On first thought, late November seems like a strange time to release Gladiator II, Ridley Scott’s plus-size return to the blood-and-mud thunderdome of Ancient Rome. The original Gladiator was a quintessential summer movie — the very first of the 21st century, you could argue, given its May 2000 release. Is the sequel landing in the vicinity of Thanksgiving instead of Memorial Day proof that every month is now blockbuster season? Or have we reached the point where a historical epic, even one as goofy and educationally worthless as Gladiator II, looks automatically prestigious compared to everything else Hollywood is churning out these days? People wear togas in this movie. It must belong in awards season, right?
The month is fast becoming Scott’s annual window. Gladiator II is his third consecutive movie to open in late November, following last year’s similarly battle-heavy Napoleon and 2021’s House of Gucci, which is battle-heavy in a very different sense. Increasingly, the British octogenarian has staked out the Thanksgiving holiday, the way Will Smith once had the weekend of Independence Day on lockdown. And somehow, that seems oddly fitting for the career Scott has carved out for himself over nearly 50 years. He doesn’t really make summer movies in the traditional sense, even when he makes movies — like Gladiator or Alien, like Blade Runner or Thelma & Louise — that happen to open in the summer.
What Scott specializes in are blockbusters for grownups: big, accessible, sometimes very loud genre pictures that rarely feel like they’re aiming to entertain every demographic, the way so many studio releases now do. He is not entirely alone in this lane. Christopher Nolan has found great success making popcorn movies that hardly qualify as fun for all ages. Ditto Jordan Peele, whose high-concept horror is adult in violence and theme. But Scott has been doing this for nearly half a century. And even as the industry has become increasingly infantilized, he’s continued to cater to slightly more mature sensibilities.
Not too mature. To be clear, Scott is not exactly a highbrow filmmaker. He got his start in advertising, and as he moved into moviemaking, he never lost that commercial instinct. Every Ridley Scott picture is slick entertainment, even when it wants to do more than entertain. He makes thrillers, action movies, and tense melodramas. Even when the subject matter is serious, the approach is rarely alienating; his most acclaimed work — his Oscar winners — aren’t exactly intellectually ambitious. Black Hawk Down might be a harrowing depiction of war, but it also doubles as a rousing band-of-brothers adventure story. Gladiator, which won Best Picture, is a shameless crowdpleaser at heart. Even Thelma & Louise, the rare Scott movie that goes very light on special effects, was built to thrill.
But as other directors have been pulled head first into the PG-13 industrial complex, Scott has steered clear of glorified babysitting duty, threading the needle of making mainstream movies without spending his time and talents on purely adolescent distractions. He’s turned down superhero movies. And the franchise pictures he has made are proudly R-rated: those squishy Alien movies; the limb-chopping Gladiator films; and his one-entry detour into the Hannibal Lecter universe, which features a set-piece so graphic — a Grand Guignol money shot that gives new meaning to the term “food for thought” — that it practically felt like a nationwide test of every mall movie theater’s carding policy.
Somehow, Scott still manages to secure enormous budgets, even though he misses as often as he hits, and shows no interest in laboring much in the IP-development salt mines. His last four movies all cost between $75 and $250 million. Few of them have what you would call four-quadrant appeal, though Lady Gaga’s scenery-chewing star performance in House of Gucci probably drew some teenage stans, while swordplay of the kind seen in The Last Duel, Napoleon, and Gladiator II doesn’t exactly repel boys of a certain age. By virtue of clout, Scott seems to have earned the rare privilege to spend boatloads of studio cash on projects at least superficially out of fashion with audiences and execs.
A quick scan of his filmography reveals a lot of dabbles in genres now considered old-fashioned or even extinct. He’s made biopics of historical figures (1492: Conquest of Paradise), Biblical epics (Exodus: Gods & Kings), halfway-cerebral science fiction (The Martian), survival thrillers (White Squall), and juicy ripped-from-the-tabloids dramatizations (All the Money in the World). There’s an out-of-time quality to his career, made up of films that seem distinctly modern only in the technology used to get them off the ground. What he’s consistently flashing back to is an era when Hollywood seemed comfortable bankrolling expensive productions that didn’t treat the whole American public like 12-year-olds.
Because of his interest in war and history, Scott is sometimes said to make Dad Movies. The larger truth is that he doesn’t handle his audience with kid gloves. A philosophical darkness, and sometimes a real mean streak, runs through his thrillers. An avowed atheist, Scott isn’t afraid to depict a godless world — or, in the case of his unsparingly bleak Alien prequels, to paint God as sadistic and indifferent. The Counselor, his underrated collaboration with Cormac McCarthy, might be the most pitilessly cynical studio film of the new millennium … though it has some competition from another Scott movie, the rape-culture origin story The Last Duel. Even his less heavy stuff, like Gladiator II, dispatches characters with a ruthlessness that would shake younger viewers. They are not the target audience. Unlike almost everyone else in Hollywood, Scott doesn’t make movies for them.
And that’s rather welcome at a moment when the box office is largely dominated by Avengers and Minions. You don’t have to love Scott’s films; he’s made his fair share of workmanlike, bloated, or plodding stinkers, like that dreadful Robin Hood reboot starring Russell Crowe. Frankly, the new Gladiator II is very far from his best work. But at 86, he remains a welcome anomaly of the current showbiz ecosystem: a craftsman of big-budget spectacle who funnels all his career capital and resources toward adult interests. Yes, House of Gucci might be ridiculous, sensationalized pulp, but it’s pulp for grownups. Don’t we deserve some dumb fun? This Thanksgiving, or any other, that’s worth a little thankfulness.
Gladiator II is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
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