Gladiator II with Alexandra Sills

Podcast Archives - The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies

Rounding out our trilogy of special episodes on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, we are joined by gladiator expert, Alexandra Sills.

Special Episode – Gladiator II with Alexandra Sills

Alexandra holds a BA in Classical Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London and a MA in The Classical Mediterranean from the University of Leicester. Alexandra’s MA dissertation was awarded the Mark Pluciennik prize in Archaeology & Ancient History. Alexandra has published outreach articles for Bad Ancient and Working Classicists and recently published an academic article entitled ‘The Tropification of Hollywood Heroes Thrown Into the Arena’ for Melita Classica in 2023. Alexandra’s current research focuses on gladiators in the ancient world and their reception on film and television. We’re thrilled to have her on the show to discuss all things gladiators.

We start with a history of the development of the gladiator in the Roman world including:

• The Etruscan evolution
• The Julius Caesar effect and the subsequent influence of Augustus
• The osteo-archaeological evidence for gladiators

Are there things that Gladiator II gets right from the perspective of the ancient evidence? We discuss the possibilities with Alexandra.

Fred Hechinger plays Emperor Caracalla, Pedro Pascal plays General Acacius and Joseph Quinn plays Emperor Geta in Gladiator II

Things to listen out for

• The nobility of the screen gladiator versus the infamia of gladiators historically
• The contrast between the crowd of spectators in the ancient world and in cinematic representations
• The dehumanisation involved in the arena
• The role of the love interest
• The gladiator connection of Katniss Everdeen
• The trope of the woman in the refrigerator
• How to make sure gladiators are dead in the arena and on film
• The complexities of katabasis (journeys to the Underworld) in the context of films and sequels
• The challenges of setting a film in Ancient Rome but changing key elements of history through the storytelling
• The deep specialisation of the different gladiatorial fighting styles
• Where are the shields? Where are the nipples?
• Sexuality in the Roman imperial era versus the representation on screen

Gladiator II – Macrinus played by Denzel Washington

Screen examples discussed

• Spartacus 1960 – Stanley Kubrick
• Gladiator 2000 – Ridley Scott
• Gladiator II 2024 – Ridley Scott
• Spartacus: Blood and Sands 2010-2013 (Starz series)
• Those About to Die 2024 (television series)
• Fall of the Roman Empire 1964 – Anthony Mann
• Pompeii 2014 – Paul W.S. Anderson

Gladiator II Analysed

Check out our other episodes on Gladiator II with experts Dr Lindsay Steenberg and Professor Martin M. Winkler.

Sound Credits

Our theme music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Automated Transcript

Lightly edited for the Latin and our wonderful Australian accents!

Dr Rad 0:15
Welcome to The Partial Historians.

Dr G 0:19
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Dr Rad 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr Rad.

Dr G 0:33
And I’m Dr G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 0:54
Hello and welcome to a new, very special episode of The Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr G.

Dr Rad 1:04
And I am Dr Rad.

Dr G 1:07
And we are super thrilled to have a special guest with us today, Alexandra Sills. Now I’ll just give you a quick bio. Alexandra Sills holds a BA in Classical Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London, and an MA in the Classical Mediterranean from the University of Leicester. Alexandra’s MA dissertation was awarded the Mark Pluciennik prize in Archeology and Ancient History. Alexandra has published a range of articles for Bad Ancient and Working Classicists, and recently published an academic article entitled ‘The tropification of Hollywood heroes thrown into the arena’ for Melita Classica in 2023. Alexandra’s current research focuses on gladiators in the ancient world and their reception on film and television. And if you haven’t guessed already, we are thrilled to have Alexandra on the show to discuss gladiators. And of course, the most recent foray of gladiators on the big screen, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator Two. Welcome Alexandra.

Alexandra Sills 2:21
Hello. Thank you for having me. Absolutely thrilled to talk about this film. There’s so much to talk about.

Dr G 2:28
Soooo much to talk about. So to get us started, a soft launch, if you like, into this foray. What makes a gladiator in the ancient Roman world. When do they originate and when do they go out of fashion?

Alexandra Sills 2:45
Okay, that’s a really good question, and it’s one that’s got quite an interesting answer, I think, because everyone assumes that they’re really stereotypically Roman. But actually, the Romans stole the idea from other cultures, and we’re not entirely sure which other cultures they got the most inspiration from, because nobody bothered writing that down. But we do know that down in Campania, which is the area around Naples and Pompeii, they were having fights long before they did in Rome. That tended to be something that they did after battles with prisoners of war and sometimes during feasts. And also, the Etruscans were having combats as well. So the Romans were looking to the north and to the south and seeing, Oh, this is actually quite a fun entertainment. Why don’t we try it? So the first recorded fight in Rome, according to Livy, was in 264 it was for a funeral of a former consul, and it was put on by his sons. They decided that they were going to have something to make this particular funeral, something really memorable for everyone who turned up. And the Romans had just won a battle, and some of the guests were told, brought along some prisoners of war as guests, as presents for the family. And someone had the idea, let’s make them fight. So they did. And there were three pairs of gladiators at that first funeral, and then as funerals, it became, you know, popular to have that first one, obviously, was a hit. You see more and more and more gladiators being at each funeral until that part of the funeral could last multiple days, and it was put on either by the tomb or in the forum, if it was particularly big, and the whole of Rome would come out. And it was the point was not necessarily as a sacrifice to the dead, because that’s not something that the Romans were particularly interested in. But it was a show, particularly since these men were former consuls, and that’s a military role to show some military prowess, particularly, and. Prisoners of war, they’re usually caught with their own kit and their own skills, so they don’t need a lot of training, and so that they could be presented as a celebration. This is a former consul he was in charge of the army, and look, we’ve got prisoners of war fighting to the death, because we can do that because we’re winners. So that’s how they kind of started. And then Julius Caesar decides, I’m going to use this to my political advantage. Because why not? So he, of course, Julius Caesar started to say, I need to put on some games, because I can see how they’re making my peers really popular and look fantastic, especially to voters, but no one in my family’s died. What do I do? So he starts,

Dr Rad 5:48
What a tragedy.

Alexandra Sills 5:50
No one’s dead. It’s awful. So he starts putting on games 20 years after his family members have died, slightly delayed saying, Oh, I wasn’t rich enough to do it before, or, you know, I didn’t have the means, but I can do now, and I want to catch up. And it was always –

Dr Rad 6:09
We’ve all had those situations where your to do list gets away from you.

Alexandra Sills 6:13
Especially when your to do list is as long as his was. But, you know, he was saying, I can do it now, so I should, and it was very convenient that it was always in a year where he needed to win an election soon. So then you start having laws brought in by the senate saying, Julius, he’s been nuts. We need to put caps on how many gladiators you can have at a funeral, for instance. And he is assassinated before he can start completely divorcing funerals from gladiators. But then you get Augustus, and he’s been watching and he thinks, yeah, I can’t have rivals putting on a show bigger than I can. I’m going to monopolize gladiatorial combat, take it away from funerals and just make it mine. I’m the only one who can do it.

Dr G 7:04
Oh, the classic Augustus power move.

Dr Rad 7:07
It’s my thing. Yeah.

Alexandra Sills 7:08
Yeah. And that’s when it starts turning into the Imperial thing, where it’s put on by the emperor for the people, instead of by the sun for a dead father. And it carries on going and getting bigger and bigger and bigger for a couple of centuries, and we don’t really see it decline until the four or five hundreds. So it happened for an awfully long time. 1000s and 1000s, 10s of 1000s of gladiators were fighting across the entire empire.

