The Gladiator II Line That Broke My Brain

Historical accuracy in movies can be a strange, slippery thing, and the way we respond to it can be even stranger. Photo: Paramount

Gladiator II, for all its lavishly budgeted world-building, isn’t exactly a movie you’d look to for historical accuracy — no matter how much Ridley Scott defends the sharks inside the Roman Colosseum. (Has he said anything about the presence of a printed newspaper? Or, for that matter, the chronologically inconsistent battle techniques?) The film certainly plays it fast and loose when it comes to such matters, and the original Gladiator (which I love) had its share of wild historical incongruities as well. But there’s one scene in the new picture — really, one line — that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s a tiny, throwaway moment, the kind that could be cut from the movie with little effect. But for some reason, it has seized hold of my brain.

It occurs relatively early in the film, when our hero, Lucius (Paul Mescal), is flashing back to his childhood and his flight from Rome. Lucius is, secretly, an heir to the throne, and we understand that he was sent off by his mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), to protect him from those who would seek to kill him. In the scene in question, young Lucius is hiding in a small African village when Roman soldiers come looking for him. As he runs away, we hear one of them asking the villagers, “Have you seen this boy?”

It was at that point that I thought, Wait, what is this soldier referring to?
If he’s asking if the villagers have seen “this boy,” then presumably he’s showing them something. What could that something be? Did the ancient Romans have witness sketches? They obviously didn’t have photographs. (Though it would be very funny if Scott cut to a Roman soldier holding up a Polaroid. Some audiences today probably think Polaroids are that ancient.) I’d like to imagine that the soldiers were holding up a perfectly carved little marble statue of the boy. Or, hell, maybe a full bust that they were lugging from village to village.

Historical accuracy in movies can be a strange, slippery thing, and the way we respond to it can be even stranger. I’ve never been bothered by the inconsistencies in Hollywoodized period action movies like Braveheart, The Mask of Zorro, or assorted adaptations of The Three Musketeers. (I grew up reading Asterix comic books, which derive much of their fun from such anachronisms.) And I’m not bothered at all by Gladiator II’s more out-there ideas; the aforementioned sequence with the sharks inside the Colosseum might actually be my favorite scene in the movie.

There is, of course, a long history of films being purposefully anachronistic when it comes to the time periods being depicted onscreen. Often, they do this to make a broader point about the World We Live in Today. (Gladiator II, by the way, is definitely guilty of this — way more than the original Gladiator, which admirably made little effort to tie its story to the present.) But if you are going to tie your movie to the modern day, I say go all out. My favorite example of this is Alex Cox’s 1987 masterpiece, Walker, in which Ed Harris plays the American adventurer and soldier of fortune who invaded Nicaragua in the mid-19th century. Released at the height of the Reagan administration’s involvement with the Contras, Walker was a scabrously pointed satire of American foreign policy, and although it took place in the 1850s, it had Coca-Cola bottles and Zippo lighters and Marlboro cigarettes and helicopters. Of course, Walker was also a massive flop that was buried by its studio and might have ended Cox’s mainstream filmmaking career, and I was one of a small handful of people who bothered to see it when it played (for, I think, one week) in theaters. So what do I know?

To be fair, I also don’t know anything about Roman forensic techniques, or the methods used by whatever their equivalent of a police force would have been. And, no, I’m not going to be the 97th writer to call up and interview a Roman historian about Gladiator II’s accuracy. (I could ask Ridley Scott, but I suspect he’d just tell me to go fuck myself.) It’s entirely possible they did have some sort of sketch they could have shown. If so, I would like to have seen it — it would have been an interesting factoid to throw in there. The fact that we see nothing, and that this is just a tossed-off background line, tells me that this is not a thing the filmmakers gave much thought to.

Maybe that’s why such indiscriminate inaccuracies often stick out much more than the more brazen ones — because they feel strangely pointless. They’re not making any grand comments about today, nor are they slyly undercutting (and perhaps reinvigorating) something sincere and dusty. No, what they’re really revealing is a fundamental carelessness on the part of the filmmakers.