The Millennium in Frames: Gladiator’s Popcorn Prestige

The Millennium in Frames is our close-to-chronological look at the most important, influential, popular movies since 2000. 

To kick off a look at modern movies with Gladiator might seem arbitrary, and though it is in a lot of ways, in other ways it’s a perfect start. Gladiator is the first Best Picture winner of the 2000s, a remarkable fact once you consider it’s essentially a summer blockbuster, and it contains some of the more perplexing cultural questions we’ve faced in the new millennium, like: What happened to Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix? Where did Ridley Scott go wrong? And, most importantly: Why did we love Gladiator, when we’re now so obviously fed up with movies like Gladiator?

A refresher: Gladiator was a Roman epic released in the summer of 2000. It stars Russell Crowe in the leading role, Joaquin Phoenix as the main antagonist, and features Sir Ridley Scott, veteran director of all-timers like Blade Runner and Alien, behind the camera. Gladiator made a ton of money ($457 million worldwide, good for second-best in 2000 behind Mission: Impossible II), and also brought home a bunch of awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Russell Crowe (Joaquin Phoenix was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Scott had a nod for Best Director, too). Though the movie tries to bring forth a lot of character drama and some grandiose political stakes, it’s remembered most today for its rousing man-speeches and gory action, odd for something that was released as a prestige epic, a reboot of a genre whose heyday came 40 years prior with movies like Ben-Hur (1959) and Spartacus (1960).

Remembering a Best Picture winner for its most classically entertaining moments—Crowe’s inspirational quotes, the violent Coliseum scenes—might seem like we’ve collectively missed the point, but revisiting Gladiator proves that it’s at its best when it wants to please the crowd. The action delivers. The Oscar-reel speeches thunder and shake. The special effects flex their muscles. It’s remarkable how easy it is to watch, and that’s a weird thing to say about something garnered this much critical praise. How many Best Picture winners can call themselves popcorn movies? In the new millennium, there might not be another one. Maybe Slumdog Millionaire? The Departed? Even Return of the King feels weightier than Gladiator. Are a bunch of dudes going to gather around with pizza and wings and pop on Million Dollar Baby? Nope, but they would for Gladiator. Retrospectively, that’s really weird.

That’s not to say that it’s inexplicable why Gladiator saw the awards success it did. The cast is sensational (Crowe’s maybe a bit overrated, but Phoenix is way underrated) and the effects were marvelous in their day. The story, as discussed, is a total crowd-pleaser, and the production values trump just about anything from the period (fun tidbit: The Gladiator team hand-crafted over 27,000 individual pieces of armor for the movie). It’s just well-made, and sometimes well-made movies take advantage of weak fields (Gladiator’s biggest competition for the Oscars was the polarizing Traffic) and score just because they’re well-made movies. Sure, we look at this movie now and say it’s a blockbuster, but it’s a really good blockbuster, and it doesn’t need—nor try!—to do anything else.

And maybe that’s striking for us today—a prestige movie that doesn’t try to do anything except tell a kickass story and give you your money’s worth. It always feels weird to read about how things were affected by 9/11, but watching something like Gladiator, a summer movie of 2000, versus something like The Bourne Identity, a summer movie of 2002, makes it clear that filmmakers in the wake of September 11 perhaps felt a greater need to “say something” with their art. Heck, look at the quintessential summer movies of today—comic book flicks—and think about how many of them aim for some kind of theme or message that’s supposed to resonate outside the world onscreen. Captain America: The Winter Soldier dealt with national surveillance. The Dark Knight delved into amorphous motives and senseless evils. Iron Man existed amid the backdrop of messy defense contracts. There’s not a lot of dumb fun to be had at the movies anymore. Blockbusters today are part of a dialogue; they want to smack you with a rumination as much as they want to shoot ‘em up. Gladiator existed in a blissful world that had just calmed down after Y2K and sporadic acts of domestic terrorism, but was still ignorant of lurking international dangers. There was no obligation—maybe no need—to say anything at the movies. Gladiator just existed to be a good time, to wow us with its visuals and bring us along a classic journey of sweet revenge. It’s easy. It’s cool. Sometimes it feels nice to sit and watch something easy.

Is that ideal? Hard to say. Gladiator has a contextual innocence that some might argue frees our retrospective from criticism clichés like “problematic” or “troubling” (though it should be said that no movie, no matter how masculine, should feel okay with having only one female speaking role—sorry, Gladiator, you’re not entirely out of the doghouse), but maybe it was good for art to receive a kick in the pants and go back to viewing the world around it with an exploratory, investigative eye after 9/11. There might be truths to be found in this movie, but you have to look underneath all the spectacle, and when there’s so much fun to be had in the meantime, what with Crowe’s charisma and Phoenix’s delightful sniveling, why would you want to make it hard for yourself? The filmmakers certainly didn’t.

Thus, the legacy of Gladiator is an insightful one for the beginning of our journey through the millennium. It’s one of our final reminders of the pre-9/11 approach to movies in the 2000s, when delivering on entertainment, character, and spectacle was enough to garner praise from the top of the business. We can delight in the prime of Russell Crowe’s career (his Best Actor win here was bookended by nominations for The Insider in 1999 and A Beautiful Mind in 2001—many say his turn in Gladiator is the least-deserving of the three) and we can play what-if games about the spastic career of Phoenix (saw terrific peaks—Walk the Line, The Master—and deep valleys—the I’m Still Here mockumentary) and the steady decline of Scott (after he put out Black Hawk Down in 2001, he had a solid decade-plus of misses before coming back with The Martian in 2015). Indeed, Gladiator is a rare modern movie that is safe to discuss simply as a movie, and in that regard, it goes down smooth and without trouble.

 Can you fault a movie for not shooting at anything more than a thumbs-up? Gladiator kept things simple, but perhaps that’s why it’s great. On the verge of an era full of undercurrents, deeper meanings, and art-as-obligation, you might pardon a movie for enjoying itself while it still could. After all, the near future would see Hollywood confront deeper, darker questions than ever before, and movies would take up the heavy mantle of probing the world for answers. Until then, Gladiator just wanted to entertain, and that was mercifully enough.

Next time, the age of the modern superhero movie begins with X-Men.