"Gladiator" Review: Over Two Decades Later, We're Still Entertained

2000's Best Picture winner remains a powerful, moving testament to the human spirit.

September 18, 2023

On August 26, 1910, near the northwest coast of the Ottoman Empire, Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born. She would become a Roman Catholic nun, a missionary, and a world-renowned symbol of charity: Mother Teresa.

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Despite the adoration, she was an easy target for ridicule: many contested her deification by the media and the warped humanity with which we imbued her legacy.

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It was a fair criticism. Mother Teresa did many remarkable things on paper, but between the lines lurked unsettling realities. She founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious congregation devoted to assisting the poor, ill, elderly, and generally underprivileged; she opened numerous homes and hospitals to usher souls into the next life with dignity, care for the afflicted, and shelter homeless children; she negotiated a temporary ceasefire during the Siege of Beirut to evacuate 37 children.

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But there were ulterior motives. Mother Teresa's manipulations to spread Catholicism are well-documented, as was celebrating suffering as a means of reaching the divine. All things through and for Christ, even if the very people suffering these things do not accept Christ or the need to experience hardship to grow closer to Him.

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Her disregard for religious independence was palpable: she had the sisters of Missionary of Charities trick dying patients into getting baptized as a means of entering heaven. She was a hypocrite, advocating the very suffering she avoided herself, seeking advanced treatment while trying to toe the line by offering up acceptance of death with her last breath before an angioplasty.

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She got canonized regardless; she is a lauded historical figure regardless. She is a hero to many regardless.

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If Mother Teresa teaches us anything, it is the folly of turning ordinary people into heroes, praising deeds while pretending intent is irrelevant. After all, the right thing done for the wrong reasons is still the wrong thing. Mother Teresa may have done great things, but there is little evidence that she was great, hero or otherwise.

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Maximus Decimus Meridius is an interesting rebuttal of such hero worship. He is a man of honor and principle, a soldier with deep respect for the cause he fights for and a sense of duty evolved beyond simple concepts. He believes Rome is a light in the darkness and its emperor, Marcus Aurelius, a great man of great deeds.

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He is perhaps slightly misinformed in these accounts. Rome was a vast and formidable empire with tremendous scientific, architectural, military, and political acumen, creating frameworks for numerous fields of human advancement used today. It was also barbaric, oppressive, and deeply classist. The real Marcus Aurelius was a remarkable man, though the extent of his brilliance gets lost on Maximus, who admires him more as a father of Rome than a truly skilled ruler.

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But this somewhat narrow view lends Maximus humanity, the realism needed to make him a viable protagonist. Gladiator is a movie of conflicting ambitions in that it seeks to mean very little while meaning very much. It believes in quality, not quantity. It does not want to lecture us on the glory of Rome or the ethics of its conquest and governance. It does not seek to elaborate upon the interconnecting relationships of Maximus and the many people who affect his need and quest for vengeance. It does not want to be a passionate love story or a tale of revenge that thrives on that concept alone.

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It wants to be Gladiator.

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It wants to be an action spectacle. It wants to be a triumphant story of having everything stripped away and winning it back one battle at a time. It wants to be a tale of revenge where a man absent any flaw or fault destroys his enemies. It wants to be everything that makes a movie uninvolving and uninteresting, tedious and dull, but without being any of those things itself.

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It sets moods in battle to reflect its necessity. The Germanic tribes get fought on a dark, foggy day as though the world hinges on their defeat. Maximus is a great general because we see the gritty, bloody, fiery mess he must navigate to bring glory to the empire. He is a great captain because he brings together a group of slaves as a fierce battalion, inspiring them to work as a team to survive. His achievements have merit not because they get achieved but because he achieves them. He understands the world and the stakes of every moment.

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We know Maximus. He does not tell us everything he thinks and everything he feels. His virtues get spelled out inside of us instead of hammered into our heads. We see him keep his men from standing in his presence and showing them affection after battle. He knows the exact time since he last saw home, the layout of his land, and every fruit that grows on it. We know his values matter because they are our own, or if nothing else, how we imagine them.

