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Director Christopher Nolan reveals his favorite film of 2024.
As directors pick their favorite 2024 films to Varietynew play, Nolan revealed that Gladiator 2 is his favorite film of the year, writing the following explanation:
In Ridley Scott’s first “Gladiator,” Maximus asks us, “Aren’t you entertained?” and we are confronted with the truth about why we visit the Colosseum through a film. Scott knows we're not there to get information about Roman culture; we are there to see our own dark desires from a comfortable distance. But he is too experienced a director to be caught making parallels with our time. He lets the world of “Gladiator II” speak for itself, showing us once again who we are, simply inviting us to enjoy the crazy inflationary ride. Why are there sharks in the coliseum? Because we demand them and Scott masterfully gives them to us. In revealing how games are used to manipulate public opinion, we cannot help but see shadows of our own public arena cast in the sand.
Like the best long-awaited sequels, “Gladiator II” should be a remake and a sequel in one, and it's a testament to Scott's brilliance that he manages to balance the individual pathos of the original with the expansionist demands of the sequel's central theme, bringing a lifetime of experience in tone control. Scott raises the game with his action staging – his incredible, hyper-observant, multi-camera mise-en-scène (so different from the original) masterfully fights the action in sequence after clear, jaw-dropping sequence. The effect is not just to entertain, but to make us aware of the film's themes. Few filmmakers have worked so invisibly on so many levels. In films from “Blade Runner” to “Thelma and Louise” to “Gladiator II,” the visual density of Scott’s art serves as a foil to its underlying thematic clarity.
Despite all his success, Scott's contribution to the evolution of cinematic storytelling has never been properly recognized. The visual innovations that he and his fellow 1970s British advertising directors brought to film were often dismissed as superficial, but critics at the time didn't get it – the lavish photography and meticulous design brought new depth to the visual language of films. films, mise-en-scena that could tell us what the worlds they portrayed would be like. This has never been clearer than in the masterful opening scene of “Gladiator II,” where Paul Mescal's hand gently cradles the harvested grain of the original film's swaying wheat.
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Source: Variety
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