Gladiator was the greatest sports movie ever made
On sportswashing, stardom, and the mob
As you might have guessed from the header, this edition of The Chimera contains spoilers for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.
Gladiator II is out next month. I’m on the fence as regards my expectations; I think that the trailers look like they’ve relied on shoddy CGI for too many shots (those awful baboons; that naval engagement in the Colosseum), and more importantly that the premise of Rome having fallen back under tyrannical rule renders the entire story of the first film, including Maximus’s death, entirely pointless.1 On the other hand, Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal both look killer in what footage and imagery has been revealed so far (and Paul Mescal? Eh, I dunno). So I’m hoping for a Top Gun: Maverick, but expecting more of a Matrix Reloaded.
One of the benefits of Gladiator II’s impending birth, though, is that the first film has been re-released in a few cinemas, so earlier this week, I got to see Gladiator on the (very, very!) big screen for the first time.
It was pretty sweet. Gladiator is part of a small clique of films which I watched several dozen times around that perfectly impressionistic age around 10-13, which makes it a) impervious to criticism that might reach my ears, and b) hugely nostalgic for me to watch (points A and B are closely related, I feel).2 All the best visual aspects of the film were enhanced by watching it on a screen fifty feet wide; all the best lines were improved at 105 decibels. “WE MORTALS ARE BUT SHADOWS AND DUST, MAXIMUS!” Oliver Reed bellowed as Russell Crowe jogged out of the bowels of the Colosseum to dismember Titus the Gaul in high definition. “SHADOWS AND DUST!” This is exactly what you want from a boy film.
By this point, I know every beat of the film by heart – and yet, as all masterpieces should, it can still surprise and delight. There are small details you pick up on with each rewatch, like how the hetaerae who throw themselves at the gladiators when they first reach Rome appear again in the background of later crowd scenes, or how Crowe is still a little bloodied in a post-battle feast scene because he cut his face in real life, during filming. It’s a film packed with detail.
But as I sat there like a louche millennial Caligula in my Odeon Luxe© Recliner seat, immersed in the crunch of sand and bones by Dolby Cinema© surround sound, a more expansive thought dawned on me. Gladiator is a sports film. And in fact, it might be the greatest sports film of all time.
Start from the moment Maximus is found, wounded and passed out amid the ravaged remains of what was once his family home, by slavers. At this point, he’s a nobody – believed to be a deserter from the Roman legion he once commanded, injured and unmotivated, and sold in North Africa to the local gladiator trainer, Antonius Proximo.
In other words, he’s a try-out in the gladiatorial world who has been talent scouted by, uh, the slavers, and signed for a pseudo-sporting club which hopes to develop his talent and make a profit off him.
Proximo soon recognises Maximus’s abilities. He puts him into a multinational team alongside a physically imposing German (Hagen, played by Ralf Möller) and a speedy African (Juba, played by Djimon Honsou).3 This trio proves too much for the local opposition (though other academy propects do fall by the wayside/are decapitated).
Jose Proximourinho then masterminds his gladiators’ route from the doldrums of local competition in Zuccabar (modern-day Morocco) all the way up to the Colosseum: they will fight in Rome, in the Champions’ League of gladiatorial combat, a 150-day celebration of the recently deceased emperor Marcus Aurelius’s reign. Here, Maximus is promoted to captain, leading his team of plucky underdogs to a giant-slaying (emphasis on the slaying) victory over the chariot-riding opposition during a recreation of the battle of Zama. It all feels very Burnley vs Man City, or perhaps Greece vs England.
Though the evil emperor Commodus is frustrated in his attempts to have Maximus killed in the arena, the neutrals love him: Maximus is the Lionel Messi of bloodsports, the flair player who takes to heart Proximo’s advice that it is not enough to win; he must also entertain the crowd while he does so. He earns fans. The plebians chant his name. They worship him. In the arena shop, they presumably sell out of armour with his name on the back.