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We want to believe we could lead a group of slaves to victory with life on the line or win the approval of a holy emperor. We want to believe we are as devoted to our loved ones and principles as Maximus and that we would be just as victorious in avenging the death of those loved ones and the violation of those principles.

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It is a powerful idea, and Gladiator would thrive on it more if it made Maximus a true gladiator rather than an action hero. His victories, for him, are relatively bloodless. He is rarely in danger or outmatched by his opponent. He is as flawless in the arena as in virtue, a suit of armor seemingly giving him superhuman abilities. The result must always be the same for the film's ideals to hold, but a tougher road would have more meaning. His perfection somewhat cripples him as an accessible protagonist; the aspiration we get called to is, through virtue of being flawless, flawed.

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It is much of why Gladiator merely exists once Maximus gets enslaved and Commodus arrives in Rome: the movie does not know what to make of its characters or how to let them affect their environment. Gladiator is built on the strength of its people; its thematic foundation is how we shape the world, whether in power or poverty. How do we leverage our position to achieve our goals, and what does that leveraging say about us? From the fighting pits to the palace, it is a world built entirely by the people.

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It is a rare film where the story, while still about the story, depends on its characters. Maximus is the beginning, the middle, and the end. He must refuse his situation and remember his motives. He must remain the same man at the start as the end, but he falters. The film has him play a political animal working in congress with senate conspirators and a former lover seeking to overthrow Commodus. His ill-conceived plot and the passionate kiss he shares with Lucilla betray Maximus and all for which he, and thus the movie, stands. It is a foul compromise between art and the big studios who demand cliche to pacify audiences it does not understand.

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But more than anything else, it is a neglect of the movie. It is not a complex political drama built on palace intrigue and a complicated web of interconnected motives. It is not a dissection of political structures and whether Rome should be an empire or a republic. It is not an opportunity to reunite former lovers in circumstances that awaken their passion. It is Gladiator. Anything it gives us beyond Maximus and his quest for revenge is a needless distraction to bridge the gap between moments the film is unsure what to do with, an unwelcome antidote to battle fatigue.

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But we do not need, nor did we ask for, an antidote. We will always want to watch an ideal. Maximus is all we aspire to be and secretly believe we are. He is a visual articulation of what we feel towards the ones we love, how they shape us, and the ideals we hold most dear: loyalty, family, duty, honor, and strength.

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Maximus is strength. He does not let himself become shadow and dust. He cannot be afraid, not because he is some archaic definition of masculinity, but because he knows having things to stand for, a purpose greater than yourself, makes us human. He has what the new emperor does not and can never have. He says Commodus has been afraid all his life, and he is right.

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The film does not always let him be right. It is not always sure exactly how to exact the revenge Maximus seeks, so it uses coups, sexual tension, and murdered friends to inspire sentiment while it figures itself out. It dives too deeply into its corny villain to make him tangible. It pushes him into a pointless incest side plot and forces him to speak in harsh whispers to compensate for thin development. It asks us to believe all men can get redeemed in a moment despite not needing redemption if they had not necessitated it in the first place.

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But despite how it often depicts him, Gladiator concludes on the right note. It does not ask us to look at a man and pretend he is not flawed or that his intentions are not pure, like some canonized nun who cares more for converting heretics than assuaging anguished souls. It does not ask us to view him as a hero and worship him as a saint. It asks us to be optimists. It asks us to believe in the man and thus in ourselves.

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That is Gladiator’s power, the strength that makes it resonate as Maximus lays dead in the arena and Lucilla urges the people to honor him as a true soldier of Rome: death is not to be feared; it is not worthy of it. It is inevitable, inescapable, and thus not something to defy. We can run a thousand miles and a thousand after that; it always catches us in the end. But if we can live as Maximus: believing in something, fighting for something, staying true to something, and welcoming death as a culmination of that belief, of that fight, of that commitment, we too can be free.

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