This sequel is watchable and spectacular, with the Colosseum created not digitally but as a gobsmacking 1-to-1 scale physical reconstruction with real crowds.
Yet this film is weirdly almost a next-gen remake, effectively reincarnating almost every single narrative component of the original in a variant form, the events of the first film echoing in franchise eternity.
if there had once been some emotional history, before his marriage, between him and the emperor’s daughter Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), who has a boy of her own.
At 28, Paul Mescal is younger than Crowe’s 36 when he took the lead in G1, but he is massively bulked up with a new sonorous Britspeak growl: charismatic and likable in the ways Mescal always is.
He is young Lucius, who as a child made a chaotic escape from the moral cesspit of Rome and is grown to adulthood in separatist Africa Nova territory which now faces being subdued by the clumsy cruelty of the Roman empire
he is a soldier and his wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen) is no simpering hausfrau but a warrior also. There is no mention of a child but I have a feeling we might in years to come find out about a son hidden away from the danger of battle.
The Romans’ tough, honest general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) does his duty but respects the Africans’ martial bravery and has no truck with decadent Roman politicians; he is effectively the new version of Maximus battling the Teutons.
It is impossible to avoid the pedantic deja vu in this film, or the feeling that its novelties are byproducts arrived at almost accidentally. Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla is the one female character in the film with agency
she has a difficult, unspoken relationship with our hero, just like the first time around, but which here creates a weirdly Oedipal energy. Lucius maybe comes close in his emotional confusion to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus