A pocketsize note on Gladiator II

As per usual, Denzel Washington underlined that he masters his craft in the most sublime ways. That, the grandeur-boostin’ special effects and the shot of that one warrior entering the arena on a massive rhino made for an enjoyable Friday morning at the cinema.

However, I’d love to see what directors and screenwriters like Ramata-Toulaye Sy and Nia DaCosta would do with a Gladiator-budget. I trust that if people/populations were to be invented, Sy and DaCosta’s imaginations would give us the best costumes, make-up, conversations, confrontations and perhaps even languages. They wouldn’t present us characters, extra’s and sceneries looking like the product of someone whose whole sense of creativity is rooted in one Heart of Darkness-esque book about Moors, Kel Tamasheq and ‘Thee Arabs’.

And with all those myths that have survived even the most ancient of times… from women with snakes for hair and just all kinds of ruthless killers… why are all the women so soft and helpless? Why are we only crying and dying all the time? Give us a Lashana Lynch or Jean Grae looking person who, in reaction to the evil she witnesses, kills for sport. Give us a head of empire whose army of elephant riding, Hannibal-coded soldiers comes in, pulls out some gladiators’ spines, eats too many grapes at the afterparty and leaves the next morning. Probably with a few captives but with not too much drama. Elegantly. And who knows, maybe they’ll come back. Maybe not all of them return to where they came from and those who don’t, install this lingering fear that one day there will be a rebellion. But, not right now because now, they just came for the sport. To witness and to participate, to win. Just to keep them Romans and Greeks on their sandaled toes. Can we please have some fear-spreading women? Who aren’t randomly evil but still terrifying? Women whose terror isn’t the result of trauma or a broken heart but who still, out of a survivalist habit, actively choose violence every day and from the moment they wake up.

Can we have main characters who are women
who fight
over something other than a man
and who don’t die
but who live
for something other than a man?