Why Historians Will Be Agog Over ‘Gladiator II’

Fact and Fiction in Gladiator II: Those Who Are About to Lie Salute You

Remember when Ridley Scott’s 2023 biopic Napoleon set off a firestorm among finicky French historians? How shocked, shocked they were by the film’s factual inaccuracies (zut alors, Bonaparte never led the charge at Waterloo!). Well, it looks like the 86-year-old Oscar-winning director is at it again (see page 56), only this time it’s scholars of ancient Rome who’ll be storming Scott Free Productions. Although Gladiator II has been warmly received at early screenings, the 150-minute movie, which opens Nov. 22, is clearly chock-full of historical whoppers — like that scene in which a flooded Colosseum is filled with sharks. “Total Hollywood bullshit,” snipes Dr. Shadi Bartsch, a classics professor at the University of Chicago who has degrees from Princeton, Harvard and UC Berkeley and has written several books about ancient Rome. “I don’tthink Romans knew what a shark was” (though naval battles were held in the arena, she notes). The scene with rhinos charging into the Colosseum is sort of true — “Martial wrote a poem in 80 A.D. about a rhinoceros tossing a bull up to the sky,” Bartsch says — but not the two-horn breed shown in the film, only the one-horn type, and there’s no evidence that gladiators actually rode them, as they do in Scott’s movie. One of the most eyebrow-raising anachronisms involves the scene in which a Roman noble is shown sipping tea in a cafe while reading the morning newspaper … 1,200 years before the invention of the printing press. “They did have daily news — Acta Diuma — but it was carved and placed at certain locations,” says Bartsch. “You had to go to it, you couldn’t hold it at a cafe. Also, they didn’t have cafes!” As far as Scott is concerned, historical nitpicking didn’t bother him with Napoleon, and it doesn’t bother him now. “By the time you get to 2024,” he admits, “it’s all speculation.” — Jordan Hoffman

South Pole Doc Uses AI to Bring Explorers Back to Life

More than a century ago, legendary polar explorer Ernest Shackleton understood the internet-age principle of “pics or it didn’t happen.” Endurance, the new Nat Geo doc by Academy Award-winning husband-and-wife filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Free Solo, The Rescue), showcases stunning film footage that Shackleton’s men took during his 1907 expedition to Antarctica — including shots of his vessel being crushed by ice and leaving 28 men stranded at the bottom of the world. Not surprisingly, there were no photos taken during Shackleton’s 800-mile lifeboat journey across the South Seas to seek help. To depict that harrowing part of the documentary, the filmmakers relied on a combination of re-creations — filmed with actors in Iceland and Los Angeles — and artificial intelligence. Using state-of-the-art software to synthesize audio recordings of the survivors, long-dead crewmembers posthumously “read” their diary entries aloud. Given the controversy stirred using AI to bring Anthony Bourdain back from the dead in 2021’s Roadrunner, Chin and Vasarhelyi were taking some risks. But, like Shackleton, they are explorers in their own right. “It’s a great tool, [but] you have to be considered and mindful and ethical about how you use it,” says Vasarhelyi.

How Star Trek’s Jess Bush Became a Bee Actress

On Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Jess Bush plays Nurse Chapel. Here on 21st century Earth, though, the 32-year-old Australian moonlights as an artist — known as ONEJESSA — and her latest exhibit is creating quite the buzz in New York. Bush has entombed 1,000 dead bees in orbs of resin and strung them together in a floating sculpture hanging in the Glass Atrium lobby of Manhattan West, the new development on Ninth Avenue and 32nd Street. “The inspiration was my own sense of wonder and gratitude for Earth’s beauty,” she says. As for where she got her hands on 1,000 dead bees: “Unfortunately, it wasn’t that hard. I have a few beekeepers in Australia that I visit, and I pick up dead bees from the grass around the hive.” THR got an early look at the exhibit, which opened to the public Oct. 30, and can report that it’s definitely a honey

This story appeared in the Oct. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.