At this point, the analogy turns from football to boxing, because Maximus only fights one-on-one bouts in the arena for the rest of the film. First up is a huge billing, as the aforementioned Titus the Gaul is brought out of retirement – with an unbeaten record, because he’s still, you know, breathing – and matched up against Maximus. Maybe it’s more like a wrestling match, because Titus sort of tag-teams Maximus with a gang of hungry tigers on chains who are released in the arena, but ultimately Maximus wins, spares Titus after Commodus gives him (i.e. Titus) the thumbs-down, and is even more beloved by the plebs for doing so. Flair player.
Here’s where it gets all the wilder – or so it would seem. Maximus’s final bout is a literal fight to the death with the emperor himself. Commodus – who we have seen earlier in the film is hardly a shabby swordsman himself – enters the ring in an all-white get-up which counts as one of the most stunning costumes in a film full of them.
It seems a bit far-fetched, right? An emperor, fighting in the Colosseum? And yet.
Commodus, who in real life was strangled to death in the bath by his wrestling partner, did actually appear in the arena, dressed as a gladiator. Contemporaries didn’t much like this; it was considered vulgar, and obviously everyone he came up against submitted to him (he didn’t kill them, for what it’s worth). And while this seems weird to us, it shouldn’t. Or, more accurately, it wouldn’t, if we lived in Iraq, Gabon or Turkey, or any other country in which dictators regularly use sports to launder their images, and even take part in those sports themselves.
There are literally dozens of examples of this. Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, for example, was head of the Iraqi FA and Olympic Committee, and supposedly arrested and tortured Iraqi athletes who underperformed. Bolivian president Evo Morales – not a dictator, but certainly someone whose commitment to democracy was questionable during his 13-year stint in power – played for a team in the second tier of Bolivian football while in office (a cool quotation from Morales: “I would die fighting for people’s rights, but if I don’t get the chance, I would like to die playing football.”) Under Franco, Real Madrid – cementing their eternal status as football’s supervillains – became a symbol of the regime; the club was described by a Francoist minister as “the greatest embassy we ever had”, with Franco regularly putting his thumb on the footballing scales behind the scenes in Madrid’s favour. Viktor Orbán, Xi Jinping and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have all used football as planks in a political platform. Hell, even in his own milquetoast way, Keir Starmer has made his Arsenal fandom a part of his public persona.
In fact, the whole point of Gladiator is about how sports can be used as a platform for political influence. The dramatic stage offered by sporting spectacle is too much for both the strongman and the would-be revolutionary to forego.
Early in the film, Proximo offers Maximus some advice. He has just revealed that he, too, was once a gladiator, but was freed when Marcus Aurelius granted him a wooden sword called a rudis, a real-life process by which the slave-gladiator could obtain emancipation in ancient Rome. “I was not the best because I killed quickly,” Proximo explains. “I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd, and you will win your freedom.” His point is that even a slave can challenge the power of the emperor, if the crowd is behind him. In gladiatorial combat, as in football or boxing, or any number of other sports, your background doesn’t matter – as long as you’re good.
Commodus is a pretty intense villain for Hollywood – he kills his own father, wants to fuck his sister, threatens the life of his nephew, and detests the noble, honour-driven Maximus to the extent of having Maximus’s innocent wife raped and crucified alongside his son. But Commodus is also conniving, cunning and dangerous, and he understands how to win over the fickle populace of Rome: by planning months and months of bloodthirsty games in honour of his predecessor and handing out free bread at each spectacle. Even the sophisticated, patrician senators in the film, played by Derek Jacobi and John Shrapnel, have to acknowledge that Commodus gets the masses. “I think he knows what Rome is,” admits Jacobi’s Gracchus, the urbane, cosmopolitan politician. “Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they’ll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they’ll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it’s the sand of the Colosseum.” He then utters one of the film’s most memorable lines: “He’ll bring them death – and they will love him for it.”
Anyone who read about the human-rights abuses and objections to the Qatar World Cup two winters back will recognise this sentiment, with “death” replaced by “Lionel Messi dismantling a dogged French defence in front of 89,000 people plus Salt Bae” and “Rome” replaced by “everyone you know with access to a TV”. Because people did die to bring the World Cup to Qatar – a lot of people, per the BBC, potentially in the thousands.
