I watched Gladiator 2 at the Chirnside Cinemas. It was good, as expected, but not as good as the first one. Why? Maybe simply because it was a sequel and was therefore no longer original (Yeah, I know, but The Empire Strikes Back, blah, blah, blah – I stand by what I said). Or maybe because the main character, Lucius, wasn’t quite as interesting as Russell Crowe’s Maximus from the first. The actor was Paul Mescal, someone who was completely new to me. He acquitted himself well and fit the bill, but seemed to lack Crowe’s charisma. I dunno. Also, two of the bad guys, the two Emperors, were just a couple of decadent twinks. Denzel Washington’s character, the ambitious gladiator trainer, was the real bad guy and played him convincingly. It had all the spectacle of the Colosseum that one could want – adding a flooded arena (with sharks!) for a sea battle – but this time the focus was more on the politics and Lucius’s back story. I was worried the film would feature a lot of animals being killed (an historical feature of the Colosseum’s activities) but it’s just one big rhino, which gets bruised and battered, but lives. It’s a satisfying story that ties up the loose ends of the first film and leaves us on an epic high. It’s always great to see what Ridley Scott and his team can do with bringing the world of ancient Rome to our screens, and that’s actually enough for me. I’m glad he had Lucius re-state Maximus’s famous line that ‘What we do in this life echoes throughout eternity’. It’s such a memorable line, worth repeating in a blockbuster film. I think about it a lot. In fact, I would rephrase it as ‘If we want what we do in this life to echo through eternity, make it epic’.