Declan Egan

1/. Visually worse / cheaper than gladiator whoever made the CGI monkeys should be fired. ALSO, why monkeys?? Maybe I dunno, they could fight, OTHER GLADIATORS? 2/. Fight choreography= terrible, looked fake and exaggerated. 3/. Script = terrible. Pompous writing that tried to have depth but missed the mark, every time. 4/ No logic or rational connection to the story of gladiator. Why did Lucius have to leave Rome when gladiator 1 ended on everything going well. No attempts even made to bridge that. 5/. Paul Mescal miscast: no charisma on camera, visually looked awkward and sounded like a punch drunk Rocky when he spoke. 6/. Too many main characters: the emperor brothers (sucked), denzel, Paul mescal, the mother.. unnecessary side characters with unnecessary scenes and dialogue that didn’t contribute to the story. For example Macrimus’s gladiator guard had way too many scenes but he contributed 0 to the story or to the enjoyment of the film so what was the point of him having so much screen time!? Stupid. 7/. Chaotic structure and flow: it felt like they tried to do way too much all at once and there was no crescendo or arc but instead there was a high volume of small and medium moments that were out of place and badly timed instead of a build up to one or two arcs just like Napoloen (also a hot mess). 8/. Reminded me of megalopolis: the terrible CGI, the over the top dramatic and shakespearian type acting styles, the incoherence of the story and flow. Disaster. Weird time to be alive. I feel like an AI chat bot wrote the entire movie story and script. Is it a sign of the times that there is such a huge gap between this movie and the beauty of gladiator 1. We have advanced massively in cinema tech, graphics etc but have we gotten stupider overall both as creators and consumers. I dunno. ANYWAY, 1 star.