My job is to sniff out clown world ... and I smell clowns.
On its face, maybe that looks awesome to you.
Look at how amazing the trailer is! A beloved greatest movie of all time is getting a sequel! This is gonna rock! Denzel Washington is in it so it'll be based!
🤡
Haven't people learned that Hollywood hollows out everything with substance and wears it like a skinsuit to preach the religion of wokeness?
A few tidbits I spotted:
The juxtaposition between the Roman elite and Denzel Washington's character, Macrinus, who may (spoilers?) have a role in assassinating Emperor Caracalla:
Diverse ... Roman senators?
The girlboss archer who apparently dies in the arms of Paul Mescal's Lucius:
The commentary on the modern military industrial complex and America's endless wars:
The focus on power, rebellion, and vengeance will take on a whole new meaning if presented through the "social justice" Marxist lens:
The movie is set several decades after the first. Lucius, the grandson of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, is grown up and lives in Numidia (Africa). Pedro Pascal's General Marcus Acacius leads an invasion to Africa to steal and colonize the land. The Romans were relentless in such efforts, but how might woke Hollywood use white men invading Africa as a nod to today's Marxist ideology?
This invasion causes Lucius to end up in slavery (like Russell Crowe's Maximus), so Lucius follows Maximus to compete as a gladiator.
Imagine what messages this 2+ hour movie could be trying to teach us.
Maybe I'm wrong. My job is to spot the woke mind virus where it lurks in the shadows and bring it into the light, so I have clear bias and paranoia.
But it's been a long, long time since I've been proven wrong.
It's true that Gladiator portrayed the Roman Empire in a generally positive light and played fast-and-loose with history, but like other theatrical dramas like Braveheart, it is meant to be more of a Shakespearean play than documentary.
What Gladiator did well was offer a commentary on honor, revenge, duty, betrayal, governance, human nature, and the mob - the historical aspect was secondary to it, just like MacBeth.
The themes in the movie present a worldview where good is pit against evil on an epic stage. A generation of young men were inspired by Maximus to remember what virtuous masculinity, sacrifice, and destiny look like in the face of overwhelming evil. Particularly for the men reading this, I do not need to explain the depths of feeling that stir within me when I watch scenes like this:
But wokeness, this skin-and-gender experiment in Marxism, rejects the very idea of good and evil, and with them, all notions of honor, duty, chivalry, and justice (and certainly the idea of noble masculinity). To the woke, there is only power and oppression. The oppressed are the good guys, even if their character is evil through and through.
Or have you not paid attention to Star Wars, the most most basic "evil vs good" story in cinema history?
Ridley Scott isn't thoroughly woke, but he has long since turned away from masterful storytelling so he can trash the historical heroes of the West. His movie Robin Hood depicted King Richard as a crazed fool of a man, compared to the agnostic-but-pure Robin, who leaves the service of Richard a broken man.
Scott likes to flip lore around to make sure we know that our favorite historical characters were flawed men. He then denies these men their triumphs. Consider last year's Napoleon movie. Every guy I knew was excited as heck to watch it. Napoleon was a tyrant, but a genius - and one who was wiser than most of the small-minded men who have ruled nations.
'I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires, and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist. There is between Christianity and whatever other religions the distance of infinity.' - Napoleon Bonaparte
Instead of THAT Napoleon - the marvelous intellect and insight mixed with extreme pride and greed - we got a gross, ignoble gnat of a man who was ultimately ruled by his wife. Everyone stopped talking about it after opening weekend.
Ridley Scott could have gone for historical accuracy, but his movie didn't even have that - it was just his nearly three-hour long caricature of Bonaparte.
Scott has been able to put beautiful, timeless, worthy themes in his movies, even if he is a man who sees religion as mostly evil and every historical hero as irredeemably flawed. His movie Kingdom of Heaven may have portrayed Christians as barbaric invaders, but in spite of his endless cynicism, a few lines made it into the movie that still taught young men to aspire to the levels of greatness that Scott himself scoffs at.
But Kingdom of Heaven was released in 2005.
Scott has descended even deeper into his cynicism since then, and I have serious doubts that the aging cynic will be able to keep the woke acolytes of Hollywood at bay in Gladiator 2.
