December 5, 2024 • 61 mins
folks, Ridley Scott has just released another one of his patented, late-era slopfests and we couldn't be more ready. that's right, it's your Gladiator II review, wherein we are forced to admit that we sometimes really enjoy the slop. so we brought returning champion Patrick Wyman back on the show to use his Roman history expertise to break down this oddly-paced, mess of a film with an anemic plot that we all nevertheless enjoyed. turns out, some fun spectacle, nice visuals, and Denzel Washington doing a great villain turn will cover a multitude of sins. now sit back, let the historical inaccuracy wash over you, and join us in the slop zone.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's my boyfriend's birthday, and so I have to, like,
you know, shower him with praise absolute. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
he's a very good boy. He's the bestest birthday boy.
I think that that has been said by many important historians.
So you know, yeah, yeah, we gotta go to the
pub and talk about to Losing Guitari presumably, yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
We look, we love a good zome.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I got him from are you aware of the the
Etsy store? Krit Drip?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I got him.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I got him to lose a guitar krit Drip shirt
that said like I became a non total, non totalizable
entity and all I got was a stupid T shirt
and it's really it went It went down well, so
you know, yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
The summer between my first two years of my PhD,
I had a French at a French advisor who was wonderful.
I absolutely love her to death. But she gave me
a copy of To Losing Gatari to read over the
summer because we had just done a class on like
globalization in the Roman Empire. Uh, and I got super stoned,
like correct as stoned as I've ever been. Like, I smoked,
(01:11):
I rolled and smoked a personal blunt and sat down
and read to Losing Guatari and it blew my mind.
Like there you go. Yeah, that was I think that
was the correct introduction to to that particular brand of
post postmodern thought.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah. I think that it really helps to be absolutely
zeedd and booted out your damn mind to get your
head round it, because the trouble is otherwise you're paying
too much attention and you shouldn't. It's more of a
vibe based philosophy.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, absolute, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
So this is the third time we recorded this week,
in the third time that we mentioned losing guitar.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
It's rule, man, because they because they rule. And also
that's the rhizome, Luke, it's in the ri zome, Luke.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
I will stay away. I will stay away from all philosophers,
get them.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Nond It's coming for you because I keep talking about
it at you and that's how it got me, all right,
Like sorry, now you know, Luke, that's that's how it works.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
So we love it. We love a decentralized network based
approach to to understanding the world.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
You goddamn right, you got that right.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
It's so good to talk to you, guys.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
I missed you. Yeah, oh man, Oh like.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
I think that we should do it. Guys, I am
I For one, I'm ready to talk about the world's
stupidest movie. Christmas is dumbest picture.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
You're calling it dum dumbest but some but still far
better than Napoleon somehow. All right, there I go, Hello
(03:28):
and welcome back to We're Not So Different Podcast? How
we about how we always end up talking about losing
guitar even when we're here to talk about slop. God
damn it.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Slop and more slop is in the rho.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Yes it is. My name is Luke and I'm joined
by doctor eleanor you know the deal, uh, And we're
here to talk about a new movie called Gladiator two.
You may have heard of it, and we've got a friend,
So no question today. Just straight onto the main show, folks.
We're back for another of Ridley Scott's late career slop fests.
(04:06):
By now we all know what to expect. Spectacle anachronism,
the Vegas historical outline, possible great actors trying their best
with socio material, slop and more slop. Maybe, just maybe
we can admit that, as postmodern humans, we enjoy a
good bit of slop every now and again, maybe not
all the slop, maybe not the volume that we receive it,
(04:27):
but some of it is fun, and Scott's movies are
no different. I think by now it's very clear that
any Ridley Scott movie made after the tragic suicide of
his brother Tony Scott in twenty twelve will succeed or
fail purely based on how well the script turned out
and how interested the actors are in chewing up scenery.
Since then, Ridley has reportedly cut his amount of timing
(04:49):
film way the amount of time filming way down, and
chooses to remove any messy stuff in editing rather than
doing another take or two or taking time to massage
the script. Twenty twenty one's the Last Duel being The
big notable exception here is it's both very very good
and wonderfully directed. Normally, however, if you get disinterested actors
(05:10):
in a messi script, you end up with something awful
like Napoleon. If, on the other hand, you get actors
in there who aren't afraid to make the most of
what little they're given and the script hasn't gone through
several thousand revisions, the movie will be much more tolerable,
maybe even downright enjoyable, which is why we must think
our lucky stars, because Denzel Washington is the most perfect
(05:31):
choice for the later era Ridley Scott film. He's all
bomb basted and kinetic energy, and he loves to meet
the script exactly where it's at in revel revel in it?
Are these character turns very abrupt? Yes? Does the timeline
of events make even passing sense in a wider historical context? No?
Did he change the location of the Rubicon River from
(05:57):
where it actually is to somewhere between Ostia and Rome? Probably?
You know, doesn't he just matter? No? Does it matter
that Paul Meskal is a black hole of charisma when
he's speaking? Absolutely not. The point is we've got Denzel
mugging for the camera while spinning a decapitated head on
(06:17):
a plint and telling the Roman Senate to get in line. Also,
Connie Nielsen and Pedro Pascal are trying hard with the
meager scraps they're given to work with. But we'll get
to all that because the most important star we have
today is right here on the show with us to
talk about Gladiator too. You know him, you love him.
I'm so glad to have back Roman historian podcasting godfather
(06:38):
in Friend of the Show, Patrick Wyman, Patrick, how the
hell are you?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I could not possibly be better after that lovely introduction.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
That was so nice of you to say. I'm so
stoked to be here and I'm so stoked to talk
about this movie because I I ironically loved it good.
I'm glad it's completely It is like I could not
possibly agree more with everything you said. It is such
fucking slap. It's such slop. But but you know what,
(07:07):
I'm a little piggy. Give me, give me the yamyam yum.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Exactly, I said to me. It was just like, it's
much like the dinner I'm going to be having after
this podcast down Weatherspoons, delicious slop yum yum yum, fried
frozen food. Fuck.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah exactly. Yeah, you know what this feels like. This
movie felt like when you go out to the bar
and you and you have like not twelve drinks, not
two drinks, but like six drinks, and you're you're kind
of buzzed, but you're sober enough to know that you
should eat food, and so then you order like chicken fingers,
(07:49):
a grilled cheese sandwich, French fries some wings, like like
a huge pile of stuff, and then you get it
to go and you take it home and eat it
there like a responsible like a respect enjoyer of your slot.
That's that's that's that's how I felt about this movie.
Is it's like it's like six beers and thirty seven
(08:10):
hundred calories.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I mean, which is one of my favorite things possible.
So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
It's really that's really my wheelhouse.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
It. Yeah, I was. I was honestly surprised by how
much I did enjoy it. I kind of thought we
were going to be in for another Napoleon esque thing here.
But I shouldn't. I shouldn't have doubted Denzel. That was
my fault, and I didn't. I then saw an interview
where someone asked Ridley Scott how often he thinks about
(08:42):
the Roman Empire and he said he's never thought about
it once, and well, yeah, that is that is what
we need, is what we need here, That that is
the vibe we need. Has he ever thought about it? No?
You know, like, oh God, it's great, good, I love it.
Just please you know, until you're perfect being, keep keep throwing,
(09:03):
keep throwing this ship out to this uh, Patrick before
we talk any about like the movie, like the plot
and all that, you know, I guess we should do
a little bit on the historical aspects. I think we're all,
you know, pretty familiar with Scott's deal, uh when it
comes to history by now. But were there any aspects
of Roman history or life or culture that you saw
(09:24):
that you know, you perked up and you're like, oh
they did you know that looks pretty right or that
looks pretty good or you know whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, I mean so I would say not in any
literal sets, right right, right, Like I think I think
it's important to understand that we have to do like
a land acknowledgment for history as we talk about this movie,
where like like we acknowledge that there is a real
Roman past and that there were things happening in Rome
in this period of time, but this is we're not there.
(09:54):
We're we're we're like pouring one out for for the
real history. Yeah, yeah, I think it gets right, Like
you like, we've got it. We've got to leave aside
sharks in the Colosseum, cgi baboons, guys reading newspapers, like
like there are like seventeen thousand things like that that
we could point to, but but honestly, I think it's
(10:14):
pedantic to do that, and it misses the point of
what Ridley Scott movies are about and the ways in
which they are valuable and even occasionally thought provoking. Because
what I liked about this in the way that I
thought it got it something that actually matters about Roman
history is about what is empire? Who does it benefit?
(10:36):
And is it and is there anything redeeming about it? Yeah, Like,
because this whole movie is an argument about what Rome is,
who pays, who pays the price for empire? Who benefits?
And it doesn't? Like is there anything that makes it worthwhile?
Like is the Colosseum worth the blood spilled to build
(10:58):
it and fill it? Like That's that's what the whole
movie is about. And frankly, I think that's a much
more compelling take on Rome than the first movie where
they're talking about the dream of Rome and all this,
which which is quite literally bullshit like yeah, yeah, never exists,
it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah, I completely agree, although for me it was a
real uh tale of two halves because like the first
half I was like, hell, yeah, this guy's spitting fuck Rome,
Like absolutely fuck Rome. I was like, yes, gee, you
see your boy. He fucking hates Rome. I hate Rome. Yeah,
that's right, people get conquered. It's a terrible machine that
(11:37):
like chews up and spits out other civilizations for absolutely
no fucking reason. But then by the end he's like, ooh,
dream of Rome. I'm not mad at my mommy anymore.
And I'm like, what the fuck is this dude? Like
it's like, like, maybe Rome could be a democracy. Shut
the fuck up. No, it couldn't a But you.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Know, I'll say, even at the end, it's still ambivalent
because it doesn't because because he doesn't actually make a choice,
he asks the like the last scene of the movie
is him asking the question of whether there's anything redeemable there?
So so yes, he there, Like it does allow for
it does allow for the possibility that maybe there is,
but it doesn't actually say that. Unlike the first one,
(12:15):
the first one is very clear that there is an
actual good Rome lurking under the corruption and the bad people.
The second one is not certain about that at all,
and it sees good people being corrupted by it.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I liked I think it did
a good job of presenting that and presenting like the
fickleness of the Senate and how they could be easily
moved by powerful and or well very wealthy individuals, and
how it wasn't you know, this deliberative body that we're
(12:51):
kind of told about. But it's you know, a bunch
of oligarchs sitting in a room and you know when
the old emperor, when one of the old emperors gets murdered,
you know, pretty much in broad daylight, and they all
know what happened, but they're like, hey, cool, new guy, Great,
let's go.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
You know.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
I thought they Yeah, I thought they they did a
good job with that stuff. And yeah, I think, uh,
I think it's very I just think it's very interesting that,
you know, he he almost I don't know that Scott
actually seems very interested in answering the question of whether
(13:30):
like the Dream of Rome is real. Like he almost
seems like it's like a it's just a story trope
to him, you know, like it's not he's not interested
in asking this question in any meaningful way. So you know,
he's just gonna you know, he's just kind of throwing
it out there.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's what the actors seem
to take it seriously.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Though, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Which is the part that because yeah, I think you're
absolutely right. The script, the script is interested in the
question as a as a counterpoint to the first movie
and and and it effectively undoes the legacy of the
first movie in the opening credits, which I kind of
fucking dug, You're just like, you've got you you did
(14:14):
the whole movie. And then you're like, ah, but but
it didn't matter, didn't account for it didn't amount to anything.
I'm like, I kind of dug the willingness with which
they just went down that road. Yeah, I thought that
was I thought that was kind of cool. Uh but yeah,
it's like but but the actors, like I think especially
Denzel thought thought about it, and he was like, I'm
just gonna have all the fun humanly possible with this.
