Gladiator 2

This is probably Mescal's biggest role to date, he has picked good arty indie roles but this is a biggie

Normal People made stars of him and Daisy

Central to the appeal of Gladiator was that it was a revival of the sword and sandal epic genre that was long dead by 2000 (revivals of dormant genres was a bit of a thing at the time—Titanic harks back to 70s disaster movies and the romance films of Classic Hollywood, Saving Private Ryan to WW2 epics, The Phantom Menace to, um, boring space films). English accents and classical scores are conventional in Hollywood movies about the ancient world (it was rumoured Crowe had to be talked out of doing a Spanish accent in the original). Audiences associate those things with historical, rural, and rustic fantasy settings, because those are traditional in films with such settings. Rap music, on the other hand, is an intrinsically modern urban form. The problem isn’t that rap isn’t appropriate to the time perid; it’s that rap is not appropriate to the genre.

(I have no issue with Denzel being in it, those complaints are just the usual suspects)

i think Spartacus had all Americans as the rebel slaves and English as the Romans. I think they might even have swapped some actors around for that reason

I'll drink to that

Do we know if Denzel's character has any sort of African background, or is it just 'colour-blind casting'?

Stone had an idea of the Macedons being 'Celtic' I think… maybe there were more subtle distinctions than that with the accents I missed.

I thought Christopher Plummer as Aristotle had standard English accent which emphasised the distinction between 'educated' Greek and the Macedonians.

A decision derived from the director’s conviction that a strand of Celticness linked the Irish and Macedonian peoples… Stone argued that the deliberate selection of Irish accents over the more “parochial” and “ornate” English syntax was intended to replicate the boisterous demeanour of Celtic men

https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/viewfinder/articles/alexander-stoned-irish-masculinity-and-violence-in-oliver-stones-alexander-2004/#:~:text=Defending%20his%20decision%20to%20afford,got%20poetry%20in%20it%20and

Denzel was not mentioned by me so I'm not sure who that other poster is referring to.

For me it is quite simple; this film should be treating itself with the same level of respect that the people marketing Dune respected their film. Based on this trailer they don't seem to be taking it seriously at all so I'm sure why the audience will by paying for a ticket.

Perhaps I'm just a little irked given I loved what Zimmer and Gerrard did with the first soundtrack. There's no reason why the soundtrack for this one wouldn't be ready for use.

Horrible trailer imo. Totally at odds with the feel of the first movie. It's as of they don't get what made Gladiator great. It wasnt the battles, the Colloseum or the tigers. Those were just FX. The real brilliance of the first film was the way they really made a silk purse from a sow's ear when it came to the script. It was more than just a summer action movie. It was a story about a family man trying to get back to the family he lost.

The era that allowed Gladiator to be made is gone. Hollywood is too silly and ridiculous these days. Its all focus groups, diversity / gender quotas and assorted nonsense. Anything but make a quality film.

Congratulation, you just won red pill bingo!

Seems a big step up in roles for the actor (Joseph Quinn) playing the Emperor… I've mostly seen him in TV miniseries, not many film roles.

Macrinus was also quite a popular surname name during the period, like Marcus would have been as a forename, so it merely could be a name that Washington's character chose or his family chose.

The thing is, as you say, a black character isn't at all out of place in Rome. Nor is it "colour blind" casting. The Romans expanded all over the place and absorbed many different peoples and their countries. Once absorbed into the Empire, those people were then subject to taxation and with taxation came citizenship. This meant that you could, in theory, travel anywhere within the Empire if you had the means or a viable way of making a living.

So some lad from North Africa could easily end up trading on the streets of the Roman capital. The only barrier would have been his knowledge of Greek. From the time of Alexander to the end of the 4th Century Greek was the common tongue around the Mediterranean. A good command of Greek and a bit of business acumen and you could go places, as it were.

Greek was to antiquity what English is to the world today. But it fell out of favour with the Roman world when the Empire split into "western" and "eastern". Greek became the "eastern" tongue and therefore less fashionable amongst the always fashion conscious Romans and Latin, the language of officialdom, began to become more widely spoken.

As an aside, the real life Marcus Nonius Macrinus was one of the main inspirations for Russell Crowe's character in the original 'Gladiator'.

Will still watch the movie no matter what critics say, but what an earth were they thinking with that trailer….and who are they trying to appeal to exactly.

I'm sure the people behind the movie aren't the same people who decide on trailer direction but how could a bunch of people sit around a room and say yep, this is it.

Sure anyone that remembers the original teaser for Gladiator way back when with it's pure Poledouris probably recalls that little twinge of disappointment that it didn't follow through to subsequent trailers or indeed the film itself.

Thankfully the OST became on the most loved in cinema history.

Yes, the use of the track in the new trailer sucks, but the bottom line is, it won't be in the final feature, and I'd be far more concerned about it potentially being a bloated, CGI rehash with a director that has, shall we say, somewhat lost his way of late, revisiting a classic that perhaps should have been left alone.

But we shall see........hopefully it turns out well.