Dr Rad 7:37
That is crazy when you think about it.

Dr G 7:39
It becomes quite an industry, hmm.

Dr Rad 7:42
I know now for some people seeing gladiator or gladiator two or some such might be the extent of their exposure to gladiators. You know, this is might be where they’re learning about gladiators. So thinking about gladiator two, tell us what are some perhaps surprising things that this film gets right about gladiators?

Alexandra Sills 8:08
So one of them seems to be accidental, but I’m going to go with it anyway.

Dr Rad 8:13
I love when historical movies do this.

Alexandra Sills 8:15
They had a character who was played by a Palestinian actress, and we don’t know who she was, but we think from the the stills that have been released that she was part of the staff of Denzel Washington’s character, but for reasons unknown to be diplomatic, she was cut from the film, and apparently it’s her narrative arc has been replaced at the last minute by a character who is the doctor in the gladiatorial school. And that’s brilliant, not for the actress, but for my purposes, because it does show that gladiatorial combat was not brutal, but survivable. And that, because they were huge investments and they were worth a lot of money, you would absolutely provide the best medical care available. For instance, one of the most famous doctors from the ancient world, chap called Galen started his career in Pergamon in Turkey as a gladiatorial doctor. And he credits his wonderful breadth of knowledge with spending two years with these guys who are getting sliced open all the time so that he can actually See inside what’s happening with tendons, muscles, internal organs. He wouldn’t have got access to that otherwise. So he credits two years at a gladiatorial school with giving him the wonderful amount of knowledge that meant that he could later come to Rome, and I think, you know, be a doctor for emperors, for goodness sake. So, yeah, the the gladiators were getting injured a lot. We don’t have a lot of gladiatorial skeletons. There’s a cemetery in York and a cemetery in Ephesus, and both of those cemeteries have skeletons with huge amounts of wounds, some of them we can tell time of death. This is what caused the guy to die. But there are also loads of wounds that have shown signs of healing and show signs of care in the healing as well, not just breaks, but cuts, slices. These bones are, you know, they tell a story. There’s even some bones. There’s one from York, which has got bites in it, you can see the teeth marks.

Dr G 10:43
Oh, God.

Alexandra Sills 10:46
And they go deep. I think it was into a hip bone. And, my goodness, I can’t imagine how that must have felt. I think they’ve measured the gaps between the teeth and how big the teeth are. I think they said it might have been a bear.

Dr G 10:58
Wow

Alexandra Sills 10:59
Horrifying.

Dr G 10:59
Okay, yeah,

Dr Rad 11:02
The hip bone’s connected to the jaw bone

Alexandra Sills 11:07
But, yeah, absolutely, these guys would have had the top line of medical care. So it was really nice that, accidentally, they had this character added at the last minute and gave him that profession, because it does show that they were receiving some care. They weren’t just thrown away the first time they got a cut, because a cut is more dangerous in many ways, because you can get an infection.

Dr Rad 11:32
So I agree. I really liked that aspect of the doctor character was probably one of my favorite parts, because it wasn’t something that you actually saw very much of in the first movie, either. So that was like a new addition. And yeah, I agree that was a really nice touch. And it also does show, as you say, that the Romans, as much as obviously, we struggle with this aspect of their culture, sometimes it does show that they weren’t just keen to throw away the lives of these particular fighters. That wasn’t the purpose of these games, which I think is what people think. Sometimes they think the Romans wanted to see death. And I’m like, Well, it’s a little bit more complicated.

Alexandra Sills 12:17
Yeah, they absolutely weren’t going to see death. They were going to see how men reacted to impending death with dignity. It was like a kind of teachable moment. If you’re going to die, do it with some dignity, like these guys are, but they weren’t going for that. Specifically. They were going to see how you prevent your death through skill, through discipline. So it wasn’t going to see people die. It was going to see people try to kill using skill and discipline, but also to save their own skins, and that was a far, far more important aspect.

Dr Rad 12:56
Now, Little Timmy, we’ve brought you here for your fifth birthday so that you can learn life’s most important lesson.

Alexandra Sills 13:03
I mean, it’s, can you imagine the wiggles?

Dr G 13:07
It’s a whole new show now.

Alexandra Sills 13:12
But yeah, it was. It was not a conveyor belt of of death and destruction like we sometimes see in Hollywood. It was much more about the tactics and thinking things through. And you can see them thinking what their next move is going to be. How am I going to defend from this blow? So I think instead of, you know, just like mindless violence, we should consider it like how some people watch sport now from sofas. They’re not just thinking, ‘yeah, get him’ necessarily. They’re thinking, ‘okay, if it was me, I would go this way around, and I would make sure that I’ve got this defense’. And I, you know, we should think of the spectators as kind of back seat drivers, and they’re analyzing little pieces. It’s not mindless. They they know what they’re looking at. And they’re thinking, Yeah, okay, I like that. That technique is going to work. I think, yeah, okay, that’s good. Or I really don’t like that guy’s style. Does he not realize he’s leaving this side of his body, and, you know, undefended, what’s he doing? That kind of thing. We should consider them to be connoisseurs. I think that’s, that’s the better way to think about it.

Dr Rad 14:31
Yeah, which we’ve normally seen as, like, this crazy, mindless mob, which is what we normally see in movies, yeah,

Dr G 14:36
Uh oh, not the, not the crowd in the film.

Dr Rad 14:40
Not the crowd. Look, he’s coming in with the two swords, and he’s chopping that guy’s head right off. I hate it when he does that.

Dr G 14:49
Classic. I think this leads in really nicely to thinking about what, what makes a cinematic gladiator, as opposed to an an ancient world old gladiator. So we’ve got this idea that there there’s a sophistication to the fighting, a sophistication to the way that they’re looked after. The crowd is intelligent, knows what they’re looking for. How does this compare to the idea of the cinematic gladiator, and some of the tropes that come through in that version of the gladiator?

Alexandra Sills 15:24
Yeah, I’ve looked at a lot, a lot of screen gladiators for my research, and there are certain things that happen almost every single time. So one of them is the spectators will just be bloodthirsty, mindless, an anonymized mass incapable of any sophisticated thought. So let’s get rid of that straight away. One of the other things that makes a screen gladiator is that they don’t start off in a lowered position. The gladiator in Rome was the lowest of the low they were classed as infamia, which is where we get the word infamous, obviously. And that’s the same class as sex workers and funeral directors, because funeral directors, they touch corpses so they’re not clean anyone who sells their body. Sex workers, actors, these are people that you might cheer when you see them perform, but you’re not going to want to be seen next to them at a dinner party. That would be awful. But screen gladiators, they don’t start off as enslaved people or something like this. They’re always noble in their own way. They’re not, you know anyone plucked from obscurity, that they’re always generals or Starfleet commanders in Star Trek, that kind of thing, and they always have to be demoted before they can be thrown into the arena. And we see this in both gladiator movies, because Maximus is a general. Acacius is a general. Lucius is, you know, grandson of an emperor who is a general. So these guys aren’t the lowest of the low. They’re performing for plebs, because that’s what these spectators always are plebs. But they always have to have an honor that they’ve always had. They can’t earn honor in the arena. They can only claw some of it back, which I think is interesting, because that’s not what gladiators were doing in the real world. They were plucked from obscurity and completely self making their honor, rather than having to fight for it back. And there’s there’s other things that make a screen gladiator. You’ve always got to have a wife who’s killed horribly, or a family member who’s tortured.