(14:36):
And because he's got a very Killmonger in Black Panther
thing going in the best way. I mean, like, Killmonger
is probably the most compelling individual character that there's been
in a Marvel movie. And I think in much the
same way, Denzel is one of the most compelling characters
we've seen in the the Gladiator cinematic universe of of
(14:57):
of movies in television about ancient Rome.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he yeah. Denzel came in and he's like,
you know, he he answered the question of you know,
is there you know, is there a dream of Rome?
And the answer is no. The dream is just power
and you know, and getting and attaining it. And then
you have someone like you know, like Pedro Pedro Pascal
(15:20):
is a Casius and Connie Nielsen her character, and they,
you know, they do believe in it, and I think,
you know, they try, but you know, you could tell
from like the differences of like the dream of Rome
versus being unsure versus you know, don't care Rome sucks,
like Denzel kind of is. You know, the script is
(15:41):
very much giving them very little on the side of
the Dream of Rome, because I mean, all of this
is obviously a farce and they know, you know, they
know it while it's happening.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
It's just yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Yeah. The only thing before we get into it that
I wanted to mention is that while looking up stuff
for this film, I came across a section on Wikipedia
and it says in May two thousand and six, Scott
(16:13):
said he wanted to make a sequel. There were differing
ideas and during the time Nick Cave, the singer, was
commissioned to write a new draft of the script. It
was later revealed to be written under the working title
of christ Killer. Cave described the plot as a quote
deities versus deity versus humanity end quote story. The story
(16:37):
involved Maximus impurgatory, who was resurrected as an immortal warrior
for the Roman gods. Maximus sent back to Earth and
tasked with ending Christianity by killing Jesus and his disciples,
as Christianity was draining the power of the ancient Roman gods.
During his mission, Maximus is tricked into murdering his own son.
(16:58):
Cursed to live forever, Maximus fights in the Crusades, World
War Two, and the Vietnam War, with the ending revealing
that in the present day the character now works at
the Pentagon. The script was rejected and scrapped after you,
consultant on the original film, told Scott it wouldn't work,
especially as Cave had written something quote two grand in
(17:21):
quote due to his theater work, and then that is
what we that is what this is what this.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Is what you I can't believe they stole that from us.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Oh my god, I mean well Spielberg killer, given Nick
Cave's heel turn into being like a weirdo Zionist in
a way, I'm glad this didn't get made because I'd
be grappling. I'd be grappling with myself because I'd be
trying to see this even though you know I'm mad
at him right now. Oh fuck, and hell.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Even by the standards of something Ridley Scott makes, that's batship.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
I love it, I'm here for it, But I think
it should be a comic book. I know that's my
answer to everything. But that would be like a really good,
like batshit graphic novel, Like let's get Warren Allis on it.
Let's go Yeah I could.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
I could see Alan Moore having a ton of fun
with that.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Yeah he would. He'd be like, oh, Nick Cave, this
is a cute story. Now let me make it really
fucking weird. And then yeah, turns out he's actually turns
out he's actually time traveling Judas and the Friendy ended
up killing.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Jus Like whoa hell yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Hell yeah, all right, yeah, let's get into the movie.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Basic plot is this, uh new Media is about to
be conquered by and they are going to put up
a fight. Paul Mescal is the main character whose name
is like I think Hanna or something Hano At the beginning,
it's Paul Mescal. Yeah, and there's a big fight. There
(19:13):
are some cool like boat They did a cool thing
with this when they had the wall going right up
to the edge of the sea. So the boats came
in and they had to drop the siege towers and
the ladders from the boats in order to scale the wall,
which is a really cool thing because he Ridley's done
a bunch of the you know, we got to blow
(19:34):
a hole in the wall to get through it kind
of things. So I thought this was a nice change
of pace, and you know, sadly it doesn't go the
way of the Numidians and Paul Meskal's wife is pierced
with an arrow that was shot by Pedro Pascal's Acasius,
(19:55):
who is leading this. But he is very reluctant. He's
shaking his head the whole time because he's very disappointed
to let you know that he disapproves of all this.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
He didn't want to kill Paul Muscal's wife, Nope, and
yet he did.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
So yeah, it's uh yeah, and you know, that's uh,
you can kind of trace the steps from there. Paul
Mescal gets sold into slavery as as is the wont
of the Romans over there over their captives, and uh
he's training to be a gladiator and he gets put
(20:30):
in uh monkey with but like but.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
That also is like it was like the the extra
ugly babboons. Yeah, you know he's you can tell he's
the gang leader. It's like, you know, he'd like eighties
kids movies where the bad guy has a mohawk.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
That guy's thing strong Rufio from hook Vibes going on
with the baboons there, and they like.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Don't you look even slightly realistic? This is my biggest
bug about it. Like it's like this is what the
most cgi asked baboons I ever done scene Like I.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
It's like it's like you pulled like, uh baboons from
like a monster movie or like an alternate you know,
like like you pulled them out of like Star Wars
or Star Trek, Like these are the space baboons of
you know whatever twelve uh oryon twelve or whatever. But like,
you know, you can realize baboons. You can even put
(21:30):
people in mocap suits, like Andy serkis like, We've done
this before, but it's like Nope. These cgi baboons with
like wider than they look like, they can unange their
jawels like snakes.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
They're they're the b plot in one of the lesser
episodes of Clone Wars. That's exactly what. That's what the
baboons look like. Like my my kids have watched every
episode of Clone Wars like seventeen times, so I'm familiar
with like the monster b plot and the that's exactly
what the That's exactly what these baboons and so look
like that. So Funnily enough, the Romans did enjoy having
(22:06):
baboons in the arenas. But the most famous baboon instance
in Roman history is that that, as a punishment for
particular kinds of crimes, the female offenders were supposed to
be fucked by baboons in public.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
That was it's a beautiful culture, guys, we should really
emulate it.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Yeah, I did not expect you to say that. That
is not what I expected at all.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah. There's a scene in the Rome series where an
Eastern potentate is talking to a very drunken brutus after
the assassination of Caesar, and the Eastern Potentate is like,
I will help you. I would give you money to fight,
you know, to fight Octavia, and he's like, but I
want to see a Roman woman fucked by baboons and
(22:52):
it's it's like one of the better scenes in an
already very good series. But yeah, actual, Like this is
the thing about Rome. Whenever we get real weird shit
in a film or TV depiction of Rome, it's almost
never as weird as the Romans actually were. Romans did
lots of weird stuff by our standards, and like they
(23:15):
almost never go with the actual weird things that the
Romans did, like getting naked and dressing in wolf cloaks
and whipping each other up and down the hills of
the city Annual Festival, annual festival they did.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Like yeah, normal, yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
But it's just like their weirdness doesn't accord to the
weirdness that we're comfortable with. It's interesting because we're totally
fine with the violence of Rome, but we're not comfortable
with the sexuality of Rome, which is kind of like,
you know, this is like the modern condition, as that
we're ineared to violence but afraid of sexuality, although obviously,
like being forcibly fucked by a baboon is a form
(23:52):
of sexual violence. But we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy,
that's not okay. But on the other hand, like, here's
this weird baboon scene right, like this is kicking the
pants off of my ancient baboon factory that I was
going to drop in, which is that the ancient Egyptian
police used to use baboons like like police dogs, but
it was like police baboons fucking.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
I was reading a site report of a very very
very early Egyptian royal temb, one of the very first
Egyptian royal teams from the pre Dynastic period. So this
is about thirty seven hundred BC, and this is like,
so this is imagine one of the first guys to
be an Egyptian king as we understand it, he was
buried with a menagerie of animals like that he had
(24:39):
that they had caught and brought from elsewhere, one of
which was a baboon that showed signs of having been
like staked to the ground, like it had like it
had like wear marks on the bones that suggested it
had been like tied up so long tradition of baboon
importation and exploitation in the ancient world. But yeah, so
I want to I want to come back this guy.
(25:00):
What you mentioned about the violence, because the in all
of these movies. This is not to say that there
was not huge amounts of violence in the Roman Empire,
but it's generally not the violence that we see on screen.
The violence that the Romans were fond of was either
(25:21):
highly professionalized and stylized violence, which is what gladiators mostly did.
Gladiators were professional athletes. You don't like brow highly trained
people that you spent thousands and thousands and thousands of
denari or the like huge amounts of money to train,
to train and exploit. You don't have them kill each
other for no reason, like in a fight. Like gladiators
(25:44):
lost fights all the time and survived. This is like
the idea of two gladiators fighting to the death. It
was a fairly rare recurrence. It was it was only
for special occasions. What the Romans did do was have
gladiators fight prisoners who had no chance of beating them.
But it feels icky to modern audiences to have trained
(26:04):
killers killing unarmed prisoners or barely armed prisoners like that
feels icky. The Romans loved beast fights. But again, for
a modern audience, the idea of watching a guy with
a spear torment and kill a giraffe is like that
is that's pretty ikey to us. Romans loved and loved
that shit. So we end up with these hyper violent,
(26:28):
highly skilled fights on on camera, which is not really
what the Romans taste was, nor was it economically viable
in the context of the like the economy of the
games in the Roman world.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And they
do kind of like have some knobs towards the economics
of this, you know, in that you know, you have
these scenes where they're talking about the expense of various
gladiators who were killed, but they don't stop doing it, right, Yeah,
and it doesn't really make sense. It would be like,
(27:04):
you know, wanting to shoot a race horse, which we
do every time there's a race, but you know that's
not like the goal in theory.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, so, yeah, this stuff is expensive. I mean, they're
the the gladiators who are fighting in Rome especially, are
the product of an empire wide system of finding, developing, training,
caring for those guys, Like they're the if you're good
(27:33):
enough to fight in the coliseum in Rome, you are,
you are you represent years of investment from a variety
of stakeholders in your continued survival. So, like the idea
of them just throwing away these guys in like random
one off battles is like, that's not how gladiatorial combat work.
They're much more like professional wrestlers than than than anything else.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, I mean it's a great way to kill Christians,
you know, like they absolutely love to kill Christians this way,
but you know you're not gonna kill actual gladiators Like
that's but yeah, it doesn't. We want we want it
to be fair. It's very interesting because you know the
movie does play with the concept of like, well, is
Rome awful and irredeemable? And in many ways I would say, yeah,
(28:20):
but it can't go far enough as to admit even
how awful gladiatorial sport is. You know, it's like there's
there is no it's not a fair fight. And you know,
there there's something I always see over and over again
in Ridley Scott historical movies where he wants there to
be some form of fairness that isn't there. He wants
(28:42):
there to be some like impulse towards democracy or fairness
or a concept of equality that is simply non extant.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
And I find that really interesting.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, that's what That's what makes the Last Duel so
compelling in comparison to the rest of Ridley Scott's subra
is that that's not there, right, because it's it's actually
true to the period. It actually reflects the war rays
of the period, right, Like there's no there's no determination
to fairness in that movie. There's a lot of talk
about rights and privileges and you know what you're owed
(29:18):
as a member of a particular social group, but none
of this like completely a historical idea that the world
is fair, which in Gladiator too is particularly both Gladiator
movies is particularly glaring because what the arena was about
was not just entertainment, though it was. It was about
reinforcing the social hierarchy. It's that if you're if you're
(29:39):
in the stands looking down at what's happening on the sands,
you know that you are above that. That even the
meanest Roman is not the kind of person who gets
thrown into the arena unless you transgress, right, if you transgress,
then you end up on the sands. That's what the
That's what the Colosseum is about, at a funda mental
(30:00):
level is rein is laying bare and reinforcing those social
hierarchies and and it's and I think you're absolutely right
to point out the discordance between the idea of fairness
that Scott brings to it and what the arena actually was.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, the good news is that this movie
issues any notion of pacing. Let's say, because like we
get we get Paul Paul Mescal gets purchased by uh
Denzel's character Macrinus, and he uh like he does. There's
(30:43):
like a very brief training sequence. There's like a little
bit of stuff, and then within like five minutes they
are off to uh to Rome. They're going to fight
in the coliseum. You know. They get in there, there's
a they walk under the the arch and the the
the wolf and the twins Romulus and Remus and all
(31:04):
that stuff, and we get a little background on that,
and then we meet the co emperors Getta and Carakala,
who are who were two real emperors, but they are,
I guess kind of time displaced. So this whole thing's
time anyway. Uh, there's a lot of time displacement going
on from the actual Roman empire. But the point is
(31:27):
Gheta and Caracala are let's say, unwell, unhinged as it were,
and they just want to see blood and violence. And
when Acasius gets back from his win and he's like,
I just want to go on vacation and hang out
with my wife, they're like, no, no, no, no, We're
(31:48):
going to conquer India and Persia. And it's like, oh, okay,
Alexander the Great, right, calm down here, guys. Acasius doesn't
want that. And then it turns out that there is
a secret plot between Connie Nielsen's character Lucilla and Acasius
(32:08):
to throw a coup with Acasius's loyal soldiers. And yeah,
it's uh, there's a lot going on here real quick
because almost immediately Paul Meskal's character is thrown into a
private gladiatorial duel uh to score but yeah, between Denzel
(32:33):
and another senator or in a senator and you know,
Lucius wins, and then instead of just being normal, he
quotes something from Virgil's a neeied and you know, uh,
this is like everybody's like, ugh, you know, local Numidian
shocks or silences Roman class Roman upper class with by
(32:59):
speaking imperfect Virgil or whatever. Yeah, you know, it goes.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
I think my favorite comment that I've seen online about
the whole get In Carcolla situation is that they're like
the mcpoiles. It's like, yeah, like you can't see it,
you know, so you oh my god, on the internet
(33:27):
for that one.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, oh that's so fucking good. Yeah. You can really
imagine them having some like really disturbing wines about milk.
