Enough pearl clutching – who cares if Gladiator 2 isn’t accurate?

A scene from the upcoming film, Gladiator II
A scene from the upcoming film, Gladiator II

My son’s birthday falls at the end of the month, and my role in the festivities is to provide an outing to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II. Having seen the trailer, I already know – the musclebound presence of Paul Mescal as Lucius notwithstanding – that I’ll be spending most of the film with my eyes tightly shut.

In real life I am not squeamish – quite willing to disembowel a small game bird if necessary. But when it comes to on-screen disembowelling it is another matter, and the trailer’s orgy of smiting, stabbing and torrents of gore was a salutary warning of what to expect.

The sight of a combatant perched aboard a charging rhino, neatly tacked up with saddle and bridle, provided a welcome distraction: for some moments I was so busy wondering how you get a bit in a rhino’s mouth that I quite forgot about the carnage.

The rhino – and the sharks circling a nautical battle in the flooded Colosseum – caught the attention of historians, who question the authenticity of Scott’s version of gladiatorial combat. Dr Shadi Bartsch, a classicist from the University of Chicago, dismissed the film as “total Hollywood bull----” (or entertainment, as it is otherwise known).

Dan Snow (whose two-part documentary on the Colosseum begins next week on Channel 5) was less brutal, noting the improbability of sharks and rhino-wrangling, but admitting the right of filmmakers to imagine “fantastical visions of the past”.

When it comes to accusations of historical inaccuracy, this is not Scott’s first rodeo. His previous film, Napoleon, was criticised by historians (including Snow) for outrageous departures from verisimilitude, including the bombing of the pyramids (Napoleon was apparently highly respectful of the local monuments). To these, and other accusations of deviation from historical fact, Scott responded with a pithy suggestion that the nit-pickers should “Get a life”.

For professionals and amateurs alike there is an irresistible charm in spotting historical howlers. From William Wallace’s kilt in Braveheart to the escape route taken by the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music, small inaccuracies can assume a disproportionate significance. Julianne Moore’s curious pronunciation of Lytton Strachey’s surname in Pedro Almodóvar’s film The Room Next Door left me unreasonably irritated. Surely, I thought, someone – not least Moore’s co-star, Tilda Swinton – could have told her that it was “ch” as in “church” not “k” as in “cake”.

Then again, perhaps I’m mistaken, and he was “Strakey” to his Bloomsbury chums. As with the gladiatorial rhinos, facts become a mutable commodity when it comes to the imaginative interpretation of history by artists. And while historians and factual accuracy are indispensable in their own realm, artists are entitled to an idiosyncratic version of truth.

The accuracy of Tolstoy’s depiction of battle in War and Peace was bitterly attacked by the distinguished career soldier General Mikhail Dragomirov. Yet for the depiction of the human experience of war, it is Tolstoy’s interpretation of the psychological reality that we remember, while Dragomirov is all but forgotten (except by historians). And since all we really know about gladiators is that their calling involved a lot of showy violence, we may as well embrace Scott’s charging rhino for what it is: a CGI embellishment to the Roman precursor of Squid Game.


Ring the bell

Last Friday, Radio 4’s afternoon news programme, PM, signed off as usual with the weather forecast. But then came a surprise: the sound of the bells of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, ringing ahead of the cathedral’s reopening next month after the devastating fire of 2019.

Notre-Dame’s bells were followed by the Westminster chimes and the “bongs” of Big Ben (also silenced for a while during recent renovation). The sound of the great bells of Paris and London was a moving reminder of their enduring significance in increasingly secular times.

In revolutionary France, when church bells were enthusiastically melted down, the Emmanuel bell of Notre-Dame was rung to herald the atheist Festival of Reason. In our own time, while church congregations may be dwindling, the pealing and tolling of centuries-old bells still mark the great moments of joy and grief in our national and personal lives – their sound at once uplifting and a reminder that this, too, shall pass.