Gladiator II trailer: 5 details you may have missed
With less than two months to go until its release, let's dive into everything Gladiator II
Gladiator II is almost here. When it hits cinemas in November, it will have been more than 24 years since the iconic original arrived.
Can it fulfil expectations? It’s a tough ask, but the latest trailer certainly makes it look an exciting watch.
Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington and the creepy emperor duo of Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger clash for control of Rome. And the 3-minute teaser gives you a good clue as to where the massive reported $310 million budget went.
Battles. Bloody big battles. That’s where. However, amid all the action you may have missed some of the finer points of the Gladiator II trailer. Here are five of the top spots.
Lucius is Maximus’s son
The Gladiator II trailer shows off how this new movie is linked to the last. Paul Mescal’s Lucius is, spoiler alert, the son of Maximus.
He featured in the original Gladiator, as a child, played by Spencer Treat Clark.
“Lucius, take your father’s strength,” his mother Lucillus tells him as he’s about to enter the arena. “His name was Maximus. And I see him in you.”
The Romans used rhinos in gladiator battles?
The last Gladiator II trailer, from July, showed us rhinos being used in the Colosseum. This new one shows both a rhino and monkeys in the arena.
You might assume this is Ridley Scott playing fast and loose with history, as he likes to do. But such antics really did happen during the Roman Empire era.
Back in July, El Pais cited Jerry Toner’s The Day Commodus Killed a Rhino as proof. It explains exotic animals like rhinos and lions would be incorporated into the gladiatorial games as a way to show off the power of the empire.
We see multiple eras of battles in the trailer
The Gladiator II trailer is a broiling mass of battle scenes. And to get your head around what’s going on, it’s important to understand we’re likely looking at multiple time periods here.
Our take is the big sea battles are part of the earlier timeline in Gladiator II. Part of the exposition sees the Romans attack Numidia, an ancient kingdom that is now part of Algeria, where Lucius lives with his wife and child.
The trailer also sees Mescal cradling, in the sea, a woman shot through with an arrow. It seems safe to assume this is his wife. And, yep, she’s a goner. There’s your revenge fuel for Gladiator II.
Tim McInnerny stars as simpering Thraex
We love to see an icon of British comedy or character acting show up in one of these cinema epics. And Gladiator II has at least two of them.
The trailer shows us a brief glimpse of Tim McInnerny as Thraex, according to IMDb, who appears to be an advisor to Denzel Washington’s Macrinus. We know NcInnerny best from Blackadder but, fair play, he has also proved his epic fantasy-adjacent chops in Game of Thrones, as Robett Glover.
Thraex is also apparently a type of gladiator, so perhaps this isn’t the character’s actual name. Gladiator II also features Matt Lucas, who briefly popped up in the Gladiator II trailer from July.
Sea battles in the Colosseum did happen (apparently)
One of the least likely bits of the Gladiator II trailer is where we see a Roman Amphitheatre full of water, with ships doing battle instead of lone gladiators or, y’know, rhinos.
This was apparently something that happened back in the day too, and these battles were known as naumachia.
According to the Colosseum’s own website, these were usually held in purpose built arenas. And it sounds like they cost a fortune to stage. The trailer suggests in Gladiator II the actual Rome Colosseum itself is flooded and, apparently, this did actually happen in the structure’s early years. It was completed in 80 AD, where Gladiator 2 is set some time after AD 200. In real life it may have been a bit leaky by then.
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