Absolutely absolutely spot on. I mean, so, there's there's a
few things here. I think first of all, Numidia is
a Roman province at this point, there is absolutely no
(33:49):
reason why somebody who was born and raised in Numidia
could not have learned Virgil there, Like, yeah, let's let's
let's get that out of the way first of all.
Like that you could go. One of the things about
the Roman Empire being Roman is that by about two
hundred AD, when this is set, you could be fucking
anywhere and learn Virgil. That's the whole point of the
(34:10):
Roman Empire is that by this time the provinces are
every bit as quote unquote Roman as the city of Rome,
and in fact often more so, because Rome is filled
with people who have come from various corners of the
Empire to live there, Like there are the amount of
(34:31):
evidence there is for immigration to Rome from elsewhere is
overwhelming and spans every different evidentiary base that you could
hope for. I mean, it's there in inscriptions, it's there
in the ancient DNA evidence, it's there in the isotopic evidence,
it's there in the material evidence of objects being brought
(34:51):
from all over from all over the place. So Rome
itself is an extraordinarily cosmopolitan place, and the pro are
full of people who have been who the only culture
that they know effectively is Roman culture. Like I'm sure
that that's going to make some saying it that way
(35:12):
is not entirely accurate in a specialist sense. But for
the lay person, like they're reading Virgil, they're going to baths,
they're they're being educated to read and write in Latin,
they're using papyrus, they're eating off of uh, they're eating.
They're using a material repertoire that is indistinguishable from what
would be used almost anywhere else in the Empire, Like
(35:33):
that's that's the whole point of the Roman Empire. And
Numidia is like that so the when so the modern
people's emphasis on like on on race in the Roman
Empire and uh and you know, were there black people
in the Roman Empire? Yeah? There were. That wasn't important
to the Romans. That wasn't how they understood identity or belonging.
(35:58):
Like for them, if you did run and ship, you
were a Roman. That's the literal definition of romanness as
the Romans understood it. Like so that the yeah, that
was that all? That all just struck me quite hard
as I was as I was doing this. And and
I think the the baseline level of acceptance that all
(36:18):
the other characters give Macronus in this that nobody is
like a black guy in Rome. Everybody takes it for granted,
like oh yeah, sure of course this is this is
entirely normal. That's accurate. I liked that. I like that
part of it, that this this is not a movie
that wears that that is trying to make a point
about the diversity of Rome. It takes it for granted.
(36:39):
And that I that I appreciated. I thought that I
thought that was that was a good thing.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Yeah, yeah, they you know, people have made a deal
about how like Denzel just speaks with like, you know, normal,
Denzel is normal, I guess patois or whatever you want
to call it, you know, and like, why didn't he
fake like this accent, that accent and this is somebody
who's like and he said, you know, we originally like
(37:05):
tried out a couple of different, like more African style accents,
but they just ended up sounding offensive and I was
doing a lot of clicks and stuff and you know,
and nobody wanted that, and so, you know, me and
Ridley just decided that I would talk normal and you know,
get who cares. And I was like, yeah, that, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
I actually thought that was good.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
None of you sound like none of you sound.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Yeah like Romans sound like we don't know what Roman
accents were, Like, we don't you know, like and we've
got kind of like received ways that we will pronounce things,
but we don't know what a fucking Roman accent is.
And I thought it was actually kind of good because
it's like you have some people who are a little
bit more high For Luton, he sounds like he's from
(37:48):
the provinces, which America. Is I think it works, you know.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly to the extent that we can
talk about accents in the Roman world. We know that
there were very We know that the Romans distinguished between
different accents. We don't know what they sounded like. It's
very difficult to reconstruct the phonology of spoken Latin in
the Roman world for a variety of reasons. There's a
huge body of scholarship on it. But the but we
(38:15):
know that they distinct, Like you could tell the difference
between somebody from Spain and somebody from Africa. You could
tell the difference probably between somebody who grew up speaking
British Latin and somebody who grew up in the Balkans Uh,
and those people would have sounded different, and they wouldn't
have sounded like English like like doing they like, they
wouldn't have been doing received pronunciation. That's that's like, that's
(38:38):
a modern convention and how we talk about Rome. It's
one of the things the Rome TV Show did well
was they used the variety of accents in English as
a way of capturing social diversity and geographic diversity in
the Roman world and the and they're not they're doing
the same thing in Gladiator too. It's just because it
sounds just because some people have American accents, it sounds
(39:00):
kind of jarring to those of us who have been
conditioned by you know, generations of everybody in period films
doing English accents.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, it's like, like, I hate to break it's everybody,
but they don't have RP accents.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yeah, just like like.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
You know, like what do you think romans sound like?
You know, and I thought it was nice. I thought
it was actually a nice touch. And I'm glad that
they they'd done it that way.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
You know, yeah, exactly. Yeah, after this we get we
start to get the uh, we get into the gladiatorial
aspects that you know, the blood and guts here that
that we're going to get and uh, I'm just going
to talk about them real quick, or a couple of
them real quick. The first is, uh, Paul Meskeal and
(39:47):
the other Numidians are put in there, and there's like
a champion gladiator who is writing a rhinoceros, which is
just cool, which is cool as fuck, like, you know,
just straight up souls elden Ring. Shit, you gotta go
fight a guy on a rhinoceros.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Like, yeah, you can. You can ride a rhinoceros. Why not?
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Yeah? And they knock this rhinoceros knocks people aside, you know.
But Paul mescal in the end, he knows how to
defeat the rhinoceros. It is to get really close to
the wall. So if it runs past you, just runs
right into the wall and as it's coming, throw up
a bunch of chalk, like your lebron before a game.
It just runs straight and you you you kind of
(40:29):
get hit while this is happening, and it runs straight
into the wall and like keels over and and then
you're good. And it's like, how did he survive getting
clipped by a rhinoceros.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Like all the other things a rhinoceros that should.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Have like that should have decimated, like the left or
right side of his rib cage and all those internal
organs should have been liquefied.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Man, it made me think of Donkey Kong Country.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
It's like the Zelda puzzle, Like, Okay, I gotta I
gotta make the thing run into me in front of
this like breakable wall. Okay, I'll stand here and die.
Heay work, yeah, Chris, you know.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Yeah, very very good. And I was very a big
fan of the scene because there was a rhino. But
then I was sad when the rhino was hurt. But
I was also glad to see the rhino because I'm
really hoping, against hope, people can't possibly think that people
were of rhinos, can they. So I I was like,
I was, I'm very happy to see it because I
(41:30):
was like, I know, you bitches don't think this is real.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
So that's I hate to break this no, but so
my favorite interaction I ever had with a student when
I was teaching was the one who asked me when
in the Middle Ages Game of Thrones took place and
where the dragons went.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
No, no, goddamn.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. So so yes, there are a lot of people
who came out in the movie thinking that the Romans road.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
I know they're they're in Wales. All the dragons are.
We know that that's where they went.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
That's where they.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
Oh my god, oh the future, horrifying glimpse into the future.
Hopefully not Hopefully that's just a person who uh has
been a little a little too acculturated by pop culture
and that they can learn, uh that that's not true
in the future. Because I certainly remember thinking very stupid
(42:30):
things like that when I was hopefully hopefully yeah uh.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Well, but but to that point, I just want to
follow up on that real quick, Like, I don't think
there's anything wrong with making kind of historical fantasy or
things like oh because it's I mean, and there I
hate the pedantry about it, but whether it's from academics
or lay people who just love to point out the inaccuracies,
(42:57):
it's like, what matters is that things like this get
people interested in the actual past, and that like they
certainly did for me. I part of the reason that
I took Roman history classes was because I watched Gladiator
and and you've got plenty of time to read books
and shit like, you can do that, but what you can't,
(43:19):
but what you can't inculcate out of nowhere is an
interest in the subject matter. And if if Ridley Scott's
CGIs baboons and sharks in the Coliseum and other absurd
shit in this movie gets people to take Roman history
classes or buy one of Mary Beard's books or something, yeah,
but hell yeah, I'm all about it. I'm all about it.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Yeah, I agree, I completely agree with that, And I mean,
I suppose that hopefully it's something that we can teach
him out of. But uh, you know, it does hurt
my heart very slightly when I hear that someone might
think that that is true.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
So yeah, yeah, oh man, oh yeah, no nobody if
for everybody listening to this who's wondering, No, they did not,
in fact ride rhinos.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
No, you cannot write a rhino. That's not a thing.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
You can do.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Your legs, I'm.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
Sure tried, but that was an ill fated pursuit.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
They're very large. Your legs aren't gonna like go on
at all. They're not ponies. I'm just saying, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
There's no there's a reason there are no rhinoceros mahouts,
you know, like that's not like that's not the viable
path forward.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Yeah. Yeah. The other the other big thing here, the
other big set piece is the now Machia or the
Sea Battle in the Coliseum, which yeah, I uh, they
put sharks and everything in there, but like, look, I
fucking loved I loved the like the Sea Battle in
(44:51):
the Coliseum. I love that. I love that they actually
did that. It's just the whole thing I found, uh,
really enjoyable, you know, just the ram and grinding of
ships and everything. Fans.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Now I've been given to understand Patrick, and can you
confirm this that at the time when this theoretically took place,
the piping wasn't extant in the Colisseum. To do the
water thing is something.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Yeah, yeah, so they it's it was something that they
did around the beginning, like in the initial games for
the Colisseum. So it was it was one of the
huge attractions very early in the Colisseum's lifespan. And then
my understanding is that they didn't do it again, okay,
or that it was not like a common thing. Yeah
that so, or when you know, when they opened the
(45:40):
Colisseum in eighty eighty, I think that it was. It
was part of the kind of opening festivities, but it
was cost prohibitive and it was it was a pain
in the ass for a variety of reasons, and so
they didn't I don't. I My understanding is that they
didn't do it in this period, but I can but
I don't know for sure. One thing about the name
battle at the very start actually in quite accurate, but
(46:06):
more for the Hellenistic period where there were tons of
naval battles and huge ships and siege engines and shit,
so like that stuff that did exist in classical antiquity,
but would have been much more common like three hundred years,
four hundred years beforehand.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Oh yeah, I was wondering about that because like even
just the boats, I was like, these look more Greek
to me. But then I was like, what the fuck
do I know? You know, well, they didn't.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
There was the the Mediterranean was a Roman lake. They
didn't need giant they didn't need giant fleets throughout most
of the period of the Roman Empire because there was
nobody else with a fleet to challenge them.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
So the but fleets like that and siege engines like
that did exist. They were, and they were especially common
during like the wars of the successors of Alexander the Great.
