i was entertained

Gladiator II and our exhausting need to intellectualize everything.

There's a moment about forty minutes into Gladiator II when I realized I was grinning like an idiot. Paul Mescal's Lucius had just survived a spectacularly ridiculous encounter with what I can only describe as Murder Monkeys™, and instead of thinking "this is nothing like the original," my brain went: "Okay, so this is what we're doing? Bet." It was the exact same feeling I had watching Ridley Scott's House of Gucci – that precise moment when Lady Gaga says "father, son, and house of Gucci" with an accent that exists nowhere on Earth, and you either decide to get mad about it or buckle up and enjoy the ride.

I've been thinking a lot about what we mean when we say a film is "unnecessary." It's become critical shorthand for "this doesn't justify its existence," as if every movie needs to present a dissertation defense before it's allowed to exist. The discourse around Gladiator II has been particularly intense in this regard – there's been this collective pearl-clutching about how it "disrespects" the original, as if Ridley Scott himself didn't direct both films and decide, at age 86, that what the Roman Empire really needed was a theme park sequence.

The transformation of Scott's directorial approach in recent years tells us something vital about both filmmaking and joy. This is a director who's evidently pivoted from the brooding intensity of Alien and the original Gladiator to something altogether more audacious. From House of Gucci's parade of accents to Napoleon's deliberately ahistorical approach to French history, Scott has entered what I'm calling his "fuck around and find out" era. He's making films with the unbridled enthusiasm of someone who's earned the right to chase whatever bizarre vision strikes his fancy, and the results are gloriously unhinged. This is Ridley Scott unchained – a director who's already secured his legacy and now seems determined to have as much fun as possible with whatever time he has left behind the camera.

In 2000, when the original Gladiator hit theaters, we experienced movies differently. The internet existed, sure, but film criticism hadn't yet become an Olympic sport where every self proclaimed film critic with a TikTok account and a ring light needs to explain why Actually This Movie Is Problematic. We weren't making 45-minute video essays about historical inaccuracies or writing Substack newsletters about how this betrays the legacy of its predecessor (the irony of writing this in my own newsletter isn't lost on me). We were too busy shouting "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?" at random intervals and making our friends uncomfortable. The shift from then to now is stark – we've developed this peculiar cultural obsession with justifying our enjoyment of anything that doesn't explicitly present itself as High Art.

**mild spoilers in this next paragraph, skip to the next one to avoid them**

Listen. The first thirty minutes of Gladiator II are, admittedly, a mess. The film forces a tragic backstory onto Lucius with all the subtlety of a rhinoceros in a china shop (foreshadowing intended). His partner dies in battle – fine, standard stuff. But then his friend gets mauled by mutant baboons approximately four minutes later, and it feels like someone's playing Mad Libs with a revenge plot. The screenplay desperately wants us to believe these rapid-fire tragedies carry the same emotional weight as Maximus losing his family in the original. It doesn't work because it's trying too hard to recreate lightning in a bottle while simultaneously featuring checks notes genetically modified primates.

But then something sublime happens: the film discovers its true identity as the most expensive B-movie ever made. Enter the twin emperors, Caracalla and Geta, sporting bright red hair and makeup inspired by Sid Vicious. Yes, you read that correctly – in 2024, Ridley Scott decided what the Roman Empire really needed was a punk rock aesthetic. These emperors host decadent feasts in the Colosseum, turning the sacred arena into their personal playground of excess. It's here that Denzel Washington's Macrinus truly comes alive, moving through scenes with the confident swagger of someone who knows exactly what kind of film he's in.

The spectacle only escalates from there. The Colosseum transforms into an aquatic arena complete with warships and – because why stop at historical accuracy now? – actual sharks. This isn't just empty spectacle. It's spectacle with purpose. The purpose just happens to be "what if we made Jaws but make it Roman?" This is where the film finds its groove, embracing a level of theatrical superfluity that would make Caligula blush.

The evolution of Scott's filmmaking feels perfectly suited to our current moment. A director who, at this point in his career, responds to historical nitpicking with "Get a life" is exactly the energy we deserve. "The audience is all that matters," he's insisted recently. "I've always felt that. The moment you forget that, you're in trouble." And watching Gladiator II's most outrageous moments – from shark battles to punk rock emperors – you get the sense that Scott is having the time of his life reminding us why we go to movies in the first place.

It's in this gleefully excessive atmosphere that Denzel Washington thrives. I spent the entire movie watching his face, trying to pinpoint exactly what makes his performance so magnetic. It's not just that he's having fun – though he clearly is. It's that he seems to instinctively understand something about movies that we've collectively forgotten in our rush to taxonomize everything. Every gesture is simultaneously precise and abundant, like he's deconstructing the very idea of a "prestige historical drama" in real time. I couldn't take my eyes off him, and I couldn't stop thinking about how many critics would completely miss what he's doing here.

In an era where every piece of media must be dissected through either hour-long video essays or Letterboxd one liners, there's something almost radical about Scott's recent output. At 86, having directed 30+ films over 45 years, he's making movies at a pace that would exhaust filmmakers half his age. But more importantly, he's making them with a freedom that comes from understanding something fundamental: the gap between "high art" and "popular entertainment" was always artificial.

The truth is, we're living through an exhausting moment in film culture where every movie has to justify its existence through a lens of either groundbreaking artistic achievement or calculated IP exploitation. It's like we've forgotten there's this vast, gloriously messy middle ground where films can just be. We've become a society of "but actually..." people, armed with film school terminology we half-understand and a pathological need to be the smartest person in the quote-tweet. Every movie must either revolutionize cinema or get dragged for not revolutionizing cinema. God forbid something just wants to show you a good time – that's beneath us now, apparently. We're too busy writing 12-part threads about how the aspect ratio in the third act represents the protagonist's emotional distance from their childhood trauma, or whatever.

Leading up to my writing of this essay, I watched someone on YouTube spend 15 minutes explaining why this film "fails to understand the themes of the original" and all I could think was: my brother, there are SHARKS in this Colosseum. SHARKS. This compulsive need to intellectualize every piece of entertainment until it stops being entertaining is exhausting. It's like we're all stuck in a never-ending first-year film studies seminar where everyone's competing to have the most sophisticated take, and nobody wants to admit they simply had a good time at the movies. When did we become so afraid of pleasure? When did "I was entertained" become such a shameful admission?

Last week, I found myself in a two-hour argument about whether Saltburn was actually critiquing wealth or just aestheticizing it. Someone brought up Marxist theory. Another person started talking about the male gaze. I caught myself about to launch into a discourse about class consciousness in contemporary cinema, when I remembered being seventeen and trying to explain to my best friend why Constantine has "not aged well, actually." She just stared at me, popped another handful of popcorn in her mouth, and said "Keanu Reeves fights demons for two hours straight. That's literally all I need." I think about that moment a lot lately, especially sitting in theaters watching people record their reactions so they can post frame-by-frame analysis later.

My favorite thing about movies has always been their ability to surprise me. Not just with plot twists or special effects, but with the simple audacity of their choices. Watching Scott embrace pure spectacle at this stage of his career feels like a director finally breaking free from the suffocating weight of his own legacy. He's not trying to recreate the profound meditation on power and revenge that made the original Gladiator resonate. He's doing something else entirely: he's having fun and daring us to admit we are too.

There's a difference between having standards and forgetting why we fell in love with movies in the first place. Between thoughtful criticism and the performative need to find something wrong with everything. Gladiator II knows exactly what it wants to be – it's right there in Maximus's famous question from the original. And watching it deliver on that promise, without pretense or apology, I found myself giving the only review that really felt true to me: I was massively entertained.