daniju

As a director, Ridley Scott has always suffered from accusations of making simplistic popcorn movies. But I've always felt this unfair. To my mind, he is a director who somehow made his career today when he should have been in the golden age of Hollywood. A Cecil B DeMille, an Anthony Mann, a William Wyler. The scale and ambition of his movies carries with it a critical dismissal. Big equals throwaway, but this does such a disservice to the artistry of some of his work.

I was never a huge fan of the original gladiator, when compared to films such as Kingdom of Heaven, but I was still looking forward to the sequel.

What surprised me however, was the ambition. This film is basically the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as opposed to any singular story of an individual man, and it is all the stronger for it. I would urge any lover of cinema, big cinema, to go see it on the largest screen possible at once. It was glorious. My only complaints were that Paul Mescal felt slightly lacking in gravitas, although it did not detract from the film, oh, and the less said about the CGI apes, the better.

At the end of the day, age shouldn't really matter, but when you sit there watching this, and you remember it came from a director on his way to being 90, it is astonishing.

Please everyone, make this film the hit it deserves to be.

Had high hopes for this movie, albeit accepting that it would be a highly politicised polemic against Trump.

That aside, there is such great subject matter for a Trump film. He does seem to have lived his life like a strange hybrid of Gordon Gecko, Tony Soprano and Lberachi, and it's a real credit to Sebastian Stan that he captures the inflection, the mannerisms and the look, without descending into parody.

The problem that I have is with the script. By attempting to portray Trump as a frightened kid, overshadowed by his father and in awe of his mentor, you then need to have a very nuanced and gradual shift into him becoming the bullish, obnoxious figure of later years.

What this film fails to do is to join the two halves and show that decline. It's akin to Michael Corleone telling his girlfriend at the wedding that he is not like his family, and then cutting straight to the death of Fredo.

Or young princess Elizabeth skipping around the sunlit fields of Tudor England, receiving the news that Henry VIII had died, and then donning the white face paint to declare that she is now married to England.

The hurt and the callousness that Trump shows in the second half of the film to those around him, consequently seems unearned and a little clumsy in its keenness to show that he is bad and a villain without shading.