They were a huge deal. There was a king, a
successor king named Demetrius the Besieger, nice fascinating guy. Yeah, uh,
(47:03):
Demetrius Poli or Kettis, who was who was famous for
building ships like that, like increase on an increasing scale,
like just gigantic monstrosity ships to to to assault cities.
So yeah, so that's a real thing that fully technologically
within the bounds of what you could do in the
in the second century AD.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Hmm, yeah, yeah, that's great, you know the whole like
they at least they do the spectacle well, but the
entire time they were fighting, I just kept thinking, man,
can you imagine, like how long it would take to
drive that thing out like all that like you just
(47:45):
like you created this like lake and the sand, it
would oh god, it would be wet forever.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Just and also like think about it, after all of
that work, how many seats you're taking out in order
to make that happen. So that's gonna be like you're
lose a lot of revenue as well, So like that's
a big thing that you know, my my little I
live under capitalism brain was like calculating, you.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
Know, like the set pieces in this movie were outstanding.
Like it's it's hard to overstate how gifted a director,
a director of action Ridley Scott is like, because you
only have to watch something that's like a big set
piece it's done by someone who's not Ridley Scott to
see how poorly it can turn out, and like he's
(48:32):
he's very much in the kind of I would say,
like the George Miller vein of filmmaker where they are
telling a story through action scenes like they are showing,
not telling, which is surprisingly difficult to do. And I
don't think we should. I don't think we should gloss
over that as being one of the major selling points
of a Ridley Scott movie.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
Yeah. Absolutely, I'm sure. I absolutely was delighted by the scene.
I don't care if it was stupid, and I don't
care if they never put sharks in and I don't
care if that's how sharks don't behave. I was like, hell, yeah,
Sharky Time exactly.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Yeah, it looks yeah, it looks like it looks like
a Looney Tunes cartoon, Like it really does. Like it
looks like bugs and Daffy are sword fighting on like
a gangplank and they look down and the shark jump,
you know, jumps up at them, Like that's what it's. Yeah,
it's great. Ruled Yeah. Uh. The the rest of the
stuff outside of the action, Lucilla or yeah, Lucilla and
(49:33):
Acasius learned that, you know, Paul mescal is actually Lucius,
who was Lucilla's child in this movie. We find that
out and they like try to talk to him and
he's like, no, I don't want anything to do with you,
and then he kind of starts to have second opinions. Uh,
(49:53):
but lo and behold uh in order to get in
order to deal with the to deal with all this, uh,
one of their one of their attendants has been spying
on their conversations. That goes and tells the Senator, who
goes Macronus money, who then informs the conspiracy to the Emperor,
the conspiracy of Pedro Pascal to lead his troops into
(50:16):
Rome and and and depose Geta in Caracalla. And uh
so Macrinus h tells the Emperor and they arrest lou
they arrest them for treason, and uh they're gonna stick
uh Acasius in the coliseum and uh Lucilla will be
uh chained up up up top. And Macrinus tells Paul Meskell, look,
(50:39):
this is what you wanted. You wanted to kill this
guy who killed your wife. Now you get the chance to.
And they fight in the coliseum, and it's a it's
a good fight. Uh. Pedro Pascal is very very good
at you know, he he was you know, he was
a fucking ober and Martell, you know, he knows how
(51:00):
to do a very good, very Cory graft fight and
in the end, uh Paul Mescal is like, I'm not
going to execute him because I realized that I like
Rome now that I could possibly be very important here.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
This is a story about how you shouldn't trust rich kids.
All right, you know we need we need more rich
kids to be class traders. But you got to keep
your eyes on him, right.
Speaker 3 (51:26):
And oh man, and then just one of my favorite parts,
uh Lucy's or Paul Mescal refuses to execute uh Pedro
Pascal and they're like, okay, cool. So the Praetorian Guard
just fire a ton of arrows into him, like pin
cushion him, make him look like he's like a Christian, Uh,
a Christian proplytizer showing up on North Sentinel Island. Like
(51:49):
that dude is just like a dozen arrows. They just
pincushion his ass. Uh.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
Blair leaned over to me and said, arrowed like the
strong bad voice that was very important.
Speaker 3 (52:03):
To fucking bora mirror over here.
Speaker 1 (52:05):
Just so good, so good.
Speaker 3 (52:09):
I love it. Yeah, I love it when you you know,
when you end up looking like a roly ball, just
just a little stick sticking out of it, uh, you know,
and turns out Macrinus is uh Macrinus is the villain. Uh,
oh my god, I was wrong. It was Macrinus all along.
He's he's moving behind the scenes. He gets he has
(52:31):
uh he he basically talks uh I think Caracala into
uh killing his brother, which wasn't something that they had
to be talked into in real life, as I understand it. Uh,
they pretty much fucking hated each other. But yeah, he
gets he you know, get it, gets killed a his
(52:52):
head gets sowt off in a pretty gruesome scene. And uh,
you know that's when we get Denzel moving the head
around the plinth in the Senate telling all the senators
without telling them. Look, if you want if you don't
want me spinning your head menacingly on this thing, then
(53:14):
listen to me.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
I meant a point.
Speaker 3 (53:17):
So yeah, yeah, you know it's uh, there's a lot
of background dealing. I'm not gonna get into all of it,
but basically, they're gonna they're gonna execute Lucilla in the Colisseum. Uh,
They're going to you know, it's gonna be this whole thing,
(53:38):
and they get you know, they get him out there.
And but but Paul Meskell and his fellow gladiators. They
have a little revolt and they fight back and they
try to defend uh Connie Nielsen and the senators who
are down there. Derek Jacobi who plays one of the senators. Uh,
he's like a great British actor who's in this movie
(53:59):
for literally like two scenes, for like thirty seconds. He
doesn't even get to say a word, and he just
gets fucking gashed, Like he gets like three throat slashes
by some like praetorian like just gurgling blood and you're
just like, oh, there's that guy. I remember him from
the first one. Oh, I guess he's dead now. Anyway,
on to the main thing. The gladiators win, but unfortunately
(54:23):
Denzel is good with the bow and he shoots Connie
Nielsen through the heart, just like what happened to Paul
Meskal's wife. No, you killed his wife and his mom,
and now it's time for us to fight. And lo
and behold. They get a secret message to Pedro Pascal's
troops who are at the port in Ostia, and they
(54:46):
ride up and they are going to meet the forces
of Macrinus and of the emperors, and would you know it,
they come to a river, and I was told by
people that this river's probably the Tiber based on actual geography. However, uh,
(55:07):
there's a whole thing like about how neither of these
armies cross this this river, and there's a big deal
about like the shores and people stepping into the river
and stuff like that. And I really think he meant
this to be the Rubicon, like even if it even
if the geography doesn't make sense. I was like, Oh,
they're literally fighting in the Rubicon. That's as about his
(55:29):
on the nose as you is that what you guys?
Do you think?
Speaker 1 (55:32):
It was just like, yeah, whatever, I think that that
it is a nod to that at the very least,
you know, Yeah, that's what I would have to say
about it.
Speaker 3 (55:41):
Yeah, it's yeah, they they fight.
Speaker 1 (55:44):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
Paul Mescal wins sadly because we don't get to uh
we don't get to uh, we don't get any more Denzel.
He just he dies and uh oh oh, but one
thing he puts on h Paul Mescal puts on Maximus's
armor from the first movie, and during the scuffle in
(56:08):
the water, he's not down under the water, Denzel stabs him,
like hits his chest with the thing like like with
a sword like the but the literal plot armor defeats him.
Fucking plot armor defeats I know, we gotta go. I
(56:32):
know we kind of wrapped up the end a little
bit quick. Uh but you know we we've talked about it.
It uh uh. Ridley leaves it on kind of a cliffhanger.
Is there a dream of Rome or is that just
something that rich assholes think to themselves because they want
to feel important. Who's to say, but uh, yeah, what
did Patrick? What? What did you you know? Overall you
(56:53):
said you liked it? What? What what do you wanna?
What do you want to leave the people with? On
gladiat or too?
Speaker 2 (56:59):
Yeah, I'm and I think the big thing that this
movie gets right is that Rome was a machine that
gobbled up people and spat out blood and bone, and that, like,
at a fundamental level, that's what it was. In the
ancient world, control over people, making people do things was
(57:21):
the basis of power, not machines, none of that stuff.
It was quite literally making people do shit, and that
included dying. And any understanding of Rome that is not
built on that fundamental dynamic is wrong. And so the
fact that this movie makes that dynamic its starting point
(57:42):
for understanding what Rome is, and builds the plot off
of that. I think is a strong point in it's
in its favor, leaving all the other shit aside. I
think this movie will make you think more about what
Rome actually was and why it mattered than all of
the then rewatching the first glad Aide movie a thousand times,
even if that is probably a better like movie movie,
(58:05):
it is not a more revealing or interesting look at Rome.
Speaker 3 (58:11):
Yeah, yeah, I think, Yeah, I think I had a
lot of fun with this. You know, if you just
go in and you're looking for fun, you're looking for
Denzel hamming it up and doing his thing, then you're
gonna love it. Eleanor thoughts.
Speaker 1 (58:25):
Yeah, ten out of ten, delicious slop. Yum yum yum.
I like how bright it is. I simply love to
see Paedro Pascal period.
Speaker 3 (58:35):
He's very attractive.
Speaker 1 (58:37):
The plot makes no goddamn sense. Yeah, sure, Lucius is
Maximus's Sun. Fine whatever. Yeah, and we're okay with this.
We keep sordid armor lying around around a bunch of enslaved.
Speaker 3 (58:50):
People, the strongest armor ever. Yeah, it's oh man, Yeah,
it's it's a lot of it's a lot of myths,
but it's a lot of fun. The I think, you know,
I think that's gonna about do it for us today
with gladiat or two. Check it out, have fun, Let
(59:11):
us know what you thought. Go see comments, Go see it.
Go to the movies, because the movies are great. Just
go see a movie. It doesn't doesn't have to be
this one. Just go see a movie.
Speaker 1 (59:22):
Literally, go see any movie and have a nice time.
But you know, I think this is probably the most
fun movie you can see at the moment.
Speaker 2 (59:29):
Yeah, it's a tremendous big screen experience. Highly recommend.
Speaker 3 (59:34):
Mm yep. Yeah, Well Patrick, where can people find you?
What's going on with you?
Speaker 1 (59:40):
You can.
Speaker 2 (59:41):
I'm not on Twitter much these days, but I am
on Blue Sky enjoying, enjoying not being bombarded by Nazis
a on a at a fairly regular clip. I just
finished my second book. It's called Lost Worlds, The Rise
and Fall of human Societies from the Ice Age to
the Bronze Age. That'll be out sometime in twenty twenty five,
whenever the editor gets around to it. Yeah, I know,
(01:00:03):
l I'm I'm around, I'm hanging out. I'm still making
Tides of History every week and I'm having a good
old time.
Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
We've also got the Rome Podcast don't wait at this juncture.
Speaker 2 (01:00:12):
Oh yeah, God goodness gracious, yes, yeah, I'm doing Uh.
I'm now a regular co host on Masters of Our
Domain with uh, with Phoebe and Milo and we are
We are currently covering the absolutely shiit awful those about
to die. Yes, it's just just fucking horrible, man, a
(01:00:35):
god awful piece of intellectual property that should never have
been made. So so that's what we're covering. But we
will soon be covering things that don't suck.