Dr Rad 18:03
Gives you a reason to fight. Gotta get that rage.

Alexandra Sills 18:07
Yeah, it gives you, it gives them a reason to fight, but it kind of gives the audience permission to approve of them doing these horrible things that we see. If it was any other character beheading another for no other reason than this guy told me to you’d think it was awful, and that’s how we think of their opponents, who are not given any backstory. They’re just awful, aren’t they, but our heroes have something noble to fight for because they’re mourning or they have a love interest that they want to get back to, so it kind of gives them a humanity that therefore gives us permission to say, Yeah, okay, we’re gonna let you stab that guy, because we understand why you want to do it. And that is kind of giving us permission to not be the mindless, bloodthirsty mass of the Roman spectators, even though we’re all watching the same thing, which is interesting, because the Romans kind of did give their spectators permission to watch this by anonymizing their gladiators. They did the opposite. They didn’t give them back stories and make them underdogs. And you know, talk about the loved ones that they had at home. The Romans, put a helmet on them, gave them stage names and absolutely no personality whatsoever, so that they were dehumanized in a way that the spectators could think, yeah, okay, I can watch them die because I can’t see their face. I can’t see the fear on their face. There’s no emotion there. It might – it’s barely a person. We can watch them die if necessary, but we do the opposite. We give them families, and we give them hopes and dreams and a reason to escape the arena and the life that they can just see for themselves, just over the horizon, if they can just get out. So I think that’s an interesting kind of inversion to what we do.

Dr Rad 19:58
It is interesting.

Alexandra Sills 19:59
Yeah.

Dr Rad 19:59
Yeah, yeah. It is interesting when you think about the comparison to, like, modern day, you know, WWF fighters or MMA. I can’t even remember what those things are called, because I’m no interest in them whatsoever in real life. But we also don’t do that with them either, like you don’t have them coming out going, well, here’s Steve Austin, and he’s got a lovely wife, who’s 35 at home and two adorable children. He is going to slam his opponent. Nor can you actually imagine, in ancient Rome someone announcing Spartacus coming out and saying, This is Spartacus. He was sold into slavery with the love of his life. He’s going to be fighting for her today.

Alexandra Sills 20:38
Yeah, they would have thought that was bizarre. So yeah, it’s, it’s interesting that for us, obviously there has to be a storyline to make a movie, although someone needs to perhaps remind Ridley Scott that storylines need a bit more work. It’s, it’s not just that we need a narrative arc, but they all have the same ones. They all have the murdered wife. They all have a love interest outside of the murdered wife, just to give them a little bit more love to still to come. They all have the same inner turmoil, which means that pretty much every gladiator on screen, including in fantasy, sci fi comedy, they all copy Spartacus, in a way, and it means that they’re all kind of copy pastes. It’s always the same storyline, just in a slightly different setting, which

Dr Rad 21:38
is an interesting thing to bring up, actually, because whilst I know the Starz series is quite different, and there are so many versions of Spartacus which don’t follow this particular storyline, but the really famous Spartacus from 1960 he actually doesn’t start from a high point. He, I mean, his character starts from a high point. That’s what we’re meant to leave, right? But he actually does start from obscurity. He’s meant to be the mines. So in that, in that respect, he doesn’t fit this particular trope, but we see enough of him, in terms of his training at the gladiator school and the relationship that he builds with verinia that a lot of those tropes you’re talking about apply. And that’s exactly what Howard Fast was going for he as incredibly unlikely it was that somebody would be taken from the mines and put into the arena. He wanted to have that particular arc where he goes from nothing to being this incredibly noble, admirable person, and that’s what we see in in that movie, but, but that is weird. It’s weird to see, yeah, coming from slavery.

Alexandra Sills 22:42
I think that’s really interesting, because Howard Fast obviously has him as this messianic figure that manages to really, truly threaten Rome. And let’s be honest, he really did truly threaten Rome. And yeah, but you know, we all know how that movie was made, and he had to be brought down a peg or two – communism – but the Starz series has him as a warrior who who’s telling the Roman general, if you did it my way, we’d be winning this battle right now, which you know feeds in again, the more that gladiators develop on screen, the more they have to have martial experience before the arena. Not only is it a shortcut, a narrative shortcut, you don’t have to train them because they’ve already, you know, won all of these big battles, but they –

Dr Rad 23:35
And they’re brilliant. They’re naturally just brilliant.

Alexandra Sills 23:38
They’re all, you know, prodigies of of warfare. But it’s really interesting. Even in in speculative fiction, you’ve got say, Katniss Everdeen, going into the Hunger Games, they make sure to mention she’s an ace with a bow because of her hunting. In all of them, you have to have this kind of, don’t worry, guys, this person’s going to be fine, or perhaps not fine, but they’re going to do well because they have prior experience that ties along with their inner honor. So yeah, it’s it wasn’t a surprise to me when they had Lucius in that first battle, you know, doing his thing, being amazing, even though he clearly had no training as a child back in Rome, he’s received it elsewhere, and now he’s a military genius, just like the other ones. Of course, he is.

Dr Rad 24:35
Well, I mean, this is, I’m so glad you brought up Lucius Verus Aurelius, supposed hero of this film, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Gladiator Two, not because of you, Paul. I’m not blaming you, but yeah, let’s talk about him and how he is matching up to these tropes. Because, yeah, you’re totally right. He was a little pampered imperial prince when we saw him last, and now he is a rugged, masculine sword on legs.

Alexandra Sills 25:08
Yeah, none of this decadence that you see in Rome, obviously that would be awful.

Dr Rad 25:14
I turned my back on my noble heritage.

Alexandra Sills 25:17
So we obviously you see him first tending his farm. Because, guess what? His dad had a farm. It’s in his blood, tending his farm with his wife, and they have a little bit of a kiss over the laundry. And you know she’s going to be dead in two minutes.

Dr G 25:36
Yeah, the setup is real.

Alexandra Sills 25:38
So she immediately gets pushed into a refrigerator off of a wall, into the sea within minutes. And you know that’s going to happen because it happens. Every single one of these stories follows the same path, the same narrative blocks. So you knew she was going to die, and she does thankful at least that they gave her a bow and arrow so that she at least went down fighting, which is a massive improvement.

Dr Rad 26:02
Women are always now military geniuses as well, but not genius enough to not get killed immediately in their very stylish corseted kind of breast armor.

Alexandra Sills 26:13
Oh, the boob armor. Yeah, that wall had crenalltions. She could have hidden herself perfectly well, but no, she stands up completely undefended. Of course she does. So, yeah, he’s obviously devastated. His wife’s just died. Because you have to have them devastated. It gives them a reason to fight the imperialism itself. Isn’t enough of a reason, because that happens to all of them. You need to give them personal reason, because they are special. They’re the main character. So he’s given his reason. That’s lovely. You see her go off to the underworld. Nice touch. I have to say, I enjoyed seeing Charon. I do think it was a bit of a missed opportunity. I love seeing Charon with his little boat, bless him, but I think they could have tied in, if you’re going to have anachronisms, go for it, but I think it would have been really cool to see his wife get on the real Charon’s boat over to the underworld and then in the arena later to feature the Charon character that you sometimes see in literature in the arena, who was a member of the staff dressed as the god, the Etruscan version of the God, who would come in with a hammer. And if there are any prone gladiators, and you think, are they dead? Are they faking it? Are they just trying to get out of, you know, being stabbed, the usual way, Charon would come on as massive hammer and whack him on the head, just to make sure that they were truly dead and weren’t faking it. I thought that would have been such a wonderful call back. You could have had him have it like a PTSD episode when he sees this guy dressed as Charon and remember his wife and go into berserker mode. But, you know,

Dr Rad 26:34
That would have been cool.

