesterday, I would say that it is decent enough for me. Not on the same level of quality reached by the first film (both in technical and artistic aspects) but I found myself pleased with how the main character arcs develop through the film. I liked how despite some similar plot beats the outcomes were different and they didn't resort to a copy-paste of the original.

 

That it not to say that it is flawless, in my opinion the music barely added pathos, the cinematography wasn't as good as it should have (despite being the same DOP, I would have preferred at this point that Dariusz Wolski had done it seeing his stellar curriculum and excellent work on most of Scott's recent films), the editing at times was jarring and generally leaned more on quick cuts and short sequences, wherease I think the film needed more "space to breathe". Most of the cast does a good and convincing job, especially Denzel and Mescal.

 

Spoilers here

Spoiler

And speaking of editing, the finale cuts abruptly to the credits, it was just bad.

And why the hell Djimon Hounsou isn't in the film??? He would have contributed well to it.

 

Generally I think there is quality, but maybe Scott's age is a bit showing in how he doesn't have the same energy, same eye and focus recently as in his older works.

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I frequently hear things about this film like "it's decent enough", "it's okay", "it's good enough".

Come on, the first film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Actor in a Leading Role. For many it's one of the best films every made. And we've gotten from an amazing, excellent, sensational film to an okay, good enough, decent enough film. And people accept this like it wasn't bad instead of not being okay with a mediocre film that should be at least as good if not better than the original that it's the sequel of. Let's not accept mediocrity and okay filmmaking if we could and should get excellence, otherwise mediocrity is what we'll get. 

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Well, we could've had the infamous Nick Cave script, where Maximus ends up in the modern day by the end of the film. That certainly would've subverted expectations in what one of these legacy sequels tends to be, but that also might've just pissed off more people. Really depends on if you're the sort to think terrible movies at least make you feel something over merely serviceable ones.

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30 minutes ago, Davis said:

I frequently hear things about this film like "it's decent enough", "it's okay", "it's good enough".

Come on, the first film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Actor in a Leading Role. For many it's one of the best films every made. And we've gotten from an amazing, excellent, sensational film to an okay, good enough, decent enough film. And people accept this like it wasn't bad instead of not being okay with a mediocre film that should be at least as good if not better than the original that it's the sequel of. Let's not accept mediocrity and okay filmmaking if we could and should get excellence, otherwise mediocrity is what we'll get. 

 
100%

 

And its not just this film. The industry has been dishing out dog food and too many of us are willing to pretend it’s filet mignon. They’ve managed to successfully lower our expectations on what we’ll accept.

 

The expectation, for both artist and audience, should be that it’s better than the original. 

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43 minutes ago, Davis said:

I frequently hear things about this film like "it's decent enough", "it's okay", "it's good enough".

 

The movie being "just fine" instead of an absolute masterpiece makes those earlier Ridley Scott comments where he said Gladiator 2 is "one of my best films ever" extremely funny in retrospect.

 

Ridley Scott Says Gladiator II Is "The Best Thing I've Ever Made"

 

Gladiator II is one of my best movies ever, says Sir Ridley Scott

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8 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

The movie being "just fine" instead of an absolute masterpiece makes those earlier Ridley Scott comments where he said Gladiator 2 is "one of my best films ever" extremely funny in retrospect.

 

Ridley Scott Says Gladiator II Is "The Best Thing I've Ever Made"

 

Gladiator II is one of my best movies ever, says Sir Ridley Scott

 

I wouldn't put much stock in such statements. Artists in whatever field tend to say that the latest thing they've done is also the best thing they've done. David Gilmour said the same thing about his new album LUCK AND STRANGE recently, and while it's a good album, it isn't as good as his second solo album. Didn't Jerry Goldsmith say MULAN is the best thing he ever did right around that film's premiere? I mean, it's a great score, but hardly his best. Could be PR, could be short term memory, could be a combination of both.

 

GLADIATOR II is okay, but not even top 20 Scott.