Speaker 3 (01:00:46):
Re there you go. Yeah, well you know everyone, Uh,
thank you very much for listening, and uh, we'll see
you next time.
Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
Bye bye bye. Yeah he thank you guys so much
for having me. I've gotta I've got to jump.
It's my boyfriend's birthday, and so I have to, like,
you know, shower him with praise absolute. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
he's a very good boy. He's the bestest birthday boy.
I think that that has been said by many important historians.
So you know, yeah, yeah, we gotta go to the
pub and talk about to Losing Guitari presumably, yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
We look, we love a good zome.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I got him from are you aware of the the
Etsy store? Krit Drip?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
I got him.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
I got him to lose a guitar krit Drip shirt
that said like I became a non total, non totalizable
entity and all I got was a stupid T shirt
and it's really it went It went down well, so
you know, yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
The summer between my first two years of my PhD,
I had a French at a French advisor who was wonderful.
I absolutely love her to death. But she gave me
a copy of To Losing Gatari to read over the
summer because we had just done a class on like
globalization in the Roman Empire. Uh, and I got super stoned,
like correct as stoned as I've ever been. Like, I smoked,
(01:11):
I rolled and smoked a personal blunt and sat down
and read to Losing Guatari and it blew my mind.
Like there you go. Yeah, that was I think that
was the correct introduction to to that particular brand of
post postmodern thought.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah. I think that it really helps to be absolutely
zeedd and booted out your damn mind to get your
head round it, because the trouble is otherwise you're paying
too much attention and you shouldn't. It's more of a
vibe based philosophy.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, absolute, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
So this is the third time we recorded this week,
in the third time that we mentioned losing guitar.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
It's rule, man, because they because they rule. And also
that's the rhizome, Luke, it's in the ri zome, Luke.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
I will stay away. I will stay away from all philosophers,
get them.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Nond It's coming for you because I keep talking about
it at you and that's how it got me, all right,
Like sorry, now you know, Luke, that's that's how it works.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
So we love it. We love a decentralized network based
approach to to understanding the world.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
You goddamn right, you got that right.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
It's so good to talk to you, guys.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
I missed you. Yeah, oh man, Oh like.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
I think that we should do it. Guys, I am
I For one, I'm ready to talk about the world's
stupidest movie. Christmas is dumbest picture.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
You're calling it dum dumbest but some but still far
better than Napoleon somehow. All right, there I go, Hello
(03:28):
and welcome back to We're Not So Different Podcast? How
we about how we always end up talking about losing
guitar even when we're here to talk about slop. God
damn it.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Slop and more slop is in the rho.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Yes it is. My name is Luke and I'm joined
by doctor eleanor you know the deal, uh, And we're
here to talk about a new movie called Gladiator two.
You may have heard of it, and we've got a friend,
So no question today. Just straight onto the main show, folks.
We're back for another of Ridley Scott's late career slop fests.
(04:06):
By now we all know what to expect. Spectacle anachronism,
the Vegas historical outline, possible great actors trying their best
with socio material, slop and more slop. Maybe, just maybe
we can admit that, as postmodern humans, we enjoy a
good bit of slop every now and again, maybe not
all the slop, maybe not the volume that we receive it,
(04:27):
but some of it is fun, and Scott's movies are
no different. I think by now it's very clear that
any Ridley Scott movie made after the tragic suicide of
his brother Tony Scott in twenty twelve will succeed or
fail purely based on how well the script turned out
and how interested the actors are in chewing up scenery.
Since then, Ridley has reportedly cut his amount of timing
(04:49):
film way the amount of time filming way down, and
chooses to remove any messy stuff in editing rather than
doing another take or two or taking time to massage
the script. Twenty twenty one's the Last Duel being The
big notable exception here is it's both very very good
and wonderfully directed. Normally, however, if you get disinterested actors
(05:10):
in a messi script, you end up with something awful
like Napoleon. If, on the other hand, you get actors
in there who aren't afraid to make the most of
what little they're given and the script hasn't gone through
several thousand revisions, the movie will be much more tolerable,
maybe even downright enjoyable, which is why we must think
our lucky stars, because Denzel Washington is the most perfect
(05:31):
choice for the later era Ridley Scott film. He's all
bomb basted and kinetic energy, and he loves to meet
the script exactly where it's at in revel revel in it?
Are these character turns very abrupt? Yes? Does the timeline
of events make even passing sense in a wider historical context? No?
Did he change the location of the Rubicon River from
(05:57):
where it actually is to somewhere between Ostia and Rome? Probably?
You know, doesn't he just matter? No? Does it matter
that Paul Meskal is a black hole of charisma when
he's speaking? Absolutely not. The point is we've got Denzel
mugging for the camera while spinning a decapitated head on
(06:17):
a plint and telling the Roman Senate to get in line. Also,
Connie Nielsen and Pedro Pascal are trying hard with the
meager scraps they're given to work with. But we'll get
to all that because the most important star we have
today is right here on the show with us to
talk about Gladiator too. You know him, you love him.
I'm so glad to have back Roman historian podcasting godfather
(06:38):
in Friend of the Show, Patrick Wyman, Patrick, how the
hell are you?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I could not possibly be better after that lovely introduction.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
That was so nice of you to say. I'm so
stoked to be here and I'm so stoked to talk
about this movie because I I ironically loved it good.
I'm glad it's completely It is like I could not
possibly agree more with everything you said. It is such
fucking slap. It's such slop. But but you know what,
(07:07):
I'm a little piggy. Give me, give me the yamyam yum.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Exactly, I said to me. It was just like, it's
much like the dinner I'm going to be having after
this podcast down Weatherspoons, delicious slop yum yum yum, fried
frozen food. Fuck.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah exactly. Yeah, you know what this feels like. This
movie felt like when you go out to the bar
and you and you have like not twelve drinks, not
two drinks, but like six drinks, and you're you're kind
of buzzed, but you're sober enough to know that you
should eat food, and so then you order like chicken fingers,
(07:49):
a grilled cheese sandwich, French fries some wings, like like
a huge pile of stuff, and then you get it
to go and you take it home and eat it
there like a responsible like a respect enjoyer of your slot.
That's that's that's that's how I felt about this movie.
Is it's like it's like six beers and thirty seven
(08:10):
hundred calories.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I mean, which is one of my favorite things possible.
So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
It's really that's really my wheelhouse.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
It. Yeah, I was. I was honestly surprised by how
much I did enjoy it. I kind of thought we
were going to be in for another Napoleon esque thing here.
But I shouldn't. I shouldn't have doubted Denzel. That was
my fault, and I didn't. I then saw an interview
where someone asked Ridley Scott how often he thinks about
(08:42):
the Roman Empire and he said he's never thought about
it once, and well, yeah, that is that is what
we need, is what we need here, That that is
the vibe we need. Has he ever thought about it? No?
You know, like, oh God, it's great, good, I love it.
Just please you know, until you're perfect being, keep keep throwing,
(09:03):
keep throwing this ship out to this uh, Patrick before
we talk any about like the movie, like the plot
and all that, you know, I guess we should do
a little bit on the historical aspects. I think we're all,
you know, pretty familiar with Scott's deal, uh when it
comes to history by now. But were there any aspects
of Roman history or life or culture that you saw
(09:24):
that you know, you perked up and you're like, oh
they did you know that looks pretty right or that
looks pretty good or you know whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, I mean so I would say not in any
literal sets, right right, right, Like I think I think
it's important to understand that we have to do like
a land acknowledgment for history as we talk about this movie,
where like like we acknowledge that there is a real
Roman past and that there were things happening in Rome
in this period of time, but this is we're not there.
(09:54):
We're we're we're like pouring one out for for the
real history. Yeah, yeah, I think it gets right, Like
you like, we've got it. We've got to leave aside
sharks in the Colosseum, cgi baboons, guys reading newspapers, like
like there are like seventeen thousand things like that that
we could point to, but but honestly, I think it's
(10:14):
pedantic to do that, and it misses the point of
what Ridley Scott movies are about and the ways in
which they are valuable and even occasionally thought provoking. Because
what I liked about this in the way that I
thought it got it something that actually matters about Roman
history is about what is empire? Who does it benefit?
(10:36):
And is it and is there anything redeeming about it? Yeah, Like,
because this whole movie is an argument about what Rome is,
who pays, who pays the price for empire? Who benefits?
And it doesn't? Like is there anything that makes it worthwhile?
Like is the Colosseum worth the blood spilled to build
(10:58):
it and fill it? Like That's that's what the whole
movie is about. And frankly, I think that's a much
more compelling take on Rome than the first movie where
they're talking about the dream of Rome and all this,
which which is quite literally bullshit like yeah, yeah, never exists,
it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah, I completely agree, although for me it was a
real uh tale of two halves because like the first
half I was like, hell, yeah, this guy's spitting fuck Rome,
Like absolutely fuck Rome. I was like, yes, gee, you
see your boy. He fucking hates Rome. I hate Rome. Yeah,
that's right, people get conquered. It's a terrible machine that
(11:37):
like chews up and spits out other civilizations for absolutely
no fucking reason. But then by the end he's like, ooh,
dream of Rome. I'm not mad at my mommy anymore.
And I'm like, what the fuck is this dude? Like
it's like, like, maybe Rome could be a democracy. Shut
the fuck up. No, it couldn't a But you.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Know, I'll say, even at the end, it's still ambivalent
because it doesn't because because he doesn't actually make a choice,
he asks the like the last scene of the movie
is him asking the question of whether there's anything redeemable there?
So so yes, he there, Like it does allow for
it does allow for the possibility that maybe there is,
but it doesn't actually say that. Unlike the first one,
(12:15):
the first one is very clear that there is an
actual good Rome lurking under the corruption and the bad people.
The second one is not certain about that at all,
and it sees good people being corrupted by it.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I liked I think it did
a good job of presenting that and presenting like the
fickleness of the Senate and how they could be easily
moved by powerful and or well very wealthy individuals, and
how it wasn't you know, this deliberative body that we're
(12:51):
kind of told about. But it's you know, a bunch
of oligarchs sitting in a room and you know when
the old emperor, when one of the old emperors gets murdered,
you know, pretty much in broad daylight, and they all
know what happened, but they're like, hey, cool, new guy, Great,
let's go.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
You know.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
I thought they Yeah, I thought they they did a
good job with that stuff. And yeah, I think, uh,
I think it's very I just think it's very interesting that,
you know, he he almost I don't know that Scott
actually seems very interested in answering the question of whether
(13:30):
like the Dream of Rome is real. Like he almost
seems like it's like a it's just a story trope
to him, you know, like it's not he's not interested
in asking this question in any meaningful way. So you know,
he's just gonna you know, he's just kind of throwing
it out there.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's what the actors seem
to take it seriously.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Though, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Which is the part that because yeah, I think you're
absolutely right. The script, the script is interested in the
question as a as a counterpoint to the first movie
and and and it effectively undoes the legacy of the
first movie in the opening credits, which I kind of
fucking dug, You're just like, you've got you you did
(14:14):
the whole movie. And then you're like, ah, but but
it didn't matter, didn't account for it didn't amount to anything.
I'm like, I kind of dug the willingness with which
they just went down that road. Yeah, I thought that
was I thought that was kind of cool. Uh but yeah,
it's like but but the actors, like I think especially
Denzel thought thought about it, and he was like, I'm
just gonna have all the fun humanly possible with this.
(14:36):
And because he's got a very Killmonger in Black Panther
thing going in the best way. I mean, like, Killmonger
is probably the most compelling individual character that there's been
in a Marvel movie. And I think in much the
same way, Denzel is one of the most compelling characters
we've seen in the the Gladiator cinematic universe of of
(14:57):
of movies in television about ancient Rome.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he yeah. Denzel came in and he's like,
you know, he he answered the question of you know,
is there you know, is there a dream of Rome?
