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I Hate to Say This, But Men Deserve Better Than Gladiator II
Ridley Scott’s sequel to his 2000 Best Picture winner might make you wonder if we’ve lost the ability to treat brawny historical epics earnestly.
Men who voted so differently than women, who are lashing out against feminism, and who, faced with a mainstream culture that no longer guarantees their dominance, would rather opt out, leaving them forever in peril of slipping down a digital manosphere pipeline that ends with them dumped at the goblinlike feet of Andrew Tate, who celebrated the presidential results by declaring that the patriarchy was back. Gladiator ends not with the body of Russell Crowe’s Maximus being lifted up in respect to his place as a soldier of Rome, but with fellow fighter Juba (Djimon Hounsou) burying his friend’s family keepsakes in the floor of the Colosseum and vowing that they’ll see each other again someday. Mescal’s career to date has been heavily delineated by women — from his breakout role in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People to the part in Charlotte Wells’s debut feature Aftersun that made him a critics’ favorite — and he has excelled at playing elusive objects of longing.
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