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Well, I thought this was absolutely mediocre. I might write a longer post later on, but I have very little praise to give to this film. Denzel was fun to watch, true, but I do think acting was one of the film's many weaknesses. Worst offender of all was Connie Nielsen, which I thought gave an embarrassingly bad performance. Joseph Quinn's performance as Geta was actually interesting to watch, but he's given so little to do.

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10 minutes ago, Thor said:

GLADIATOR II is okay, but not even top 20 Scott.

Exactly my point. It could and should have been excellent, instead of just okay. It's like The Godfather Part II was an okay film. Or The Empire Strikes Back. If you make a film that becomes a classic over the years and you decide to make a sequel years later, you don't want to make an okay film, or a quasi remake. You want to surpass the original. And if you can't, you either don't even make it or you go hide under a rock and feel ashamed for making a piece of shit sequel to your great movie.

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I just don't think I'm a "bad Star Wars is better than no Star Wars" person. And just insert your favourite franchise here.  I never really understood that reasoning. I don't need to "explore more of this world" without the character and plot to justify spending more time there. The "world" exists to serve the character and plot, character and plot aren't there to simply populate a world.

 

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2 minutes ago, Nick1Ø66 said:

I just don't think I'm a "bad Star Stars is better than no Star Wars" person. And just insert your favourite franchise here.  I never really understood that reasoning. I don't need to "explore more of this world" without the character and plot to justify spending more time there. The "world" exists to serve the character and plot, character and plot aren't there to simply populate a world.

 

I'm the opposite. I prefer worlds more than plots and characters. But I do obviously expect a certain level of quality throughout; I don't need it at all cost.

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1 hour ago, Davis said:

You want to surpass the original. And if you can't, you either don't even make it or you go hide under a rock and feel ashamed for making a piece of shit sequel to your great movie.

 

Hmmmm. I might disagree somewhat. I definitely agree you want to try to surpass the original, and the audience should expect that's what you did. That said, not every sequel is going to do that...in fact most won't. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try. 

 

But there should be a compelling artistic reason for doing so, and more to it than to simply cash in. If Ridley Scott had another, original idea for a Roman Empire epic, I'd have loved to have seen that.  That area of history is rich enough to be well mined, as Hollywood has proven. And if he attempted to do so I'd appreciate it, even if it wasn't as good as Gladiator.

 

But to essentially do a remake, and an inferior one at that...one that dishonours the characters in the original...that's what I have no use for.  If you're going to continue a story, there should be more of that story to be told, and an original, creativity-driven idea for telling it. If you fail, fair enough, but at least be noble in the attempt.

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34 minutes ago, Thor said:

 

I'm the opposite. I prefer worlds more than plots and characters. But I do obviously expect a certain level of quality throughout; I don't need it at all cost.


Fair enough, different strokes and all that.

 

And to be clear, I think exploring a familiar world can be magic. I just need more of a reason than simply cinematic travelogue. Staying with the Star Wars example, I love that world, and would like to explore more of it...but not at the expense of bad writing and uninteresting characters. 

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On 23/11/2024 at 12:25 AM, Davis said:

Not every film needs to be a franchise. Gladiator had a compelling story that had a beginning and an end. The story was over. If they wanted to continue the story, they should’ve made a completely different film with another plotline, not remaking the original story and definitely not calling it Gladiator II. 

 

That's what I don't understand. It's like making Titanic 2.

 

Also, Pedro Pascal is landing too many high profile roles. He isn't that good.

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32 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

Aka the considerably less famous cousin to Star Wars! Starring Luke Lukewalker, Leia Leorgana and Han Hans.

Lando Landisian, Jabba the Jabbut, Emperor Emperotine, Darth Darther...


 

Quote
Spoiler

Darth Darthanus

Darth Darul

Darth Darthdious

Nute Nuray

Mace Macedu

Yoyo (Yoda)

General Generous

Jar Jar Jinks

Padme Padmidala

Anakin Anawalker

Count Cooku


 

Quote

 

 

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