I wish I could say this has been a very productive week, especially after last week was not really, but it would not be true. I have still been hit by exhaustion at night, making me really wish my habit had not become to primarily write in the evening, but it is what it is.
Still, I have kept at it and finished the latest chapter. I think I may change things just slightly with the next one. For several chapters now, each chapter covered a day, or at least ended with sequential days. For what was happening, this has been appropriate, but I think for this next chapter I will do some fast forwarding to get to some more interesting things sooner. The things being sped past I do not think will be all that interesting though, so there should be no loss, and I do believe this will be the best thing for the story. Being the author, I will just declare it so! At least until I get to editing and rewriting things.
To keep this entry from being too short, and to partly make up for not having an article that is not a Writer’s Ball this week, I think I will talk a little about the Gladiator II trailer that recently released.
What the heck?
First, why does the original need a sequel? Second, what does this movie have to do with the original, and that is a very important question or criticism I have here. There are a lot of real stories from the Roman Empire that can be made into movies, and it is a very viable setting for stories as well, but I do not understand how this is a sequel to the original. Sure, I see the clips from the original, featuring the young boy in it that was something of a surrogate son to Maximus, but is he in the sequel? Such focus is given to the old clips of him, you would think he is one of the main adult characters feature in other scenes. The problem there is the only sympathetic character in the trailer, which I feel the boy should be, might be the main character who says he cannot remember his father or mother. Not remembering is father aligns with what was said in Gladiator, but the boy was certainly old enough to form clear memories of his mother, and there is little reason to believe she died shortly after the events of the movie, so I can only conclude the main character is not this boy.
So, why are there any clips of the boy in the trailer? Is he actually one of the bad guys in the new movie? As far as the story is concerned, I can believe that and am good with that, but this trailer does nothing to suggest that. In fact, I think one could completely remove the old clips and nothing about this trailer’s substance would change. The thing is, if you do that and I am correct about nothing changing, it begs the question of why this Gladiator II and not some completely unrelated story of the Roman Empire.
The saddest part about this criticism of mine is if the story ends up being good (which is a significant assumption) but need not be related to the original, then it will be harmed by the forced connection. It will be harmed because of the expectations Gladiator reasonably set for any movie attempting to follow it. It will be harmed because of the people today hesitating to spend any money on what appears to be a shallow Hollywood attempt to capitalize on a successful IP without respecting that IP. I will also be harmed because, if this story is good, it will not be establishing its own IP to build up, but will be connected to another, which may carry with it various restrictions.
On the bright side, seeing naval combat in the Coliseum is pretty neat, and, yes, that is historically accurate. As I recall, there are contemporary records of simulated naval battles in it and the Coliseum was built over the pools of Nero’s Golden Palace, so the water infrastructure was in fact present for this.
The dust tactic against the rhino though, and the harness on the rhino, yeah, I do not believe any of that. A couple handfuls of dust is not going to be enough to cloud the animal’s vision, and with its speed, I doubt the effective distance of the dust cloud is enough for any human to dodge out of the way in time. The harness I also have a probably with because it kind of looks like there are stirrups, but as I recall my history, stirrups only entered Europe with the Mongol invasion, and that should be centuries after this.
I do not feel like talking about the music choice for the video, but I do want to add this. The “left them eat war” line is clearly cut in and so does not appear to be an answer to the question of how to feed the Roman citizens. This makes me question its inclusion just like the clips of the boy from Gladiator; what is the point here and how does this relate?
Putting it another way, looking up a trailer for the original, there is a clear sense of story to that trailer. I have no clear sense of story here, but instead snippets of dialogue, some related and some disjointed, with action that might look neat but does not contribute to the story, and clips that leave me confused as to their significance aside from, what I suspect, is a bad attempt at linking this to the original.
When I wrote The Children of Many Gifts, I tried to be careful with it because it is my first attempt at a true sequel. This trailer does not demonstrate any kind of comparable care to me, but we shall see.