Alexandra Sills 27:34
It would have been cool, but you know, that would have required a movie that had more time spent on the script, maybe.

Dr Rad 28:08
It irritated me at the time that they had that afterlife segment, because to me, it was just trying to give Lucius the Maximus thing with the grain. It was just his version of the grain that we constantly saw Maximus, you know, running his hand through with the sad music. And, yeah, the biggest thing I hated, I suppose, about this movie was how much it was just trying to hit those same notes as the first film, and doing it so badly.

Alexandra Sills 28:35
Yeah

Dr Rad 28:36
That, yeah, it actually irritated me. But I do see where you’re coming from, and I like your vision.

Alexandra Sills 28:41
Yeah, you know, if there is a Gladiator Three, and apparently there is going to be, you know, call me. I work for cheap.

Dr G 28:49
Yeah, get some real gladiator information in there. You know, stack that script with something really cool.

Alexandra Sills 28:55
He doesn’t allow, you know, experts on on set. I think he did talk to someone beforehand with the script, but they weren’t allowed on set because he was so annoyed about the Napoleon comments, it would have made the film better having the expert on set. It didn’t have to be, you know, every day, but just little things would have been anyway.

Dr G 29:20
Well, I was thinking, like, in terms of thinking about these tropes related to the cinematic gladiators. Obviously Lucius is fitting right in there, and also creating this kind of, like mirror image, if you like, to Maximus, which is obviously part of what this film is all about. But now that we’re talking about Charon as well, and this element of the Underworld, I think it’s time to hit that note of Virgil’s Aeneid. And the quotation that is floating through this film that gets repeated again and again, and it’s a famous translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. It comes from John Dryden and. And it’s Aeneid Book Six, lines 126 to 129, for the cool kids in the crowd who want to go and have a look at their Virgil’s Aeneid, “The gates of hell are open night and day. Smooth, the descent and easy is the way, but to return and view the cheerful skies in this the task and mighty labor lies.” Now, I think, first of all, it was hilarious to me that we saw it in English in some places. But this also is a direct reference to Aeneas attempt to go down into the Underworld. So, yeah, this is an idea that comes through in a lot of ancient heroic literature. This really symbolic katabasis, a journey to the underworld, where you survive and are able to return.

Alexandra Sills 30:52
Yeah.

Dr G 30:53
And I’m interested in your perspective on what’s going on with Lucius and this idea of the journey to the Underworld. There’s clearly a moment where he’s getting access to seeing parts of the Underworld in moments. So yeah, I’m keen for your thoughts on this.

Alexandra Sills 31:09
I thought it was really interesting. And to start off, I thought, Oh, they’re making a real attempt to engage with, you know how the ancients thought about death. Then I thought, maybe I’m giving them too much credit, but it was interesting the way that they made him quote that they’re they’re not only harking back to the education that he had as a childhood and that he clearly still remembers. He he still connects with that part of his identity before he was forced to flee. But I thought it was interesting because it’s clearly marking Lucius. He’s got an education. He’s elite, he’s noble. He can quote Virgil, he’s noble, and that’s how you can tell he’s not your average gladiator. And in a film that’s supposed to be saying that gladiators can change the world, even though that we know that they didn’t. It’s interesting that they have to mark him out as superior to the other ones. He’s different. It’s only the exceptional gladiator that can change the world, because the rest of them are mindless drones who just, you know, they have a sword put in their hand and do as they’re told. So I did think it was interesting that they kind of had to make him the literary gladiator. He’s got a mind. He thinks for himself. Oh, okay, fine. Everyone clapped. But yet, I thought it was again interesting to think of his whole journey as a katabasis. He goes into the arena. It’s the liminal place of death. He’s constantly trying to communicate with his dead father, who, of course, failed in his katabasis. They’re not always successful in Greek literature, I think it was, oh, who was it? Theseus went down there, and Hercules went down there. Someone didn’t come back up. And I can’t remember who my professor, who taught me my katabasis module, is currently slamming her head against the table.

Dr G 33:08
The important point is that not everybody makes it some attempt it and do not return.

Alexandra Sills 33:11
Absolutely. Some attempts fail. And it’s important to remember that the katabasis is a huge undertaking that is supposed to be difficult. That’s why it’s such a great story. So, yeah, he, of course, goes into the arena. It’s a place of death communicating. He wants to achieve something. You don’t just go down there for a holiday. You’re going down to achieve something. And it brings it back to the idea that his father didn’t survive. And the thing is, with the first film, it ends with a positive note, Maximus has died, but he sacrificed himself for the greater good, and everything’s going to be fine now, and we’re going to end with a sunrise to symbolize it. But the problem with coming up with a sequel that never should have happened is you have to admit to yourself, we’re following history. So we have to say to our audience, the whole first film happened for nothing, because it didn’t change anything. And in fact, it’s worse. So it’s kind of putting that katabasis in to say the first katabasis was amazing, but it failed. You didn’t come back out of the arena. So technically, it wasn’t a katabasis at all. It was just a really elongated suicide mission. But Lucius, he knows this in advance. He’s watched one happen before. He’s thinking about the past all the time. It’s like he’s read the Odyssey and the Indian that have got these maps of the underworld, and this is how he’s going to survive. He’s going to learn from previous trips into the liminal space full of death. So I did think that was interesting, particularly since he does survive. But it’s actually in in all of the other gladiatorial stories, you’re far more likely to survive in sci fi, fantasy, speculative fiction, if you’re the protagonist, loads of your friends will die. But in the swords and sandals, your chances of dying are much higher. So Spartacus, obviously, he doesn’t die in an arena, but the battle is shown as one large arena. So he obviously does. He has to. Pompeii Milo, played by Kit Harington, with his 0% body fat, he dies again, not in an arena, but you could talk about Vesuvius as you know, the ultimate opponent. He dies.

Dr Rad 35:45
He’s close to an arena.

Alexandra Sills 35:46
Yeah, he’s he’s adjacent, and Maximus dies. Lucius is one of the only swords and sandals gladiatorial protagonists to actually reach the end credits with all of his limbs intact and still breathing. So that’s pretty incredible. So the whole katabasis motif that they’re using is pretty fitting, because not only in the literature, but in the movie history of gladiators, the swords and sandals ones, they don’t leave generally. So yeah, I thought it was interesting. But again, if you’re, if you’re going to introduce these ideas and then announce another sequel that perhaps doesn’t need to happen, you’re going to need to change it again. So it’ll be interesting to see what they do. If they do, I don’t know.

Dr G 36:41
I’m very excited for Gladiator Three, which doesn’t involve the arena at all, but is just senatorial politics, as Lucius tries to wrangle everybody into line in in the way and manner of Tiberius and getting frustrated and then maybe leaving Rome again, being like, you know, I’m done with you guys, I can’t.

