Is Ridley Scott a good filmmaker? It’s surprisingly hard to say, just as it’s hard to tell even after watching Gladiator IIWhether it’s a good movie or not. Still the original Gladiator was a perfect movie, just like a three-minute trashy pop song can be perfect. A creation of the studio system working at full speed within the constraints of the genre, a product designed to appeal to as many people as possible yet achieve a kind of immortality: the purest, almost platonic form of the Hollywood film.

The sequel, despite spectacular violence, not so much. But the differences between the two films, despite their nearly identical storylines, highlight how culture has changed in the intervening quarter-century.

Scott is a titan of the industry rather than an author. The fascination with Scott lies in the way he imbibes and radiates the broader energies of the culture around him. If Gladiator reinvented the sword-and-sandals epic at the precise moment of America’s imperial zenith, the 2001s Black Hawk downthrough the uncanny foreknowledge of its timing, it captured the atmosphere of the Global War on Terror, which was both its result and undoing. His more or less explicit War on Terror epic, Kingdom of heavenstill has the power to frustrate and delight in equal measure, recasting the Crusades through the lens of Boomer liberalism and absorbing the worldview of the then-fashionable New Atheism. By 2021, little attention will be paid to it The last duelScott had steered his craft towards the #MeToo wave: the enthusiasm of the current zeitgeist enters the director’s mind as raw material and is churned, processed and packaged as a glossy spectacle.