Saw the trailer for "Gladiator II".
Looks like it's going to be a shit-show.
The OG Gladiator film built a fanciful Hollywood story on a small base of historical accuracy, loaded on with a huge number of inaccuracies and outright fabrications. An enjoyable film, even for a Roman history buff like me.
This movie looks like it decided to throw out the small number of historical facts, and cruise on a river of laughable narrative inventions.
At the time of the film, likely the first decade of the 3rd Century, Connie Nielsen's Lucilla, and her son Lucius Verus, would have been long dead. Denzel Washington's character, Macrinus, was a Berber from North Africa, not a black man from sub-Saharan Africa. Macrinus would succeed Caracalla (one of the hilariously mis-represented co-emperors shown in the trailer), but never visited the city of Rome during his short, one-year reign.
By the time-period of the film, there had been no naval battle re-enactments in the Colosseum in nearly two hundred years. It was no longer possible to flood the arena in order to stage them; when it had been possible, the battles were fought using scaled-down ships, and the water was never deeper than about five feet.
And no matter who the Romans are fighting in the real-life battle scenes, they would not have used rowed galleys. The Roman navy had not used these since before the birth of Christ (which makes their use in "Ben-Hur" inaccurate, too.) And the less said about the portrayal of co-emperors Caracalla and Geta, the better. Caracalla was not a pale, weak, crazed palace-dweller. He preferred the rough life of the soldier with his legionaries. And he liked to have himself depicted in statues and busts as a scowling brute. None of the contemporary sources describe him as a crazy-eyed, giggling mad man.
I suppose I will go to see it. But I'm not expecting a film that's any better than its trailer.
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