The , and it looks like it will have me answering enthusiastically when asked "Are you not entertained?" Late-period Ridley Scott is hit (The Last Duel, Alien: Covenant) or miss (Napoleon, House of Gucci) for me, but even those misses have entertaining moments. Napoleon doing a bizarre little seduction stomp while he mutters wordlessly until Josephine has sex with him? Hilariously weird stuff. A match cut from Jared Leto's Paolo Gucci crying in despair to a whiny car horn honking? A fantastically funny bit in a movie that otherwise couldn't land on a consistent tone.
No Church In The Wild Is A Perfect Fit For Gladiator 2
From the trailer, it seems like Scott is cooking with gas this time around. Denzel Washington looks like he's having a great time, Scott is staging ship battles inside Roman coliseums (!), and both Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal are using their burgeoning star power to bring us the kind of massive sword-and-sandal action epic we just don't get anymore. However, it's been deeply irritating to see the YouTube comments filled with incessant criticisms of one small aspect of the trailer that will probably have no bearing on the final film: the use of Jay-Z and Kanye West's No Church In the Wild.
Assassin's Creed Doesn't Care About Historical Accuracy, And Neither Should You
The racist outrage towards Shadows protagonist Yasuke has nothing to do�🍬� with history.
If that criticism was focused on Kanye's involvement, I would understand. I stopped being a fan of the beyond-controversial rapper years before he told Alex Jones he "like[d] Hitler”, sometime around when he started wearing a MAGA hat whenever he was in public. But no one is criticizing the track because of Kanye's involvement (and his verse was omitted from the trailer anyway). In fact, the most common criticism is that hip-hop as a genre is anachronistic and doesn't belong in period pieces.
I gotta be honest, that's just a really, really bad take. That perspective fundamentally misunderstands the function of music in a film: to support the aesthetic and mood the director wants to create. Limiting a movie's soundtrack to music that existed at the time it's set is one approach, but it isn't the only approach. If the filmmaker wants to cut through the distance a period setting creates, they might use modern music to make the viewer feel a greater connection to the characters in the story.
Embrace Anachronisms, You Can't Escape Them
This is the reason Baz Luhrman used hip-hop in The Great Gatsby (in fact, No Church In the Wild also appears on that movie's soundtrack). When young people in 2013 heard big band music, they associated it with the music their grandparents (or great-grandparents) listened to. But when they heard tracks by Lana Del Rey, Beyonce, Florence + The Machine, Kanye, and Jay-Z, the Gatsby’s parties felt current and exciting. Luhrman repeated this trick in Elvis with a Doja Cat track. Music is a shortcut to mood, and modern music has to cross fewer contextual obstacles to get us there. We don't need to know what was going on in 1920s New England to understand the meaning of Del Rey’s Young and Beautiful, and that brings us into the emotions of the characters.
The Gladiator 2 trailer is attempting to capture the excitement of gladiatorial battles by using hip-hop, the genre that dominates workout and pump-up playlists thanks to its hard-charging beats and percussive vocals. And this particular hip-hop song ties specifically into the movie's themes of revolt against royalty, as the chorus questions the power of kings in the face of those who reject their rule. Jay-Z's verse includes the line, "Tears on the mausoleum floor / Blood stains the Coliseum doors." The music isn't a chronological fit, but, thematically, it's hand-in-glove. You can dispute the trailer's effectiveness, but it's not an error, it's a strategy.
Using hip-hop to soundtrack scenes set long before the genre was even in its infancy is an obvious example of musical anachronism, but period pieces are almost always engaging in some level of anachronism, using instruments or musical forms that didn't emerge for centuries after they were set. I've seen others make the point that the original film's score was just as anachronistic. For a movie set in Ancient Rome, orchestral music is anachronistic, too. The first orchestra with instruments wasn't formed until around 1600, so that music is the "wrong" choice by, give or take, a millennia. Were these commenters expecting the trailer to use music from Ancient Roman times?
Ridley Scott cares more about making entertaining movies than about historical accuracy, wh🌱ich is apparent from his body of work. And he should. Excessive fealty to historical accuracy makes fꦿor good textbooks, not good art.
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Theaters and movie studios could implement 🐟a few small tweaks to jumpstart the slow 2024 box office.