Dr Rad 37:04
that would be cool if we had a Tiberius inspired Lucius, I’d be on board for that. But I have to come back to this idea that that Lucius survives. I totally get what you’re saying about the particular storyline they’re possibly following. But as someone who constantly disappointed me in this film, what do you think about the lack of a tragic death volusus, I mean, would it have made it a better movie if he also, I think, died, or is it too much like Maximus?

Alexandra Sills 37:38
They did follow the storyline of the first one almost exactly, and they had to change it somewhere. But I do think he probably should have died, because, for a start, we know that he never became emperor. So you’ve got that hurdle, you’ve you’ve changed history so much, either you’ve got to start saying we’re going completely fictional, or you’ve got to admit this guy should have been dead for a couple of decades already. What I found interesting was the way that Macrinus is constantly talking about Lucius rage and how it’s a gift. Never let it go. It will carry you to greatness. And I thought that that probably unintentionally, had kind of parallels to Achilles in the Iliad, his rage is a tool that will carry him to greatness. Because Achilles, everyone knows the name Achilles now. And I thought that was an interesting parallel. On the other hand, for a gladiator, I think rage is the last thing that you want, because rage makes you careless, and we do see him being fairly careless at times during the movie.

Dr Rad 39:01
And that’s a big difference with Maximus, actually.

Alexandra Sills 39:03
Yeah

Dr Rad 39:05
That’s a bit of a difference with Maximus, because Maximus is dead inside. He is calm and calculated when he is forced to fight because he doesn’t care. He’s like, I don’t care if I live or die. I don’t he like. He has a certain level of rage towards certain people and about certain things, but it’s nothing like what Lucius is shown to have in this particular film I don’t think.

Alexandra Sills 39:29
No, you’re right. I think Maximus died when he saw his family at the farm. Really exactly Lucius is angrier. It’s not an anger that particularly goes anywhere. It’s kind of –

Dr Rad 39:47
We’re told he’s angry, but is he? I mean, he has moments, but it’s like when people tell me, you seem upset and I wasn’t upset, but then I feel upset because they’ve said that. I feel like that’s what happens to Lucius. People say You seem angry. You seem filled with rage. And he’s like, what?

Alexandra Sills 40:02
Well, I am now. What are you trying to say about my face?

Dr Rad 40:03
Exactly! What are you trying to say about me?

Alexandra Sills 40:09
For a start, he he’s sent straight to the arena, which, again, it didn’t happen the there’s a line Macrinus says in the film, gladiators are nearly all prisoners of war. That might have been true in the middle Republic, but it’s certainly not true into a mature empire. There were, there was no point. By that point gladiators, and this is something that the film doesn’t understand, gladiators were highly, highly specialized. They were fighters, but they weren’t soldier fighters. They weren’t transferable skills necessarily. You wouldn’t put a legionary in untrained into an arena, just as you wouldn’t send an army of gladiators out onto the field, because it’s not the same style. So we see a little bit of training, but we don’t see the weird differences in between the gladiators. So for instance, the retiarius with his trident and net, that’s weird, and it’s cool because it’s weird. They’re seeing something that they don’t see on battlefields, all of these different types, the retiarius, the mermelo, they’re all highly, highly specialized in style, and that’s what gives you the novelty, the diversity in fights, because they’re not all the same. Every single fighter has a different style. They’re always put on against the same type of opponent, so that’s specifically what they train for. And because of this, this specific styles and training that they need, they weren’t using prisoners of war. They were much more likely to have a stable of gladiators that was mainly enslaved people that they’d bought for the purpose and would train from scratch so that they didn’t have any bad habits from their previous life. You could train them to do exactly what you wanted them to do, and volunteers from from free men. So again, the fact that he’s a soldier, the fact that Acacia Maximus, they’re all soldiers, and that’s supposed to set them apart. I think actually, it would have been a more interesting film to say, yes, these guys are battlefield whizzes, but it doesn’t help them in the arena, because this is an entirely new ball game.

Dr Rad 42:45
Well, I think it’s how they fight when we see them in battle scenes, because they are the hero. We are still seeing them in these kinds of moments that I think Livy would have loved, these fantastic jewels on the battlefield between them and another fantastic warrior from the other side, which is the kind of moment that historians like Livy enjoyed celebrating, but was not really, obviously what most people would have experienced being in the Roman military. You know, you have to be a team. You have to work together. It’s not about the one guy breaking through the lines and, you know, and challenging the other leader of the other side, that’s so unlikely to happen all the time.

Dr G 43:31
I think it also hits towards the problem of filmic gladiators, in the sense that the arena fighting in no way resembles what we would expect from the ancient evidence for how these things were conducted. So we know that there were umpires essentially who were always looking on and making sure that the rules of gladiatorial combat were being followed, and allowing for breaks and pauses and also seeking additional advice if needed. So there’s a whole apparatus around ancient gladiatorial fighting, which we I don’t, not in my expectation or not in my experience. And both of you have watched more gladiator films than I have so but I have not seen that on film?

Alexandra Sills 44:21
No, I mean, Spartacus Starz has probably the closest to what I would call authenticity in the fights, but even they don’t show a lot of referees or things like that, then they’re more consistent with their pairings, for instance. But there are certain things I would love to see a fight between two rivals, and they’re constantly calling ref, ref. Are you gonna? Are you seeing this?

Dr Rad 44:50
We agreed nothing on the face! I’ve got a really important date later on today.

Dr G 44:57
That’s right, the old falling over and clutching the legs. Being like, Oh, you got me!

Dr Rad 45:03
And they’re like, typical, he’s from Spain.

Alexandra Sills 45:09
And there is always this argument of, you can’t do authentic Roman fighting styles because it doesn’t work on screen. But it certainly worked for an arena where you’ve got people in a huge seating area who could still perfectly see what was going on.

Dr Rad 45:28
I think that’s because of what we’ve been trained to expect. There’s a certain with all of these things, like what you’re talking about with you, the tropes and the way that gladiator films mimic each other so closely, there’s a reason for that, right. Hollywood is, in its bones, conservative, because the number one goal is to make money, and the best way to make money is to stick with the sure thing, something that you know is going to pay dividends. And so you take the formula that’s always worked, and then you tweak it a bit, and there is something to be said for audiences going in and knowing what to expect and enjoying that, because they know what to expect, like for example, I am sadly and tragically. I know for 2024 almost 2025 will be 2025 by the time we release this, a fan of the James Bond movies. Why? Because I know what I’m getting when I go into a James Bond movie, and I get really upset when they play with the world. I don’t like it. I don’t like to I mean, spoilers everybody, but I didn’t like it that they killed off James Bond. Didn’t like it, didn’t care for it. And so I think that’s something to be said for gladiator films as well. We know what to expect. It’s a particular style of fighting. It’s a particular way of showing the arena sequences, and we enjoy it with a twist.

Alexandra Sills 46:46
Yeah, I think. And to be fair, that does mirror the Romans. That’s why they had these styles, so that they knew what to expect, so that they could analyze the tiny details, and, you know, learn, learn the ropes themselves, so that they could comment. So it is a fair comment. Um, I would love to see shields, though. I say this all the time, the shield. And this goes into another one of my points that I really wanted to make. There’s nowhere near enough nipples on display. All of these guys have got massive breast plates on, and this works if you’re on a battlefield. But the whole point of gladiatorial combat was it was different from being a soldier if you have all this armor on, the fight becomes too easy. If you’re half naked and you’re just wearing a little loin cloth and some padding around your arms and legs, it suddenly becomes a lot harder. The stakes suddenly become a lot higher. We should be seeing nipples left, right and center.

