Gladiator II could have been much worse. In the race to make a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator(2000), Russell Crowe, who played the hero, Maximus, in the original, persuaded his friend, the musician Nick Cave, to write a screenplay – the request presumably including a prominent role for Crowe. The problem was that after killing the tyrannical emperor Commodus in the arena, Maximus too had died from his wounds. We saw him so undeniably dead that one of those “he turned out to have survived after all” sequels was out of the question.

Cave’s solution was to open his projected movie with Maximus in the underworld – but not for long. After an encounter with a group of pagan gods he is transported to the human world again, to Rome, a couple of decades after his death. There the new imperial villain is Lucius, Commodus’s nephew, the son of his sister Lucilla, who, as an innocent boy, had a cameo role in the original film. The opposition to Roman autocracy is now formed by the Christians, with whom Maximus sides before taking a whirlwind tour of armed conflict through the ages (I am not joking). He visits the Crusades, the First and Second World Wars and Vietnam, ending up with a final scene at the Pentagon.

Crowe was probably as baffled by this as I am, and his response, as Cave admits, was a straight “Don’t like it, mate”. It never progressed any further, though the script is still available online (search “Nick Cave Gladiator II script”). Scott’s own screenwriters, when charged with devising a follow-up, moved in a different direction, without resorting to divine intervention or time travel, and without finding a role for Crowe. They too saw the potential of developing young Lucius from version one, but they cast him as their hero, not their villain. In fact, roughly halfway into the sequel that was made, and has just opened, Lucius is revealed to be not only the nephew of Commodus, but also the son of Maximus (who, as careful observers of the original Gladiator might already have guessed, had an affair with Lucilla).

Gladiator II is as much a remake as a sequel, substituting Lucius (Paul Mescal) for Maximus. It starts fifteen or so years after the first movie ends. For his own safety, young Lucius had been sent from Rome to North Africa by Lucilla…