And the answer is no. The dream is just power
and you know, and getting and attaining it. And then
you have someone like you know, like Pedro Pedro Pascal
(15:20):
is a Casius and Connie Nielsen her character, and they,
you know, they do believe in it, and I think,
you know, they try, but you know, you could tell
from like the differences of like the dream of Rome
versus being unsure versus you know, don't care Rome sucks,
like Denzel kind of is. You know, the script is
(15:41):
very much giving them very little on the side of
the Dream of Rome, because I mean, all of this
is obviously a farce and they know, you know, they
know it while it's happening.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
It's just yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Yeah. The only thing before we get into it that
I wanted to mention is that while looking up stuff
for this film, I came across a section on Wikipedia
and it says in May two thousand and six, Scott
(16:13):
said he wanted to make a sequel. There were differing
ideas and during the time Nick Cave, the singer, was
commissioned to write a new draft of the script. It
was later revealed to be written under the working title
of christ Killer. Cave described the plot as a quote
deities versus deity versus humanity end quote story. The story
(16:37):
involved Maximus impurgatory, who was resurrected as an immortal warrior
for the Roman gods. Maximus sent back to Earth and
tasked with ending Christianity by killing Jesus and his disciples,
as Christianity was draining the power of the ancient Roman gods.
During his mission, Maximus is tricked into murdering his own son.
(16:58):
Cursed to live forever, Maximus fights in the Crusades, World
War Two, and the Vietnam War, with the ending revealing
that in the present day the character now works at
the Pentagon. The script was rejected and scrapped after you,
consultant on the original film, told Scott it wouldn't work,
especially as Cave had written something quote two grand in
(17:21):
quote due to his theater work, and then that is
what we that is what this is what this.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Is what you I can't believe they stole that from us.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Oh my god, I mean well Spielberg killer, given Nick
Cave's heel turn into being like a weirdo Zionist in
a way, I'm glad this didn't get made because I'd
be grappling. I'd be grappling with myself because I'd be
trying to see this even though you know I'm mad
at him right now. Oh fuck, and hell.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Even by the standards of something Ridley Scott makes, that's batship.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
I love it, I'm here for it, But I think
it should be a comic book. I know that's my
answer to everything. But that would be like a really good,
like batshit graphic novel, Like let's get Warren Allis on it.
Let's go Yeah I could.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
I could see Alan Moore having a ton of fun
with that.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Yeah he would. He'd be like, oh, Nick Cave, this
is a cute story. Now let me make it really
fucking weird. And then yeah, turns out he's actually turns
out he's actually time traveling Judas and the Friendy ended
up killing.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Jus Like whoa hell yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Hell yeah, all right, yeah, let's get into the movie.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Basic plot is this, uh new Media is about to
be conquered by and they are going to put up
a fight. Paul Mescal is the main character whose name
is like I think Hanna or something Hano At the beginning,
it's Paul Mescal. Yeah, and there's a big fight. There
(19:13):
are some cool like boat They did a cool thing
with this when they had the wall going right up
to the edge of the sea. So the boats came
in and they had to drop the siege towers and
the ladders from the boats in order to scale the wall,
which is a really cool thing because he Ridley's done
a bunch of the you know, we got to blow
(19:34):
a hole in the wall to get through it kind
of things. So I thought this was a nice change
of pace, and you know, sadly it doesn't go the
way of the Numidians and Paul Meskal's wife is pierced
with an arrow that was shot by Pedro Pascal's Acasius,
(19:55):
who is leading this. But he is very reluctant. He's
shaking his head the whole time because he's very disappointed
to let you know that he disapproves of all this.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
He didn't want to kill Paul Muscal's wife, Nope, and
yet he did.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
So yeah, it's uh yeah, and you know, that's uh,
you can kind of trace the steps from there. Paul
Mescal gets sold into slavery as as is the wont
of the Romans over there over their captives, and uh
he's training to be a gladiator and he gets put
(20:30):
in uh monkey with but like but.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
That also is like it was like the the extra
ugly babboons. Yeah, you know he's you can tell he's
the gang leader. It's like, you know, he'd like eighties
kids movies where the bad guy has a mohawk.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
That guy's thing strong Rufio from hook Vibes going on
with the baboons there, and they like.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Don't you look even slightly realistic? This is my biggest
bug about it. Like it's like this is what the
most cgi asked baboons I ever done scene Like I.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
It's like it's like you pulled like, uh baboons from
like a monster movie or like an alternate you know,
like like you pulled them out of like Star Wars
or Star Trek, Like these are the space baboons of
you know whatever twelve uh oryon twelve or whatever. But like,
you know, you can realize baboons. You can even put
(21:30):
people in mocap suits, like Andy serkis like, We've done
this before, but it's like Nope. These cgi baboons with
like wider than they look like, they can unange their
jawels like snakes.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
They're they're the b plot in one of the lesser
episodes of Clone Wars. That's exactly what. That's what the
baboons look like. Like my my kids have watched every
episode of Clone Wars like seventeen times, so I'm familiar
with like the monster b plot and the that's exactly
what the That's exactly what these baboons and so look
like that. So Funnily enough, the Romans did enjoy having
(22:06):
baboons in the arenas. But the most famous baboon instance
in Roman history is that that, as a punishment for
particular kinds of crimes, the female offenders were supposed to
be fucked by baboons in public.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
That was it's a beautiful culture, guys, we should really
emulate it.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
Yeah, I did not expect you to say that. That
is not what I expected at all.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah. There's a scene in the Rome series where an
Eastern potentate is talking to a very drunken brutus after
the assassination of Caesar, and the Eastern Potentate is like,
I will help you. I would give you money to fight,
you know, to fight Octavia, and he's like, but I
want to see a Roman woman fucked by baboons and
(22:52):
it's it's like one of the better scenes in an
already very good series. But yeah, actual, Like this is
the thing about Rome. Whenever we get real weird shit
in a film or TV depiction of Rome, it's almost
never as weird as the Romans actually were. Romans did
lots of weird stuff by our standards, and like they
(23:15):
almost never go with the actual weird things that the
Romans did, like getting naked and dressing in wolf cloaks
and whipping each other up and down the hills of
the city Annual Festival, annual festival they did.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Like yeah, normal, yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And that's the thing.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
But it's just like their weirdness doesn't accord to the
weirdness that we're comfortable with. It's interesting because we're totally
fine with the violence of Rome, but we're not comfortable
with the sexuality of Rome, which is kind of like,
you know, this is like the modern condition, as that
we're ineared to violence but afraid of sexuality, although obviously,
like being forcibly fucked by a baboon is a form
(23:52):
of sexual violence. But we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy,
that's not okay. But on the other hand, like, here's
this weird baboon scene right, like this is kicking the
pants off of my ancient baboon factory that I was
going to drop in, which is that the ancient Egyptian
police used to use baboons like like police dogs, but
it was like police baboons fucking.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
I was reading a site report of a very very
very early Egyptian royal temb, one of the very first
Egyptian royal teams from the pre Dynastic period. So this
is about thirty seven hundred BC, and this is like,
so this is imagine one of the first guys to
be an Egyptian king as we understand it, he was
buried with a menagerie of animals like that he had
(24:39):
that they had caught and brought from elsewhere, one of
which was a baboon that showed signs of having been
like staked to the ground, like it had like it
had like wear marks on the bones that suggested it
had been like tied up so long tradition of baboon
importation and exploitation in the ancient world. But yeah, so
I want to I want to come back this guy.
(25:00):
What you mentioned about the violence, because the in all
of these movies. This is not to say that there
was not huge amounts of violence in the Roman Empire,
but it's generally not the violence that we see on screen.
The violence that the Romans were fond of was either
(25:21):
highly professionalized and stylized violence, which is what gladiators mostly did.
Gladiators were professional athletes. You don't like brow highly trained
people that you spent thousands and thousands and thousands of
denari or the like huge amounts of money to train,
to train and exploit. You don't have them kill each
other for no reason, like in a fight. Like gladiators
(25:44):
lost fights all the time and survived. This is like
the idea of two gladiators fighting to the death. It
was a fairly rare recurrence. It was it was only
for special occasions. What the Romans did do was have
gladiators fight prisoners who had no chance of beating them.
But it feels icky to modern audiences to have trained
(26:04):
killers killing unarmed prisoners or barely armed prisoners like that
feels icky. The Romans loved beast fights. But again, for
a modern audience, the idea of watching a guy with
a spear torment and kill a giraffe is like that
is that's pretty ikey to us. Romans loved and loved
that shit. So we end up with these hyper violent,
(26:28):
highly skilled fights on on camera, which is not really
what the Romans taste was, nor was it economically viable
in the context of the like the economy of the
games in the Roman world.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And they
do kind of like have some knobs towards the economics
of this, you know, in that you know, you have
these scenes where they're talking about the expense of various
gladiators who were killed, but they don't stop doing it, right, Yeah,
and it doesn't really make sense. It would be like,
(27:04):
you know, wanting to shoot a race horse, which we
do every time there's a race, but you know that's
not like the goal in theory.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, so, yeah, this stuff is expensive. I mean, they're
the the gladiators who are fighting in Rome especially, are
the product of an empire wide system of finding, developing, training,
caring for those guys, Like they're the if you're good
(27:33):
enough to fight in the coliseum in Rome, you are,
you are you represent years of investment from a variety
of stakeholders in your continued survival. So, like the idea
of them just throwing away these guys in like random
one off battles is like, that's not how gladiatorial combat work.
They're much more like professional wrestlers than than than anything else.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, I mean it's a great way to kill Christians,
you know, like they absolutely love to kill Christians this way,
but you know you're not gonna kill actual gladiators Like
that's but yeah, it doesn't. We want we want it
to be fair. It's very interesting because you know the
movie does play with the concept of like, well, is
Rome awful and irredeemable? And in many ways I would say, yeah,
(28:20):
but it can't go far enough as to admit even
how awful gladiatorial sport is. You know, it's like there's
there is no it's not a fair fight. And you know,
there there's something I always see over and over again
in Ridley Scott historical movies where he wants there to
be some form of fairness that isn't there. He wants
(28:42):
there to be some like impulse towards democracy or fairness
or a concept of equality that is simply non extant.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
And I find that really interesting.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, that's what That's what makes the Last Duel so
compelling in comparison to the rest of Ridley Scott's subra
is that that's not there, right, because it's it's actually
true to the period. It actually reflects the war rays
of the period, right, Like there's no there's no determination
to fairness in that movie. There's a lot of talk
about rights and privileges and you know what you're owed
(29:18):
as a member of a particular social group, but none
of this like completely a historical idea that the world
is fair, which in Gladiator too is particularly both Gladiator
movies is particularly glaring because what the arena was about
was not just entertainment, though it was. It was about
reinforcing the social hierarchy. It's that if you're if you're
(29:39):
in the stands looking down at what's happening on the sands,
you know that you are above that. That even the
meanest Roman is not the kind of person who gets
thrown into the arena unless you transgress, right, if you transgress,
then you end up on the sands. That's what the
That's what the Colosseum is about, at a funda mental
(30:00):
level is rein is laying bare and reinforcing those social
hierarchies and and it's and I think you're absolutely right
to point out the discordance between the idea of fairness
that Scott brings to it and what the arena actually was.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, the good news is that this movie
issues any notion of pacing. Let's say, because like we
get we get Paul Paul Mescal gets purchased by uh
Denzel's character Macrinus, and he uh like he does. There's
(30:43):
like a very brief training sequence. There's like a little
bit of stuff, and then within like five minutes they
are off to uh to Rome. They're going to fight
in the coliseum. You know. They get in there, there's
a they walk under the the arch and the the
the wolf and the twins Romulus and Remus and all
(31:04):
that stuff, and we get a little background on that,
and then we meet the co emperors Getta and Carakala,
who are who were two real emperors, but they are,
I guess kind of time displaced. So this whole thing's
time anyway. Uh, there's a lot of time displacement going
on from the actual Roman empire. But the point is
(31:27):
Gheta and Caracala are let's say, unwell, unhinged as it were,
and they just want to see blood and violence. And
when Acasius gets back from his win and he's like,
I just want to go on vacation and hang out
with my wife, they're like, no, no, no, no, We're
(31:48):
going to conquer India and Persia. And it's like, oh, okay,
Alexander the Great, right, calm down here, guys. Acasius doesn't
want that. And then it turns out that there is
a secret plot between Connie Nielsen's character Lucilla and Acasius
(32:08):
to throw a coup with Acasius's loyal soldiers. And yeah,
it's uh, there's a lot going on here real quick
because almost immediately Paul Meskal's character is thrown into a
private gladiatorial duel uh to score but yeah, between Denzel
(32:33):
and another senator or in a senator and you know,
Lucius wins, and then instead of just being normal, he
quotes something from Virgil's a neeied and you know, uh,
this is like everybody's like, ugh, you know, local Numidian
shocks or silences Roman class Roman upper class with by
(32:59):
speaking imperfect Virgil or whatever. Yeah, you know, it goes.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
I think my favorite comment that I've seen online about
the whole get In Carcolla situation is that they're like
the mcpoiles. It's like, yeah, like you can't see it,
you know, so you oh my god, on the internet
(33:27):
for that one.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Yeah, oh that's so fucking good. Yeah. You can really
imagine them having some like really disturbing wines about milk.
