Somehow the script for Nick Cave’s sequel to the Russell Crowe epic Gladiator leaked a year ago, and this review of the script that asserts its high quality but wonders if it wouldn’t be just a little too supernaturally based to be a sequel was written back then, but it’s just hitting the music-journalism transom now. The coverage for the script is thorough, revealing lots of Caveian details (including a closing battle in which “the grounds [of the Coliseum] are completely flooded with several ships battling hundreds of alligators with fireballs and arrows,” and the notion that Russell Crowe’s Maximus has been damned to being a warrior for eternity as a way of atoning for his past crimes. Unfortunately, the person reading the script didn’t go out of his way to transcribe too much dialogue from Cave’s script, but he did include this speech from the anti-Christian leader Lucius, which is really really hard not to read in Cave’s bellow:

You are students, are you not? Scholars? Learned young men? Then, answer me this: Does Rome stand deep-fixed and deathless as in the time of the great Caesars? No. I think not. Does she prowl the world, hungry and fearless and all-power? Again…I think not. Do the Gods sit mighty and well-pleased in the Heavens and bestow on her, her just rewards? No and again, no…I think not. Rome weeps and this little fish swims in her tears. A fish…a little fish…hidden around an old man’s neck. The earthquakes that have ripped this mighty empire asunder…charge this little fish. The infernal plagues and disease? The hellish pestilence that ravages our land? Charge this little fish… The diabolical rage of the Gods? I say again…CHARGE THIS FISH. And charge the one that wears it! The man here spits n the eyes of the gods themselves! He is the enemy of us all!

How this has not landed in my inbox yet I do not know, but at least the “worst episode ever” commentary from the Gladiator faithful in the blog’s comment box is entertaining.


Gladiator 2 Script Review [Gone Elsewhere]