Dr Rad 47:56
So you’d like them with three nipples.

Dr G 47:59
Hollywood, are you paying attention?

Alexandra Sills 48:01
And this is where the shield comes in, because all of a sudden the shield doesn’t become something that’s handy. Suddenly it becomes absolutely essential. And you’ve got two different types. You have the scutarii. They’re using the Roman-style scutum, and which is quite large. It should, if held in the right position, come just above the base of your helmet, and then go just below your knee, so it’s covering most of you, which means that your opponent can see metal helmet, scutum, metal grieve. They’re seeing a tank. You’re an armored tank. And then you’ve got the guys the parmularii. They’re using the small parmula style sheet shields, which are smaller, sometimes round, about the size of a dustbin lid. And they’re a little bit smaller so they’ve got more on display, which means that their Greaves and their arm things are longer to compensate for that, but they have to work a little bit harder to protect their torsos as well. They’re the light that they didn’t really have heavy weight or light weight, so they don’t have weight classes at all. But if you think about it this way, you’ve got the tanks with the big shields, and you’ve got the more nimble guys with their little shields. They’ve got to move a bit harder.

Dr Rad 49:16
So not only guys, you know, they’re they’re pros and cons, basically.

Alexandra Sills 49:20
Absolutely. So not only have you got these guys that have got different fighting styles because of the gear that they’re wearing, you’ve also got a little bit of novelty and a little bit of diversity there in the styles, but it becomes something that’s absolutely essential, and it’s not just for defense. You can use it as an offensive weapon, and all of a sudden, the fights become more interesting because of that, because you’ve got to have two arms constantly working at once, which involves more brain power, more tactics. When we’ve seen fights on screen, they they look exactly the same as the. Jewels in medieval movies, because they don’t use the shields either. I think it’s just an opportunity maybe to show a different style, because it’s fun to watch. There was a little bit of shield work on the star Spartacus series, a little bit of shield work in the new ‘Those About To Die’ series on Peacock, and it does kind of demonstrate that it’s not, you’re not a soldier, and they’ve got these massive breast plates on, and it became a whole plot point, didn’t it with he’s got his father’s breastplate on, and it protected him.

Dr G 50:41
I mean, it does make you invincible. It’s like, it’s incredible, that breastplate, whatever it’s made out of, that’s what I want mine made out of.

Alexandra Sills 50:49
His plot armor was literally plot armor, which was a little bit on the nose for me, not, not the most subtle.

Dr G 50:58
No, no, and you’re expecting tragedy at that point, and that’s the moment that we don’t get the tragedy, and you realize something else is going to happen instead, you’re like, Uh oh. Taking this – you’ve mentioned Macrinus earlier, and so I want to bring things around to him, because to me, he is my favorite character in this film, yeah, but there is Denzel Washington, I think, brings the most amazing performance to this, and everybody else is kind of just trying to, like, actively catch up. But one of the things that I think is really interesting that they’ve decided to explore is the sort of fluidity of sexual expression that comes with this character, and we see this particularly with his interactions with the senator Thrax. And I’m interested about your perspective on how this sort of shapes up in comparison to the ancient evidence we have for Roman sexuality, particularly in this imperial period.

Alexandra Sills 52:00
Okay, so speaking about ancient sexuality, I think it’s interesting that all of the gladiators in particularly, in particular, are all very heterosexual, apart from in Starz Spartacus, which I don’t think is likely, personally, with Macrinus. I think it’s really interesting that they decided to go the way they did. And by what I’ve read about various interviews, particularly from Denzel Washington, is that he was pushing for it more than perhaps Ridley Scott intended. I heard there was a kiss that got cut. I would have loved to have seen that.

Dr G 52:40
Yes, I heard that too.

Alexandra Sills 52:41
Yeah, I think it’s interesting when these films put in ideas about race, gender and sexuality, but we have to be careful, because they’re always doing it from a modern perspective. So for instance, when we’re talking about black gladiators, they’re always doing it from a post 1960s experience in America. And I think they’re doing the same kind of thing with gender and sexuality. They want to talk about how the Roman world was different. It’s alien, but they’re doing it in a way that is commenting on the modern world, just a little bit too much for comfort. So for instance, in these movies, in the first one, the only queer character was a giraffe-

Dr Rad 53:41
Which was delightful.

Alexandra Sills 53:42
In the second in the second one, it’s Macrinus. Turns out to be evil. Sorry, spoiler alert, and the emperors are queer, coded and they’re evil. I would have liked to have seen something that wasn’t so cheap and predictable. I think it is possible to show that sexuality was entirely different without trying to take pot shots at wokery in a movie. So that that disappointed me, especially with the the Severans, because how do we show that they’re bad? We could show them doing bad things, or we could show them in makeup and and, you know, demonstrate, oh, these guys are gay, and that’s how you know that they’re bad. I thought that was really disappointing,

Dr Rad 54:40
Especially because, as you say, with Caracalla and Gaeta, this was a real opportunity, which people might not be aware of, because these are not particularly well known emperors, I would say. And I mean people who’ve been to Rome, they might have heard Caracalla name because of the baths, but they’re not very well known. They haven’t been shown widely in popular culture before, so people don’t really know them as personalities particularly well, the same way that they know someone like Caligula or Nero. And what they might be unaware of is where these guys come from, their parents, I suppose, in to put it into modern terms, that people would understand people of color and casting, and then the makeup on top of that, and then the queerness, I mean, it’s just it’s taking you so far away from reality. Now that might not be a problem if it was doing something interesting with it or doing something creative with it. But as you say, I was really disappointed that really Scott chose to go this direction, because I feel like it actually did him no – it just it did nobody any favors to go this direction. It didn’t add anything to the story. I don’t think it was just so problematic on so many levels, like when we saw the trailer and we saw their makeup, we were like, What is going on with that? And then to actually get into the movie and realize we were 100% right? And that was the message that Ridley Scott was trying to send. I was like, dude, what is this here? Like, I know you. I know you are an older director, but to me, that should bring wisdom. Yeah, you harking back to these 1950s 1960s things that we saw in Spartacus, where, you know, Crassus is the evil one, so he’s queer. It’s just, yeah,

Alexandra Sills 56:30
Exactly, yeah. It was cheap and it was unimaginative, and it could have been so much better, particularly Caracalla. Not only was he a person of color, but in the first film, you’ve got Commodus, who wishes that he was a guy that soldiers could identify with and admire, but Caracalla was the soldier’s emperor. They loved him. He loved them most of the time, but he was someone that they could identify with because he was a rough, tough, military type.

Dr Rad 57:07
Yeah, that’s where his name comes from, right?

Alexandra Sills 57:10
Yeah, exactly. And instead, you’ve got, I mean, it’s a film that talks about Rome is corrupt, and the fringes are where you will find honor. And then in the next breath, says, but the fringes are also they’re a different race, so let’s not be too kind about them. Then you’ve also got a wasted opportunity. With Caracalla being the type of emperor that Commodus wishes that he was, it would have been great to see Maximus son go up against the Emperor that his uncle wishes he was.

Dr Rad 57:48
Absolutely.

Alexandra Sills 57:49
It would have been great.

