Suitably Numb: Gladiator II's OST

By: Aidan Monks

Gladiator II was a disappointment and so was its soundtrack. 

At the end of the day, what did we expect? In this rabid age of sequels, reboots, and remakes where recreation is a standard, nostalgia is a currency, and every mainstream creative act recalls an older and better form of content, did we really expect anything better than the norm? Media reproduction is no longer mechanical; it is digital, effortless, and manages to be utterly transparent and guilt-free at once. The most common criticism echoed across review aggregators and newspapers alike is that Gladiator II is way – by which they mean, WAY – too similar to Gladiator (2000), the surprise smash hit sword-and-sandals flick starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, and Connie Nielson, among others. It is true. The narrative structure from the opening battle to the final showdown; the revenge arc of a brooding protagonist; the corrupt slave trader with ambiguous origins; the camp and grotesque; the Colosseum set pieces; even the central message – ‘The dream of Rome’. Whatever that’s supposed to mean, I do not know: I didn’t in the original, and I don’t in Gladiator II. As sequels go, it is shockingly similar to its predecessor. 

Unfortunately for Gladiator II, the musical score for the original exhibits some of the best work in Hans Zimmer’s discography. He has scored some of the most iconic, celebrated soundtracks for films since the late 1980s, including The Lion King, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, the Dune series, and (my personal favourite) The Thin Red Line. He also leads the film music division at DreamWorks Pictures and DreamWorks Animation studios, for which he has scored several films. Under his wing, several prolific 21st century composers have been nurtured, including John Powell (How to Train Your Dragon), Lorne Balfe (The Lego Batman Movie), and Harry Gregson-Williams, who is the latest prodigy to face the unenviable task of composing a follow-up to one of Zimmer’s classics. Having scored the magisterial music for Disney’s Chronicles of Narnia films, and a stripped-back but sentimental soundtrack for The Martian in 2015, it fell on Gregson-Williams to fill the shoes of the maestro who said he was uninterested in returning to Ancient Rome (if not because David Scarpa’s script for the sequel was so shitty, then to avoid inescapable comparisons with the work he produced a quarter of a century ago). This coming from the guy who has scored four Pirates of the Caribbean films.

Generally, there are two types of film scores – at least, two approaches – namely, the grandiose, of which John Williams’s maximalist exploits in symphonic excess represent the best (read: best-known), and the more sunk, subtle, background effect method, which you should hardly notice when the film is playing – i.e., Mica Levi’s work on the standout film of last year, The Zone of Interest. Zimmer’s oeuvre is marked by both of these ‘types’, which is perhaps why he truly is one of the GOATS, but he is most recognised for individual scenes, sequences, and cues when his epic melodies enter the foreground of the sound mix. Frankly, we don’t recall the docking scene in Interstellar – at least, the visual grammar – half as much as Zimmer’s perfect unity of organ, strings, percussion, etc., as key leitmotifs are brought to a seamless fruition. Gladiator is brimming with similar techniques. There are themes of battle, honour, enslavement, loss, lust, and freedom; they evolve concurrently, until the climactic act when principal themes dissolve into the triumphant swan song ‘Now We Are Free’ (featuring vocals from Lisa Gerrard). The score is epic, extensive, and intended to be heard. Zimmer’s beloved strings persist, alongside thunderous timpani, and – particularly in the large-scale opening battle sequence – brass and woodwind sections. Female vocals, perhaps anticipating his Oscar-winning work on Dune (2021), bear the score’s emotional weight, but can equally morph into rallying warlike belts: after all, loss and violence exist in a single breath in this story. The hammered dulcimer and the Armenian duduk feature prominently too. In Gladiator, Zimmer constructed one of his most compelling, grandiose scores. More than this, it was original. 

So, what’s so wrong with the sequel? 

In several ways, it depresses me to pose any critical valuations about Harry Gregson-Williams’s discography. He is truly one of the most underutilised, overlooked, hidden gems in film composition. Like Interstellar, Gregson-Williams’s sweeping score for Narnia is the foremost thing I took away from the film. The memories of these films are carried as much by the nerve-endings of certain tunes as the flicker-show of visual prompts that run rent-free in our minds. Some of Gregson-Williams’s soundtracks exhibit my go-to ‘best scores for worst films’ examples, Narnia being one of them. Therefore, it’s a genuine shame that such an extraordinary composer is going to be most widely recognised for an undeniably mediocre score – for a suitably mediocre movie – when his back catalogue suggests a virtuosic composer in need of a break. 

Gladiator II opens identically to its predecessor. The same atmospheric tones and gentle, ominous vocals like a lamentation. Occasionally, the iconic main theme – which instantly signifies images of Russell Crowe decapitating a Germanic tribesman or something – refrains, particularly towards the end of the film, when it begins to walk the narrow thread between homage and pastiche; sometimes with an extra layer of harmony smuggled into the sound, as if the melody wasn’t stirring enough as it stood. Unfortunately, these are the musical highlights of the film – not least, hearing Lisa Gerrard’s dramatic contralto reverberate in surround sound for the first time in my life. What we are given by Gregson-Williams is a tapestry of unexceptional melodies, characters unspecific and unimpactful; I finished the OST about as numb as when I left the cinema the night before. It makes me feel nothing at all. Gregson-Williams’s score certainly isn’t a trainwreck, because I do not believe him capable of producing anything remotely bad, but it is sculpted suitably for the most forgettable Oscar-bait blockbuster of the season. 

At the end of the day, one cannot be too sure about where the creative control sat during a process ultimately governed by the blind bureaucracy of large-scale studio filmmaking. The onus to deliver an easily identifiable product is usually placed on visionaries – in this case, the necessity for Gregson-Williams to ‘sound’ like Hans Zimmer, for fan service, for branding, and all the rest of it. It has been the same in the post-Silvestri MCU. The result is a plastic concoction of recycled techniques and motifs, which, if they achieve anything, highlight the strengths and successes of the original; Gladiator surely looks more exceptional by comparison. I’m starting to think this was the purpose of the sequel to begin with. You would think that after twenty-four years, either Ridley Scott or Paramount would have conceived some sort of authentic follow-up to the first movie, with different themes to explore, but no – the same can be said of the score. (Zimmer was, as always, correct in his decision to pass.) Rather, we are insulted with a fundamentally indistinct, undaring product, which will wash away like the grains of sand on its protagonist’s fingertips. As is the price of pastiche.