Gladiator II
seeing Paul Mescal in IMAX is something i need to see more of.
i truthfully was not excited for this movie at all because Ridley Scott’s recent films being bad, the trailer being atrociously corny, and the runtime being almost 2h30m long. however, i ended up loving every single second of this movie.
my only issue with this film is really in the writing.. i found some parts to either be too easy and/or rushed. a lot of character motivation is just thrown in without much explanation, and the explanation we do get is a flashback / flash forward similar to how Gladiator (2000) did it, but this time it didn’t really work for me. however, i feel an inevitable extended version is coming that i really hope expands on a lot of character relationships similar to the first. besides that, i really enjoyed every scene and enjoyed the arcs some of the characters go on.. even tho some don’t have any. let’s not also forget how a lot of this retreads some similar ground from the original, but tbh idrc because i was so entertained.
Paul Mescal does an amazing job from start to finish.. like everything he does is just mesmerizing and it’s not because he’s shirtless for most of the movie. Denzel Washington’s character may be the scene stealer of the movie for sure because i really loved his character as he was always doing something (usually for himself) and as things slowly get revealed, we see the tensions rise immensely. Pedro Pascal is good here too but his character i think needed more attention for sure.. alongside Joseph Quinn + Fred Hechinger because they’re basically just there any get no development. it was nice to see Connie Nielsen and Derek Jacobi back again.. the former had a shockingly good amount of scenes while the latter was unfortunately hardly shown.
the action sequences were phenomenally done alongside the cinematography which was stunning. the score was amazing and i honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it after the movie ended. i enjoyed all the blood especially because they took the R rating this time instead of PG-13 which was a nice surprise.
i’m not sure if this is just a high rating because of film high or not, but i truthfully enjoyed this movie and i really hope an extended version is released with the 4K because i need to see what was cut to see if it fixes some of my issues. i will be rewatching this again on Monday in 4DX with a double feature of Wicked / Gladiator II (both in 4DX).. so we’ll see if either film increases or decreases after a few days of sitting on them.
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