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The Gladiator II Line That Broke My Brain
Historical accuracy in movies can be a strange, slippery thing, and the way we respond to it can be even stranger.
Gladiator II, for all its lavishly budgeted world-building, isn’t exactly a movie you’d look to for historical accuracy — no matter how much Ridley Scott defends the sharks inside the Roman Colosseum. Released at the height of the Reagan administration’s involvement with the Contras, Walker was a scabrously pointed satire of American foreign policy, and although it took place in the 1850s, it had Coca-Cola bottles and Zippo lighters and Marlboro cigarettes and helicopters. Of course, Walker was also a massive flop that was buried by its studio and might have ended Cox’s mainstream filmmaking career, and I was one of a small handful of people who bothered to see it when it played (for, I think, one week) in theaters.
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