Dr Rad 57:50
Yeah, and this is where it’s like, okay, you don’t have to stick to history. Nobody’s saying that these days, most academics we speak to totally get that movies are not history lessons, and therefore you’re allowed to have creative license, but when you’re going against the history, and you’re not doing something better with it, and the actual history would have made for a better storyline, that’s where I’m lost, because I’m thinking the same thing as you. I’m thinking this film could have been so much better if you’d actually paid attention to the history, because it’s more interesting than what you came up with, which isn’t creative, it is rehashed garbage.

Alexandra Sills 58:26
Yeah and I think, I mean, I do agree it is a movie and it’s not, it’s not a lecture in some institution. On the other hand, I think that if a movie production shows attention to detail with the source material to the tiniest details. It also goes hand in hand with them being the type of production that spends time and effort thinking about smaller details, like, I don’t know, the narrative characterization, the dialog. I think it’s interesting that we can see very clearly that films that don’t care about authenticity also have terrible scripts and terrible dialog awful it’s the ones that pay attention to the little details that they’re the type to get the big details right. And I think this is why this movie was so disappointing, because it felt so it felt like something it’s difficult to describe. And the reason is because I’ve recently been doing some research on how the first gladiators movie has been viewed since by far right extremists, particularly in America, and reading that researching for that paper was so disheartening. I. Because I had to ask myself, why do they love the first film? What is there to see? So I was reading blogs and reading what they’re saying, you know, why are there people dressed as Maximus in the January 6 riots? There’s got to be reason for it. So I went back to look at the first film. And there is racism, there is misogyny, there’s all these kind of things, homophobia. In the second film, I can see all of this, except it’s been the volume has been turned up on it. Not only have you got whitewashed severins, who are now queer because queer equals evil, but you’ve got Macrinus. Macrinus is a black man who’s angry, which is, in itself, quite the trope already, is it not? But I think it’s really dangerous in the current climate to have a black man who used to be a slave and is now freed to go on such a revenge story, I think it’s sending the wrong message. You can’t free these men. You can’t give them equal opportunities, because they’re still angry, and they will come back at you with a sword in their hand. I think that’s the first film has become very popular with alt right groups, and I think the second film is going to be even more so. And the messaging in it, I get a little bit frustrated with it’s just a movie, because I’ve just spent, you know, a year deep, diving into people who don’t think it’s just a movie. They think it’s a manifesto, and it is having real world consequences, to the point where, if you see on social media, for instance, someone with a gladiator in their profile picture, nine times out of 10, if you read that bio, you’re going to be absolutely horrified.

Dr Rad 1:02:01
So that’s that’s accurate to say, in the sense that I don’t say any of these things, because I don’t think release got has any talent, obviously, hugely talented director, I love a lot of his movies, and I know that this isn’t held an opinion, held by every historian out there, but I actually really loved the first Gladiator, not because I am part of an alt right group. I should say.

Alexandra Sills 1:02:26
Yeah, it’s hard that you have to clarify.

Dr Rad 1:02:28
Yeah, exactly, but because it did exactly what I was just talking about. It did fictionalize the past massively, but it did so in a way that I think it still spoke to something that I recognized in the Rome that I study, which is that nostalgia for the Republic, which people like Tacitus, I mean, that’s their that’s their thing, that’s their brand. And so I recognize that, and also a character like Maximus, I recognize the Cincinnati’s character type, and I love seeing it on the screen. I totally recognize the way that people like to look at Marcus Aurelius and the way that he was characterized as well. And so I felt the first movie, whilst fictionalizing, still said something about the Rome that I studied, and it didn’t do it in such a problematic way that I couldn’t get into it. And it was cinematically stunning. This is the this is the thing with Ridley Scott, right? He is such a talented director, and he works with people who are obviously hugely talented as well in terms of the esthetic that they create. So all of his films, whether the storyline is good or not, are visually arresting. I mean, Napoleon Woo, My God, what a slog, and yet visually amazing, gorgeous, beautiful. Couldn’t floor what I was seeing, floored what I was hearing and the actual storyline. And that’s the danger, because we humans are very visual creatures. I mean, Ridley Scott himself is a visual creature, right? He’s influenced by other films. He’s influenced by art. Hell, Gladiator was supposedly inspired by a piece of art, and so surely he must understand the power of visual media to influence people’s real world actions, because that’s exactly why that’s a mythology that we’re fed about the reason that he got involved in the first gladiator film in the first place.

Alexandra Sills 1:04:14
Yeah, I mean, he’d already cast Caracalla and Geta with the palest actors he could have possibly found, I think, I can’t remember whether it was go to a Caracalla, but one of them was originally supposed to be Barry Keoghan, who is really incredibly pale, but he decided that he wanted to go off and do, I think it was Salt Burn, which, you know, is a whole different movie. So that’s why we got, I think it was Fred Hechinger, so he was Caracalla, who’s even paler, if that was even possible, because, you know, Barry Keoghan is properly Irish, milky white. And then to add white on top of that, and then to have Denzel Washington and with his authentic accent, for instance, which I know has caused issues, because, you know, everyone’s saying it’s New York accent, and that’s inauthentic. So is British RP. Sorry to disappoint everyone, on both those counts, noone ever spoke in an English accent in Rome. But I think what disappointed me so much was that all of these they’re not even micro aggressions, their aggression aggressions, and they felt more deliberate this time around.

Dr Rad 1:05:27
Agreed, yeah.

Dr G 1:05:28
Yes it was – It was turning up the dial on the lack of subtlety.

Alexandra Sills 1:05:32
Yeah, it was. It was the Gladiator Two, frankly, that perhaps 2024 deserved.

Dr Rad 1:05:40
Maybe, yeah, with Trump being elected into office, I he, I mean, I think that’s the thing with the first one, I could feel Ridley Scott channeling, you know, Suetonius and Tacitus in the way that he was characterizing some of the people in the film and the storylines that he was going for, not that they don’t have enough scandal going on anyway. There’s plenty there to play with, but I could feel that real Tacitean and Suetonian kind of influence. And so I was like, oh, okay, he’s channeling the source material there. But with this one, for some reason, I just did not get that same feeling. Instead, I was like, Oh, this is actually making me feel uncomfortable. This doesn’t feel like he’s channeling something from ancient Rome. This feels different somehow. And I really didn’t expect that from him. I mean, this is the guy who directed Thelma and Louise, like didn’t expect this.

Dr G 1:06:32
But I think you’ve make a fair point in the sense that what we’re looking at with GladiatorT wo is not a film that’s necessarily interested in the history it’s interested in Gladiator the original film,

Dr Rad 1:06:44
That’s true.

Alexandra Sills 1:06:45
Yeah.

Dr G 1:06:45
So like all of its touch points are not Tacitus. For instance, like we see a very sort of truncated Senate, they seem even less capable than they did in the first film, yeah? And yet, here we are. And so everything is kind of revamped, but, but with an expectation that your main source is Gladiator.

Dr Rad 1:07:16
That’s true, yeah? And Gladiator was channeling Spartacus and Fall of the Roman Empire, and maybe, I think we ended up getting back to this point with another person we were talking about this film with, and I sort of wondered that I’m like, is the problem that Ridley Scott was drawing on previous masterpieces like fall of the Roman Empire and Spartacus, which are really interesting films about ancient Rome, even though they also fictionalize. And with this one, he is just drawing on Gladiator. Maybe that’s the problem.

