The following contains spoilers for Gladiator 2 . Going into Gladiator 2, I was pretty sceptical. While the trailers had dazzled me with their awe-inspiring, Colosseum-flooding spectacle, I was privately doubting the necessity of a follow up to one of the best movies of all time.
The first Gladiator movie has a definitive ending, bucketloads of emotion, and a place in the pantheon of film history. What else possibly needed to be said? Well, as it turns out, quite a bit. Gladiator 2 picks up on similar themes and ideas to its predecessor, pulling them to a natural conclusion – and bringing Maximus's story to the poignant close I never knew we needed at the same time.
From the outset, Gladiator 2 looks all set up to be a revenge story. Paul Mescal stars as Lucius, a man living a simple life, whose wife is killed brutally in a battle waged by Pedro Pascal's General Acacius. Lucius ends up a gladiator fighting to survive in the arena, striving for vengeance all the while.
Sounds familiar, right? The genius of this sequel is twisting the story away from a straightforward revenge quest and into a wider mission to save Rome from itself. This loops neatly back to what started the whole, bloody story in the first place: Marcus Aurelius did not believe his son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) was a fit ruler, and so he tried to crown Maximus (Russell Crowe) instead. The dominos that fell from that decision led to Maximus killing Commodus in the Colosseum, and, later, Maximus's son Lucius f.