Can Gladiator II outdo its epic original?
Twenty-four years is a "slog of a time" to wait for a sequel. Now, the trailer for "Gladiator II" has finally been released and the question remains: "Are you not entertained?"
"I am", said Jonathan Dean in The Times. From the three-minute clip, the new film looks "exactly like 'Gladiator', albeit with boats". Little wonder that there are striking similarities between the two; returning director Ridley Scott has lost none of his sense of "scale and ambition" in the decades since the original.
'Frenzied excitement'
The opening shot of the trailer begins with a shirtless Paul Mescal in a candle-lit room. You "cannot blame the 'Gladiator II' lot", said Dean. They know only too well to tap into the actor's "lure". Mescal has already carved out an impressive reputation with hits such as "Normal People", but Scott's latest film will likely "do for him what the first did" for Russell Crowe. "By December he will be a bona fide A-list star."
"Gladiator II" begins years after the original, following Lucius (Mescal), the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielson) and nephew to the first film's evil Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). After living a relatively peaceful life with his wife and child, he's forced into slavery and begins fighting his way up the ranks as a gladiator.
The "frenzied excitement" surrounding the trailer hints at a "nostalgia" for an "earlier style of blockbuster", said Neil Armstrong on BBC Culture. There seems to be a "real appetite" for the "once huge sword-and-sandal drama" that peaked around the time of the first "Spartacus" in 1960.
'Oodles of spectacle'
While historical accuracy has never been Scott's top priority (he told Dan Snow to "get a life" when the historian questioned details in "Napoleon"), jaw-dropping scenes from the trailer of the Colosseum being flooded and a rhino charging across the arena to fight Mescal are, remarkably, rooted in fact.
If the "stunning" trailer is anything to go by, "Gladiator II" looks "every bit as epic" as the first film, said Erik Kain in Forbes, "with an even more star-studded cast". The sole drawback is the "weird inclusion" of Jay-Z and Kanye West's song "No Church in the Wild". I can only assume it was "some marketing exec's bright idea" to entice a younger audience, plenty of whom hadn't been born when the original came out. "It does not work".
Still, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, the trailer for the sequel "delivers oodles" of spectacle. Eighty-six-year-old Scott is long overdue a "hit" matching up to the success of "The Martian" in 2015. "This could be it".