Alexandra Sills 1:07:45
I think it shows that he he’s demonstrating that he believes that Roman was corrupt and needed to be fixed, but also that he has no idea how to fix it. Because, as you say, the Senate is even worse in this film. But the whole point of both films is that they should go back to a Republic where the Senate are the dominant power.

Dr G 1:08:05
Yeah, terrible idea.

Alexandra Sills 1:08:07
Yeah, exactly. Both Maximus and Lucius are saying, oh, Republic, Republic. And you’re looking at senators like, like tracks in the second film, and you’re thinking, Well, why? Why are you trying to bring these people back to the point where, when Macrinus says his speech about Rome is corrupt and he could knock it over, and he intends to, I started thinking, Yes, show me that. Show me that. Because the Senate is useless. These emperors are useless. If we’re going to have any kind of revolution, don’t put the Senate back in charge, that would be the worst thing possible. But Macrinus at least shows some sense that he understands how Rome works.

Dr Rad 1:08:47
Yes, exactly, well. And that’s that’s what the previous Gladiator had, though, see again, and this is what it got from Spartacus. It had Gracchus.

Alexandra Sills 1:08:55
Yeah.

Dr Rad 1:08:56
which Spartacus also had Gracchus? Literally, the same character name and everything. They have these senators who are meant to be the inspirational ones, the ones that know what to do, and the senators in the first Gladiator, they at least do have intellectual discussions, debates about what room should be doing in this film. Oh, my God. I mean you, you don’t get any of that. And Gracchus, even though he’s still alive. Oh, we get the tiniest snippets of him, and one of them, he’s being killed and so it’s not the same!

Alexandra Sills 1:09:28
It was a quicxk scene as well, wasn’t it? Derek Jacobi deserves a grand death scene. If he’s gonna have to die, don’t just quickly slit his throat and then move on immediately to a next shot. Give him, you know, let him cook. He is one of the best actors in the world. Well, what a waste.

Dr Rad 1:09:46
I have confidence that if anybody could do a death scene theatrically and over the top, it’s him.

Alexandra Sills 1:09:51
Exactly. I mean, I know that they cut a lot from the first film, and I know that Ridley Scott has said this was my final cut, but I wonder what is on the cutting room floor, and what scenes with perhaps Derek Jacobi, and perhaps even with Thrax showing a little bit more backbone and a little bit more intelligence, because I don’t think in this film, Macrinus was right. I said it. Macrinus was right. He should have won, because he was the only one who knew what should be happening and had the balls to do it.

Dr G 1:10:30
Yup.

Dr Rad 1:10:31
Yeah.

Dr G 1:10:31
Yeah, that scene in the river was a setup. I mean, yeah, he should have survived. And Lucius clearly that breastplate should not have held up under those circumstances. And we could have moved back into something of a historical narrative, actually. I mean, macarinus does become emperor at some point, not in this way historically, but certainly eventually in our source material. Are there any historical inaccuracies that you haven’t mentioned so far that really drove you crazy about this film.

Alexandra Sills 1:11:08
Yeah, yeah. So and this, this happened a little bit in the first one as well, but much more in the second one. The film doesn’t really understand that the program in a day at the Colosseum was very rigid. In the morning, you had beast hunts. In lunchtime, you had executions, and at the afternoon, part of the show, you had the gladiators, and they were separate, with different sets of performers. Or condemned. You didn’t mix and match. You did. Certainly didn’t have someone who would fight a rhino one day and then fight a human the next. That didn’t happen and and I understand that they wanted to do it because it looked good the animals that they used. We know there have been a couple of academics, and I will mention no names who have gone in the medium and said that there weren’t rhinos. And we know that there were actually, I think it was Pompey Magnus bought the first Rhino over there were rhinos in the arena. Often what there weren’t was people writing them.

Dr Rad 1:12:17
Does seem dangerous.

Alexandra Sills 1:12:18
That was a little bit jumpy the shark for me. I think if you’re going to have someone riding an animal, you can do it. I would have suggested a war elephant, because we know that the ancients had loads of those, and the Romans came up against them often. So you could have had an elephant instead of the rhino with an archer on top, which is something that Roman soldiers would have had to deal with. That would have been brilliant. The sharks were, I wouldn’t have minded the sharks if they’d have looked better. They obviously weren’t in the arena. Because, yes, again, the Romans did know what sharks were, despite what some people have gone in the news to say, um, however, they had no way of catching, transporting and keeping them. They did have crocodiles. We know that they had crocodiles because they wrote about it. What I do wonder is perhaps those about to die also had a flooded Colosseum scene, and they had crocodiles. So I’m wondering if Ridley changed it because he’d been beaten to the punch and he knew it was going to be really second, and he didn’t want to be seen as copying either way have a shark, because if the Romans could have they would have just make them look better.

Dr G 1:13:34
Oh, you want some improvements to the CGI. Fair enough. Fair enough.

Dr Rad 1:13:38
As an animal rights person, I’m embracing this new trend to have CGI animals instead of actual animals knowing what’s happened to animals entertainment in the past. I’d rather they were paid with CGI because of what’s happened in the past. And I totally, I agree with you about all those, all those points, I have to say. Dr, G, this is one thing that I have to bring up as something that we haven’t talked about yet, Lucilla. I have to know Alexandra. What’s your opinion on Lucilla?

Alexandra Sills 1:14:16
Well, she should have been dead in the first film, if we’re going by the history. She died before Commodus in history, but she survived the first film, and that’s only because the only female person in their production team on the first film said, we’ve got two women, only one of them talks, and you’re talking about killing them both off. A woman has to survive, please, if the year is 2000 so in Gladiator Two, I think we’ve got four women, and two of them talk, so yay for progress. So she should she should be dead already. I thought that in the first film, she. Is weakened by her maternal instinct, and that kind of declaws her as being the premier politician in Rome because she is smarter than anyone else in that room. In the second film, they, they discuss that she misses her son, and perhaps it’s depression, but they, they’ve, they’ve really weakened her into just a woman who cries a lot, and I think that’s so sad, because she’s still the smartest person in any room. And the death scene again, pushing women into refrigerators, perhaps she did need to die for that narrative, but good grief, could she not have gone down slightly fighting it was I thought Lucilla, they really did a disservice to a wonderful character there.

Dr Rad 1:15:53
Yeah, and look, that’s, that’s what I think I have to say again, just in case Ridley Scott listens to this episode. I don’t think any of the actors did bad jobs with the parts that they were hand they were handed. I really think that a lot of the issues in this film come down to the storyline and the characterization. And again, it’s not about me being a historian who’s like you went against history. It is about the lack of a solid, consistent, coherent storyline, good characterization that makes sense for all of the characters. That’s really what this film is lacking more than anything. Visually, great. No problems really there, apart from those monkeys. And as I say, I can see all the actors were trying really hard to do a good job with what they had, but what they had was not a lot. That’s my final take on it.

Alexandra Sills 1:16:54
They were trying to deliver Michelin starred acting with a McDonald’s menu.

Dr G 1:17:02
I think that’s an excellent way to put it, and yeah, and also an excellent point to, to conclude, Like, what an image. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Alexandra Sills 1:17:19
That’s a pleasure. It’s been delightful. I don’t like the movie, but I love you guys, so

Dr Rad 1:17:24
That’s also a good point to finish on.

Dr G 1:17:27
I think that has been our real challenge in this process, is that we got very excited for Gladiator Two, lined up interviews, then went and saw it and was like, oh no!

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