Head to St James’s Park, and pick a fight with a Geordie over the fact that Newcastle is owned by the state-owned sovereign wealth fund4 of a country where it’s literally still possible to execute someone for being a wizard. They won’t care; they’ll see any attempt to point this fact out as a partisan attack on their local identity, which is now inextricable from that of the sheikhs who have poured hundreds of millions of pounds of oil-cash into their long-suffering club. Those Geordies will also – more fairly and accurately – point to the hypocrisy of other clubs owned by nation-states and parties accused of deeply unsavoury practices.
Point being, these people, like Commodus, know that nobody gives a shit about the slaves who are dying for their pleasure when they are being entertained (or not). On an individual level, peep the loyal Kylian Mbappé stans who, even today, are out there bravely sharing their belief that sexual assault allegations against someone associated with the French player reported in Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet are somehow – as Mbappé himself has implied – planted by Paris Saint-Germain, the club Mbappé claims owes him some €50 million in back pay.5 Fake news! they wail, screaming, crying, throwing up. Sports are powerful tools of propaganda, as much now as they were in AD 180.
There’s a flip side. Sports like boxing and football in particular are also vehicles for the most downtrodden in (global) society to reach utter, dizzying, staggering heights of wealth – just ask Luka Modrić, who fled his home during the Yugoslav War after seeing his grandfather shot dead by Serb militia, then won 27 trophies with Real Madrid, captaining his country to the World Cup Final and semis, and breaking the eleven-year Messi-Ronaldo duopoly on the Ballon d’Or in 2018. Or the late Maradona, who grew up with six siblings in a house his father built out of sheet metal and breeze blocks.
But ultimately, it’s the way the arena is used by the tyrant for power over the mob that is the most compelling element of Gladiator. Next time you see someone who is normally smart acting like a useful idiot for a blood-drenched state because they support a particular football club or because they like a particular boxer, you can thank Commodus, because he did it first.
A quick addendum: I watched a great British film this week, and wanted to share an astonishing fact about it. As of October 2024, 47 films out of 50 in the UK box-office takings of all time have been released since 2000 (Gladiator is not among them, incidentally). Most of the list is what you’d expect: Avatar, various Star Wars instalments, Minions and Pixar fare, &c. But the three that were released pre-millennium are all from the 1990s.
The first two, you might guess. Titanic comes in at a very impressive number 11, having made about £82,700,000 or so in the UK since its release in 1998. And since Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out a year later, it has cemented a very solid 36th place, after making £56,400,000. Not bad for a film featuring Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd.
But the final film, which is juuuust hanging in there at number 46?
The Full Monty.
The Full Monty has made £52.2 million – that’s truly impressive staying power, if you ask me.6 And the film took me right back to the glory days of those late 90s/early 00s wholesome independent films from the UK, like Bend It Like Beckham or East Is East – basically anything with Gurinder Chadha involved. Kitchen-sink family films with a good heart, you know?
Presumably The Full Monty will drop out of the top fifty very soon, as more big films slot into the list above it (the only way it would stay up would be if it was somehow making boatloads off DVD sales, which it’s obviously not). But for now, it’s there, proudly sitting tight after more than 25 years, rubbing shoulders with the franchise behemoths. I thought that was quite cool.
Lots of sequels do this: horror sequels consistently kill off the hero(ine)s of the original movie in their opening sequences but, most egregiously, in the most recent Star Wars movies, both The Last Jedi and its own sequel The Rise of Skywalker managed to “undo” what happened in each other following The Force Awakens, leading to a literally pointless trilogy of films.
Other films in this clique: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Hot Fuzz, The Last Samurai.
I’m generalizing here by saying “Africa” because it’s never expanded upon in the film where Juba comes from specifically. But Honsou was born in Benin, so I think it’s fair to assume West Africa.
I know this is a tautology but some people don’t understand what a sovereign wealth fund is.
This pay claim may be true, and it’s important to say here that Mbappé hasn’t been charged with anything or that it’s even him the police want to investigate, though the tabloid Expressen has reported that it is. The only fact I know for certain is that Aftonbladet is one of the most reputable papers in Sweden and I am inclined to trust their fact-checking process over that of someone called @GenerationalKylian on Twitter.
Astonishingly, it was also nominated for Best Picture in 1998, up against the likes of Good Will Hunting and Titanic.