Absolutely absolutely spot on. I mean, so, there's there's a
few things here. I think first of all, Numidia is
a Roman province at this point, there is absolutely no
(33:49):
reason why somebody who was born and raised in Numidia
could not have learned Virgil there, Like, yeah, let's let's
let's get that out of the way first of all.
Like that you could go. One of the things about
the Roman Empire being Roman is that by about two
hundred AD, when this is set, you could be fucking
anywhere and learn Virgil. That's the whole point of the
(34:10):
Roman Empire is that by this time the provinces are
every bit as quote unquote Roman as the city of Rome,
and in fact often more so, because Rome is filled
with people who have come from various corners of the
Empire to live there, Like there are the amount of
(34:31):
evidence there is for immigration to Rome from elsewhere is
overwhelming and spans every different evidentiary base that you could
hope for. I mean, it's there in inscriptions, it's there
in the ancient DNA evidence, it's there in the isotopic evidence,
it's there in the material evidence of objects being brought
(34:51):
from all over from all over the place. So Rome
itself is an extraordinarily cosmopolitan place, and the pro are
full of people who have been who the only culture
that they know effectively is Roman culture. Like I'm sure
that that's going to make some saying it that way
(35:12):
is not entirely accurate in a specialist sense. But for
the lay person, like they're reading Virgil, they're going to baths,
they're they're being educated to read and write in Latin,
they're using papyrus, they're eating off of uh, they're eating.
They're using a material repertoire that is indistinguishable from what
would be used almost anywhere else in the Empire, Like
(35:33):
that's that's the whole point of the Roman Empire. And
Numidia is like that so the when so the modern
people's emphasis on like on on race in the Roman
Empire and uh and you know, were there black people
in the Roman Empire? Yeah? There were. That wasn't important
to the Romans. That wasn't how they understood identity or belonging.
(35:58):
Like for them, if you did run and ship, you
were a Roman. That's the literal definition of romanness as
the Romans understood it. Like so that the yeah, that
was that all? That all just struck me quite hard
as I was as I was doing this. And and
I think the the baseline level of acceptance that all
(36:18):
the other characters give Macronus in this that nobody is
like a black guy in Rome. Everybody takes it for granted,
like oh yeah, sure of course this is this is
entirely normal. That's accurate. I liked that. I like that
part of it, that this this is not a movie
that wears that that is trying to make a point
about the diversity of Rome. It takes it for granted.
(36:39):
And that I that I appreciated. I thought that I
thought that was that was a good thing.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Yeah, yeah, they you know, people have made a deal
about how like Denzel just speaks with like, you know, normal,
Denzel is normal, I guess patois or whatever you want
to call it, you know, and like, why didn't he
fake like this accent, that accent and this is somebody
who's like and he said, you know, we originally like
(37:05):
tried out a couple of different, like more African style accents,
but they just ended up sounding offensive and I was
doing a lot of clicks and stuff and you know,
and nobody wanted that, and so, you know, me and
Ridley just decided that I would talk normal and you know,
get who cares. And I was like, yeah, that, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
I actually thought that was good.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
None of you sound like none of you sound.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
Yeah like Romans sound like we don't know what Roman
accents were, Like, we don't you know, like and we've
got kind of like received ways that we will pronounce things,
but we don't know what a fucking Roman accent is.
And I thought it was actually kind of good because
it's like you have some people who are a little
bit more high For Luton, he sounds like he's from
(37:48):
the provinces, which America. Is I think it works, you know.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly to the extent that we can
talk about accents in the Roman world. We know that
there were very We know that the Romans distinguished between
different accents. We don't know what they sounded like. It's
very difficult to reconstruct the phonology of spoken Latin in
the Roman world for a variety of reasons. There's a
huge body of scholarship on it. But the but we
(38:15):
know that they distinct, Like you could tell the difference
between somebody from Spain and somebody from Africa. You could
tell the difference probably between somebody who grew up speaking
British Latin and somebody who grew up in the Balkans Uh,
and those people would have sounded different, and they wouldn't
have sounded like English like like doing they like, they
wouldn't have been doing received pronunciation. That's that's like, that's
(38:38):
a modern convention and how we talk about Rome. It's
one of the things the Rome TV Show did well
was they used the variety of accents in English as
a way of capturing social diversity and geographic diversity in
the Roman world and the and they're not they're doing
the same thing in Gladiator too. It's just because it
sounds just because some people have American accents, it sounds
(39:00):
kind of jarring to those of us who have been
conditioned by you know, generations of everybody in period films
doing English accents.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, it's like, like, I hate to break it's everybody,
but they don't have RP accents.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yeah, just like like.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
You know, like what do you think romans sound like?
You know, and I thought it was nice. I thought
it was actually a nice touch. And I'm glad that
they they'd done it that way.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
You know, yeah, exactly. Yeah, after this we get we
start to get the uh, we get into the gladiatorial
aspects that you know, the blood and guts here that
that we're going to get and uh, I'm just going
to talk about them real quick, or a couple of
them real quick. The first is, uh, Paul Meskeal and
(39:47):
the other Numidians are put in there, and there's like
a champion gladiator who is writing a rhinoceros, which is
just cool, which is cool as fuck, like, you know,
just straight up souls elden Ring. Shit, you gotta go
fight a guy on a rhinoceros.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Like, yeah, you can. You can ride a rhinoceros. Why not?
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Yeah? And they knock this rhinoceros knocks people aside, you know.
But Paul mescal in the end, he knows how to
defeat the rhinoceros. It is to get really close to
the wall. So if it runs past you, just runs
right into the wall and as it's coming, throw up
a bunch of chalk, like your lebron before a game.
It just runs straight and you you you kind of
(40:29):
get hit while this is happening, and it runs straight
into the wall and like keels over and and then
you're good. And it's like, how did he survive getting
clipped by a rhinoceros.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Like all the other things a rhinoceros that should.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Have like that should have decimated, like the left or
right side of his rib cage and all those internal
organs should have been liquefied.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Man, it made me think of Donkey Kong Country.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
It's like the Zelda puzzle, Like, Okay, I gotta I
gotta make the thing run into me in front of
this like breakable wall. Okay, I'll stand here and die.
Heay work, yeah, Chris, you know.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Yeah, very very good. And I was very a big
fan of the scene because there was a rhino. But
then I was sad when the rhino was hurt. But
I was also glad to see the rhino because I'm
really hoping, against hope, people can't possibly think that people
were of rhinos, can they. So I I was like,
I was, I'm very happy to see it because I
(41:30):
was like, I know, you bitches don't think this is real.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
So that's I hate to break this no, but so
my favorite interaction I ever had with a student when
I was teaching was the one who asked me when
in the Middle Ages Game of Thrones took place and
where the dragons went.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
No, no, goddamn.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Yeah. So so yes, there are a lot of people
who came out in the movie thinking that the Romans road.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
I know they're they're in Wales. All the dragons are.
We know that that's where they went.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
That's where they.
Speaker 3 (42:08):
Oh my god, oh the future, horrifying glimpse into the future.
Hopefully not Hopefully that's just a person who uh has
been a little a little too acculturated by pop culture
and that they can learn, uh that that's not true
in the future. Because I certainly remember thinking very stupid
(42:30):
things like that when I was hopefully hopefully yeah uh.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Well, but but to that point, I just want to
follow up on that real quick, Like, I don't think
there's anything wrong with making kind of historical fantasy or
things like oh because it's I mean, and there I
hate the pedantry about it, but whether it's from academics
or lay people who just love to point out the inaccuracies,
(42:57):
it's like, what matters is that things like this get
people interested in the actual past, and that like they
certainly did for me. I part of the reason that
I took Roman history classes was because I watched Gladiator
and and you've got plenty of time to read books
and shit like, you can do that, but what you can't,
(43:19):
but what you can't inculcate out of nowhere is an
interest in the subject matter. And if if Ridley Scott's
CGIs baboons and sharks in the Coliseum and other absurd
shit in this movie gets people to take Roman history
classes or buy one of Mary Beard's books or something, yeah,
but hell yeah, I'm all about it. I'm all about it.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Yeah, I agree, I completely agree with that, And I mean,
I suppose that hopefully it's something that we can teach
him out of. But uh, you know, it does hurt
my heart very slightly when I hear that someone might
think that that is true.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
So yeah, yeah, oh man, oh yeah, no nobody if
for everybody listening to this who's wondering, No, they did not,
in fact ride rhinos.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
No, you cannot write a rhino. That's not a thing.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
You can do.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Your legs, I'm.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
Sure tried, but that was an ill fated pursuit.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
They're very large. Your legs aren't gonna like go on
at all. They're not ponies. I'm just saying, you know.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
There's no there's a reason there are no rhinoceros mahouts,
you know, like that's not like that's not the viable
path forward.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
Yeah. Yeah. The other the other big thing here, the
other big set piece is the now Machia or the
Sea Battle in the Coliseum, which yeah, I uh, they
put sharks and everything in there, but like, look, I
fucking loved I loved the like the Sea Battle in
(44:51):
the Coliseum. I love that. I love that they actually
did that. It's just the whole thing I found, uh,
really enjoyable, you know, just the ram and grinding of
ships and everything. Fans.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Now I've been given to understand Patrick, and can you
confirm this that at the time when this theoretically took place,
the piping wasn't extant in the Colisseum. To do the
water thing is something.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Yeah, yeah, so they it's it was something that they
did around the beginning, like in the initial games for
the Colisseum. So it was it was one of the
huge attractions very early in the Colisseum's lifespan. And then
my understanding is that they didn't do it again, okay,
or that it was not like a common thing. Yeah
that so, or when you know, when they opened the
(45:40):
Colisseum in eighty eighty, I think that it was. It
was part of the kind of opening festivities, but it
was cost prohibitive and it was it was a pain
in the ass for a variety of reasons, and so
they didn't I don't. I My understanding is that they
didn't do it in this period, but I can but
I don't know for sure. One thing about the name
battle at the very start actually in quite accurate, but
(46:06):
more for the Hellenistic period where there were tons of
naval battles and huge ships and siege engines and shit,
so like that stuff that did exist in classical antiquity,
but would have been much more common like three hundred years,
four hundred years beforehand.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Oh yeah, I was wondering about that because like even
just the boats, I was like, these look more Greek
to me. But then I was like, what the fuck
do I know? You know, well, they didn't.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
There was the the Mediterranean was a Roman lake. They
didn't need giant they didn't need giant fleets throughout most
of the period of the Roman Empire because there was
nobody else with a fleet to challenge them.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
So the but fleets like that and siege engines like
that did exist. They were, and they were especially common
during like the wars of the successors of Alexander the Great.
