By Travis Johnson
Fresh off announcing to the world that he’d like to make another half dozen Alien movies, venerable, cigar-chomping auteur Ridley Scott told EW that he’s still rather keen on mounting a sequel to Gladiator, his 2000 historical epic that nabbed a Best Actor Oscar for Russell Crowe (that he should have got for LA Confidential, frankly).
Said Riddles, “I know how to bring him back. I was having this talk with the studio, ‘but he’s dead.’ But there is a way of bringing him back. Whether it will happen I don’t know. Gladiator was 2000, so Russell’s changed a little bit. He’s doing something right now but I’m trying to get him back down here.”
Now, this is not the first time a sequel has been mooted, with the powers that be going so far as to rope in none other than OZ-gothic poet laureate Nick Cave to pen a script.
Nick Cave, folks.
Well, if you;re going to do a movie that perforce has to include death, resurrection, redemption, sacrifice, and man’s capability of incredible violence, you could do a lot worse that the guy who wrote Murder Ballads. Cave’s script is amazing. It follows Crowe’s Maximus as he battles his way out of the Roman afterlife, reuniting with his slain son, and going on to become a kind of avatar of war, waging battle after battle down through history until the final shot of the film sees him as one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. It’s equal parts lyrical, brutal and downright insane. Have bit of a Google around – you should be able to find it, and it’s worth a read.
Now, there’s no evidence that this is the template that will be used going forward. Hell, there’s no evidence of forward momentum at all – it’s just an off-the-cuff remark from Scott, after all. But we can dream, folks; we can dream.
