Back in the ring: "Gladiator"

At the turn of the millennium, Gladiator was a seductive conjunction of the old and the new, of craft and flash. The fledgling DreamWorks studio had witnessed Hollywood raise the Titanic with dazzling visual effects, and now wondered whether it couldn't resurrect the Roman epics of fifty years before with a comparable creative guile and muscle. Ridley Scott was duly appointed to return us to and around the Colosseum, the backdrop of an earlier era's multiplex cinema, here reframed as the multiplex of an earlier era. And we were returned there in the company of the kind of heavyweight cast it was still possible to gather in the year 2000 A.D. The newly crowned Russell Crowe, the erstwhile soap star who'd just outpunched the A-listers in 1997's L.A. Confidential, made for a convincing bruiser in a way you worry even a gym-honed Paul Mescal, himself altogether rapidly promoted to serve as the star of this autumn's belated sequel, may not be. The then-emergent talent Joaquin Phoenix, scion of an acting dynasty, was pitted against him as Commodus, the louche, lisping Emperor we all love to hate. And they would be surrounded and supported by veterans who seemed almost to date from that earlier era, now taking the applause of the crowd for one last time: Oliver Reed (d. 1999, prompting some post-production jiggery-pokery), Richard Harris (d. 2002), David Hemmings (d. 2003), his eyebrows pointing towards the infinite as a ring announcer whose unmiked voice surely couldn't have carried to all corners of this especially colossal Colosseum. It would be one of those logistically grand and tricky projects you still thrill to see Hollywood make, and make this well, studio money spent wisely: Scott could show the carnage Cecil B. DeMille couldn't, fully stir our bloodlust and satiate our desire for catharsis, and there was human and historical interest to ground the technological wizardry. Audiences, and the Academy, could hardly resist. Are you not entertained?, as the cry went up.

In retrospect, we might in fact have Gladiator's success to blame for one or two things - Mel Gibson's subsequent The Passion of the Christ and the Star Wars prequels' over-reliance on CGI, to cite the most immediate and dire consequences. Yet in and of itself it continues to work handsomely: you will see no more thumping entertainment in the Odeon or Cineworld this week. What I hadn't grasped at the time, yet what's become more apparent with the years, is the extent to which the movie also functions as a golden-glowing self-portrait of Scott himself - or at least a portrait of someone you sense Scott would easily identify with: the self-made proletarian scrapper, adrift in a world of nepo babies and scheming, snivelling functionaries deemed unworthy of a man's time, handshake and mercy. (Beyond historical verisimilitude, there has to be a reason for naming your antagonist after a toilet.) Maximus Decimus Meridius is from the off an obvious commander of men - someone you'd follow into the breach, if called upon - but Scott and Crowe equally conspire to make him a details guy, smiling ruefully at a robin who drifts into the opening battle, rubbing dirt onto his hands to get a better feel for the terrain that lies ahead of him, only then leading a vast army into battle. "At my command, unleash hell" is just a long-winded way of shouting "action"; Maximus's vow "I will win the crowd... I will give them something they have never seen before" is straight from a pitch meeting, no translation from the Latin required. Yet this storied commander is caught at a transitional moment, forever yearning for the tranquillity of home, even as circumstances conspire to loose him from the safety of empire (for which we might read the perks, privileges and protections of the studio system) and force him to fight his own battles, huffily, grumpily, dourly.

Certain elements here date very much from the late 20th century, which is where Scott seems to have got stuck creatively: there are naggingly negligible roles for Djimon Hounsou as the slave who nurses our white hero back to health and Omid Djalili as the trader who sold Reed his "queer giraffes". (Hounsou, at least, recurs amid the stirring coda, involving one of many small details this script troubles to pay off.) As a filmmaker, Scott remains a singular mix of insensitivity and insecurity: a born entertainer - Robbie Williams, say - doesn't need to ask whether we're entertained or not, nor so bluntly state their methods. Commodus's observation of his sister's dozing child ("He sleeps so well because he's loved") meshes intriguingly here with Maximus's battle to earn the crowd's respect. (That he does is down to a mix of potent backstory, resilience, skill and flair, all transferrable skills for the modern creative.) Were Scott's battles to come worth fighting? In the new century, the veteran would get increasingly prolific and increasingly unreliable; he's that rare director who's made more films the older he's got, proof of his ability to talk a good game in the boardroom. Gladiator found the director, aged 63, turning his thoughts towards legacy and how a man is remembered - it was the beginning of late-period Scott - but were A Good Year (again: Crowe as Scott surrogate, this time furrowing his brow over bottles of wine), the various Alien footnotes and last year's Napoleon (with Phoenix as the anti-Scott) worth remembering? Wouldn't Scott have been better staying at home with the missus and kids, touching grass? At what point does the fight become a wearying compulsion? Born of Hollywood's ongoing inability to imagine a viable future - the auguries are not good - Gladiator II is almost upon us: the fear, shared by Crowe himself, is that Scott will overwrite this Champions League entertainment with something more akin to the Nations League, falling somewhere on a scale between timekilling and timewasting. Maybe there's some fight in the old dog yet. But the Elysian fields are calling.

Gladiator is now showing in cinemas nationwide, and available to stream via ITVX; Gladiator 2 opens November 15.