They were a huge deal. There was a king, a
successor king named Demetrius the Besieger, nice fascinating guy. Yeah, uh,
(47:03):
Demetrius Poli or Kettis, who was who was famous for
building ships like that, like increase on an increasing scale,
like just gigantic monstrosity ships to to to assault cities.
So yeah, so that's a real thing that fully technologically
within the bounds of what you could do in the
in the second century AD.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
Hmm, yeah, yeah, that's great, you know the whole like
they at least they do the spectacle well, but the
entire time they were fighting, I just kept thinking, man,
can you imagine, like how long it would take to
drive that thing out like all that like you just
(47:45):
like you created this like lake and the sand, it
would oh god, it would be wet forever.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Just and also like think about it, after all of
that work, how many seats you're taking out in order
to make that happen. So that's gonna be like you're
lose a lot of revenue as well, So like that's
a big thing that you know, my my little I
live under capitalism brain was like calculating, you.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
Know, like the set pieces in this movie were outstanding.
Like it's it's hard to overstate how gifted a director,
a director of action Ridley Scott is like, because you
only have to watch something that's like a big set
piece it's done by someone who's not Ridley Scott to
see how poorly it can turn out, and like he's
(48:32):
he's very much in the kind of I would say,
like the George Miller vein of filmmaker where they are
telling a story through action scenes like they are showing,
not telling, which is surprisingly difficult to do. And I
don't think we should. I don't think we should gloss
over that as being one of the major selling points
of a Ridley Scott movie.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
Yeah. Absolutely, I'm sure. I absolutely was delighted by the scene.
I don't care if it was stupid, and I don't
care if they never put sharks in and I don't
care if that's how sharks don't behave. I was like, hell, yeah,
Sharky Time exactly.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
Yeah, it looks yeah, it looks like it looks like
a Looney Tunes cartoon, Like it really does. Like it
looks like bugs and Daffy are sword fighting on like
a gangplank and they look down and the shark jump,
you know, jumps up at them, Like that's what it's. Yeah,
it's great. Ruled Yeah. Uh. The the rest of the
stuff outside of the action, Lucilla or yeah, Lucilla and
(49:33):
Acasius learned that, you know, Paul mescal is actually Lucius,
who was Lucilla's child in this movie. We find that
out and they like try to talk to him and
he's like, no, I don't want anything to do with you,
and then he kind of starts to have second opinions. Uh,
(49:53):
but lo and behold uh in order to get in
order to deal with the to deal with all this, uh,
one of their one of their attendants has been spying
on their conversations. That goes and tells the Senator, who
goes Macronus money, who then informs the conspiracy to the Emperor,
the conspiracy of Pedro Pascal to lead his troops into
(50:16):
Rome and and and depose Geta in Caracalla. And uh
so Macrinus h tells the Emperor and they arrest lou
they arrest them for treason, and uh they're gonna stick
uh Acasius in the coliseum and uh Lucilla will be
uh chained up up up top. And Macrinus tells Paul Meskell, look,
(50:39):
this is what you wanted. You wanted to kill this
guy who killed your wife. Now you get the chance to.
And they fight in the coliseum, and it's a it's
a good fight. Uh. Pedro Pascal is very very good
at you know, he he was you know, he was
a fucking ober and Martell, you know, he knows how
(51:00):
to do a very good, very Cory graft fight and
in the end, uh Paul Mescal is like, I'm not
going to execute him because I realized that I like
Rome now that I could possibly be very important here.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
This is a story about how you shouldn't trust rich kids.
All right, you know we need we need more rich
kids to be class traders. But you got to keep
your eyes on him, right.
Speaker 3 (51:26):
And oh man, and then just one of my favorite parts,
uh Lucy's or Paul Mescal refuses to execute uh Pedro
Pascal and they're like, okay, cool. So the Praetorian Guard
just fire a ton of arrows into him, like pin
cushion him, make him look like he's like a Christian, Uh,
a Christian proplytizer showing up on North Sentinel Island. Like
(51:49):
that dude is just like a dozen arrows. They just
pincushion his ass. Uh.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
Blair leaned over to me and said, arrowed like the
strong bad voice that was very important.
Speaker 3 (52:03):
To fucking bora mirror over here.
Speaker 1 (52:05):
Just so good, so good.
Speaker 3 (52:09):
I love it. Yeah, I love it when you you know,
when you end up looking like a roly ball, just
just a little stick sticking out of it, uh, you know,
and turns out Macrinus is uh Macrinus is the villain. Uh,
oh my god, I was wrong. It was Macrinus all along.
He's he's moving behind the scenes. He gets he has
(52:31):
uh he he basically talks uh I think Caracala into
uh killing his brother, which wasn't something that they had
to be talked into in real life, as I understand it. Uh,
they pretty much fucking hated each other. But yeah, he
gets he you know, get it, gets killed a his
(52:52):
head gets sowt off in a pretty gruesome scene. And uh,
you know that's when we get Denzel moving the head
around the plinth in the Senate telling all the senators
without telling them. Look, if you want if you don't
want me spinning your head menacingly on this thing, then
(53:14):
listen to me.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
I meant a point.
Speaker 3 (53:17):
So yeah, yeah, you know it's uh, there's a lot
of background dealing. I'm not gonna get into all of it,
but basically, they're gonna they're gonna execute Lucilla in the Colisseum. Uh,
They're going to you know, it's gonna be this whole thing,
(53:38):
and they get you know, they get him out there.
And but but Paul Meskell and his fellow gladiators. They
have a little revolt and they fight back and they
try to defend uh Connie Nielsen and the senators who
are down there. Derek Jacobi who plays one of the senators. Uh,
he's like a great British actor who's in this movie
(53:59):
for literally like two scenes, for like thirty seconds. He
doesn't even get to say a word, and he just
gets fucking gashed, Like he gets like three throat slashes
by some like praetorian like just gurgling blood and you're
just like, oh, there's that guy. I remember him from
the first one. Oh, I guess he's dead now. Anyway,
on to the main thing. The gladiators win, but unfortunately
(54:23):
Denzel is good with the bow and he shoots Connie
Nielsen through the heart, just like what happened to Paul
Meskal's wife. No, you killed his wife and his mom,
and now it's time for us to fight. And lo
and behold. They get a secret message to Pedro Pascal's
troops who are at the port in Ostia, and they
(54:46):
ride up and they are going to meet the forces
of Macrinus and of the emperors, and would you know it,
they come to a river, and I was told by
people that this river's probably the Tiber based on actual geography. However, uh,
(55:07):
there's a whole thing like about how neither of these
armies cross this this river, and there's a big deal
about like the shores and people stepping into the river
and stuff like that. And I really think he meant
this to be the Rubicon, like even if it even
if the geography doesn't make sense. I was like, Oh,
they're literally fighting in the Rubicon. That's as about his
(55:29):
on the nose as you is that what you guys?
Do you think?
Speaker 1 (55:32):
It was just like, yeah, whatever, I think that that
it is a nod to that at the very least,
you know, Yeah, that's what I would have to say
about it.
Speaker 3 (55:41):
Yeah, it's yeah, they they fight.
Speaker 1 (55:44):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
Paul Mescal wins sadly because we don't get to uh
we don't get to uh, we don't get any more Denzel.
He just he dies and uh oh oh, but one
thing he puts on h Paul Mescal puts on Maximus's
armor from the first movie, and during the scuffle in
(56:08):
the water, he's not down under the water, Denzel stabs him,
like hits his chest with the thing like like with
a sword like the but the literal plot armor defeats him.
Fucking plot armor defeats I know, we gotta go. I
(56:32):
know we kind of wrapped up the end a little
bit quick. Uh but you know we we've talked about it.
It uh uh. Ridley leaves it on kind of a cliffhanger.
Is there a dream of Rome or is that just
something that rich assholes think to themselves because they want
to feel important. Who's to say, but uh, yeah, what
did Patrick? What? What did you you know? Overall you
(56:53):
said you liked it? What? What what do you wanna?
What do you want to leave the people with? On
gladiat or too?
Speaker 2 (56:59):
Yeah, I'm and I think the big thing that this
movie gets right is that Rome was a machine that
gobbled up people and spat out blood and bone, and that, like,
at a fundamental level, that's what it was. In the
ancient world, control over people, making people do things was
(57:21):
the basis of power, not machines, none of that stuff.
It was quite literally making people do shit, and that
included dying. And any understanding of Rome that is not
built on that fundamental dynamic is wrong. And so the
fact that this movie makes that dynamic its starting point
(57:42):
for understanding what Rome is, and builds the plot off
of that. I think is a strong point in it's
in its favor, leaving all the other shit aside. I
think this movie will make you think more about what
Rome actually was and why it mattered than all of
the then rewatching the first glad Aide movie a thousand times,
even if that is probably a better like movie movie,
(58:05):
it is not a more revealing or interesting look at Rome.
Speaker 3 (58:11):
Yeah, yeah, I think, Yeah, I think I had a
lot of fun with this. You know, if you just
go in and you're looking for fun, you're looking for
Denzel hamming it up and doing his thing, then you're
gonna love it. Eleanor thoughts.
Speaker 1 (58:25):
Yeah, ten out of ten, delicious slop. Yum yum yum.
I like how bright it is. I simply love to
see Paedro Pascal period.
Speaker 3 (58:35):
He's very attractive.
Speaker 1 (58:37):
The plot makes no goddamn sense. Yeah, sure, Lucius is
Maximus's Sun. Fine whatever. Yeah, and we're okay with this.
We keep sordid armor lying around around a bunch of enslaved.
Speaker 3 (58:50):
People, the strongest armor ever. Yeah, it's oh man, Yeah,
it's it's a lot of it's a lot of myths,
but it's a lot of fun. The I think, you know,
I think that's gonna about do it for us today
with gladiat or two. Check it out, have fun, Let
(59:11):
us know what you thought. Go see comments, Go see it.
Go to the movies, because the movies are great. Just
go see a movie. It doesn't doesn't have to be
this one. Just go see a movie.
Speaker 1 (59:22):
Literally, go see any movie and have a nice time.
But you know, I think this is probably the most
fun movie you can see at the moment.
Speaker 2 (59:29):
Yeah, it's a tremendous big screen experience. Highly recommend.
Speaker 3 (59:34):
Mm yep. Yeah, Well Patrick, where can people find you?
What's going on with you?
Speaker 1 (59:40):
You can.
Speaker 2 (59:41):
I'm not on Twitter much these days, but I am
on Blue Sky enjoying, enjoying not being bombarded by Nazis
a on a at a fairly regular clip. I just
finished my second book. It's called Lost Worlds, The Rise
and Fall of human Societies from the Ice Age to
the Bronze Age. That'll be out sometime in twenty twenty five,
whenever the editor gets around to it. Yeah, I know,
(01:00:03):
l I'm I'm around, I'm hanging out. I'm still making
Tides of History every week and I'm having a good
old time.
Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
We've also got the Rome Podcast don't wait at this juncture.
Speaker 2 (01:00:12):
Oh yeah, God goodness gracious, yes, yeah, I'm doing Uh.
I'm now a regular co host on Masters of Our
Domain with uh, with Phoebe and Milo and we are
We are currently covering the absolutely shiit awful those about
to die. Yes, it's just just fucking horrible, man, a
(01:00:35):
god awful piece of intellectual property that should never have
been made. So so that's what we're covering. But we
will soon be covering things that don't suck.
Speaker 3 (01:00:46):
Re there you go. Yeah, well you know everyone, Uh,
thank you very much for listening, and uh, we'll see
you next time.
Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
Bye bye bye. Yeah he thank you guys so much
for having me. I've gotta I've got to jump.
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