‘Gladiator II’ and What It Can Teach Screenwriters

This article will include spoilers for Gladiator II.

Written by David Scarpa, Gladiator II is Ridley Scott's sequel to his Best Picture-winning film Gladiator, which came out almost 25 years ago in 2000. While that film starred Joaquin Phoenix and Russell Crowe, the sequel puts Pedro Pascal, Paul Mescal, and Denzel Washington in the leading roles. The only actors to return from the first film, set sixteen years after the death of Marcus Aurelius, are Derek Jacobi and Connie Nielsen. 

Though the film doesn't immediately seem to pick up on story threads from the first film, it slowly transitions into them as the film proceeds, getting on its feet with some expected (and unexpected) twists and turns. It tells the story of a young man turned gladiator played by Paul Mescal who finds himself in the employ of Macrinus (Denzel Washington) after General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) conquers his city. 

The twin Emperors, Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn) are bloodthirsty pirates who are running the Empire into the ground. Macrinus is working to take the power of Rome for himself through political means and continue their rule in a slightly more sane and subtle, albeit brutal, way. Acacius works to lead a coup to bring back Marcus Aurelius’s dream of a free Rome. Mescal’s character is swept up in the middle, finding himself working for and against both sides, but ultimately choosing freedom and the dream. 

Although the film doesn't have as much of the emotional punch as the first, it still has a few interesting moves for screenwriters to learn from (and at least one to avoid) as you're looking to improve your screenwriting education from this film. It’s something you should be doing with every film you park yourself at the movie theater to see.

Imply More Than State

One of the fatal flaws a screenwriter can make is to explain too much. On the other hand, one of the other fatal flaws a screenwriter can make is to explain too little. Finding that perfect balance in between can be tricky. Too much, and you're cramming exposition down a viewers throat and putting them to sleep. Too little and you're starving them of information and confusing them. You need just the right amount and the best way to do that is imply things enough to stir their imagination and let them fill in the blanks. They don't need to come up with the exact same answers you do in every case, they just need to be close enough so that the story makes sense. 

Scarpa's script for Gladiator II makes a lot of clever use of this. There are a lot of natural, assumed jumps in the story for characters, especially those who have made the jump from between the films. Or the twin Emperors. How exactly the took power isn't terribly clear in the context of the film. It's hinted at here and there, and we can assume, but it doesn't ultimately matter. We get enough context to know that they are there, in power, and aggressively leading Rome into shambles. 

Another character whose past is mysterious and only hinted at is Denzel Washington's character, Macrinus. We know he worked his way up from a slave and that he did some job or another for Marcus Aurelius, but we also know that he doesn't believe in the dream of an equitable Rome that Aurelius and those who believed in him did, which informs so much of his character. His background is hinted at all the way up to the end, even though we don't get any definitive answers about it, and that's OK. We don't need any. 

Our lead and hero, Lucius, played by Paul Mescal, refuses to answer questions about his upbringing. And even when we do get answers about how he got from point A to point B, we never get answers about how he gets from point P to point Q, where he starts in the film. He has a lot of story that just isn't explained and helps define and change his character in ways we just don't get to see. Spending time and dialogue over-explaining these things would have only served to bog down a screenplay that must have already been bursting at the seams.

Escalate the Action

In Gladiator II, all of the action found a way to one-up the sequence before. That’s exactly the energy you want to chase if you're building sequences. There's an old axiom in writing that “what's happening now must be inherently more interesting than what just happened.” You're only going to bore your audience if you put your coolest action sequence first and then have things get less awesome from there. 

In Gladiator II, they begin with a fairly standard castle siege. They one-up that sequence quickly with the first gladiator fight. Curiously, that first fight isn't in the Coliseum, it's in a small podunk town on the outskirts of Rome, but to make it more visually interesting than the war scenes we just bore witness to, they unleash hungry, shrieking monkeys into the fray. The next fight does happen at the Coliseum and the the gladiators must fight another gladiator mounted upon a rhino. Then, to increase the stakes even further, they fill the Coliseum with water (something they could really do!) and fill that water with sharks. Then, the competing teams of gladiators set out in boats to kill each other. 

It's a thrilling sequence and is a logical increase of progression from one scene to the next. When they need to reduce the visual spectacle of the fights, they increase the emotional danger. In all the previous fights, as long as our main character survives, they can be complete bloodbaths, but when they uncover a plot of intrigue and the protagonist has his shot at revenge, the stakes become personal and a one-on-one fight in the Coliseum is just as riveting because the personal stakes actually outweigh the spectacle.

As you're designing the order of your sequences, make sure you're one-upping yourself visually or emotionally as you string these set pieces together. This goes for any sort of film. Slasher picture? Make sure the kills are assembled in the same fashion. You can think the same way about many elements of your story as well, from the locations to the scenes themselves. Make sure to have things escalating as they go. There's a reason Hitchcock's North by Northwest ends on the face of Mount Rushmore rather than starts there.

Something to Avoid

One thing we should all strive to avoid in our work is harmful tropes, cliches and stereotypes. I'm sad to say that Gladiator II is guilty of one that has become rather tiresome over the years and I'm not sure why it needed to be done not once but twice in this film.

In this case, what we had was a case of what is known as “fridging.” Comic writer Gail Simone (whose new book Red Sonja: Consumed just came out) coined the phrase after a particularly brutal issue of Green Lantern where Kyle Rayner's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator in order to motivate him on his journey. She and others began to catalogue instances where women, often with little background or agency, are killed by antagonists for no reason other than to motivate the male protagonist into action. 

In the case of Gladiator II, we’re initially meant to believe we have a very empowered female character in the film, a woman taking part in the defense of her city and a very capable archer, who also happens to be the wife of our protagonist. She is then almost immediately slain by a Roman arrow at the order of General Acacius. Her death fuels the rage of the male protagonist through his journey as he imagines the arrow that killed her piercing her chest often and keeps the broken end of it with him to remind him of what he lost. Another woman important to him is killed in the exact same way with an arrow in the exact same spot, further fueling his rage, spurring him into anger and action as the final movement of the film begins.

It wasn't necessary. The character was already properly motivated by the end of the film, and any contrivance could have been made to send him on his journey at the beginning—including just looking to his past.

Being aware of harmful and problematic stereotypes is an important part of being a screenwriter and a storyteller in this day and age and it's incumbent to make sure, as artists, we're doing no harm to the culture we're contributing to in our art.

Overall

Gladiator II, for the most part, re-explores and contextualizes many of the same themes as the first film, exploring the limits of power and the tug of war between those who would wield it justly and those megalomaniacs who wield it with brutal glee. It's always a relevant story to examine, and the actors and artists who brought it to life do it with such aplomb that it's definitely worth seeing and studying.

Ridley Scott directs it with an effortlessness that makes it look easy, and it relies much more on the iconography of the first film than I would have expected, even reusing footage from the first film in key moments. Ultimately, though, it treads some of the same ground, it shows what happens when absolutely corrupt, power-mad pirates take control of a crumbling system, and the people jockeying to fill the power vacuum before those pirates are even gone have a secret war for the soul of the place they call home. As comparisons in our own country are drawn to the collapse of Rome, it might be a much more important film to study than we might want to admit.

Gladiator II is in wide release everywhere.

You can find out more about Bryan Young at his website.