‘Gladiator II’: Ridley Scott, Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal & Connie Nielsen Reveal How All Roads Led To Ancient Rome
deadline.comA ship-to shore invasion with fleets of Roman battleships fighting with trebuchets and thousands of archers. A naval duel to the death inside a flooded, shark-infested coliseum.
A fight against a rampaging rhino, and hand-to-hand combat with a pissed-off hairless, snarling, possibly rabid baboon. Nobody does these things as well, or efficiently, as Ridley Scott, and with Gladiator II he’s topped the action of the Oscar-winning 2000 original, in a reflection of a more cruel, decadent and crumbling Rome, plagued by years of upheaval since the death of Russell Crowe’s rebel leader Maximus.
Gladiator took home five awards from 12 nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Crowe. But there was nothing for Scott, the most accomplished and successful living filmmaker yet to win an Oscar for Best Director.
Despite his groundbreaking work on sci-fi classics Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), he has been nominated just three times, in 1992 for Thelma & Louise (when Jonathan Demme won for The Silence of the Lambs), in 2001 for Gladiator (when Steven Soderbergh won for Traffic), and in 2002 for Blackhawk Down (when Ron Howard won for A Beautiful Mind).
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