Long before “thinking about the Roman empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way into becoming that year’s second-highest-grossing film, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as—I’m just guessing here—your dad’s favorite movie of all time. “Are you not entertained?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus goaded the crowd in a memorably rousing scene. We really were: Here was an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, via visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.

For Gladiator II, now in theaters, Scott has somehow taken it a step further. The sequel has twice as many heroes to root for and twice as many emperors to root against, plus a wild card in the form of Denzel Washington’s conniving arms dealer, Macrinus. In lieu of tigers, battles in the arena now involve a menagerie of baboons, sharks, and a rhino. Even the opening credits have been designed to excite the audience: Key scenes from the previous film are animated in a painterly sequence, which lands on a title card that stylizes the sequel’s name as, gloriously, GLADIIATOR. It’s so grandiose, the audience at my screening started applauding before a single fight had begun.

[Read: Are we having too much fun?]

Set 16 years after the events of Gladiator, the sequel follows Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role). Lucilla secretly sent the young Lucius away to the kingdom of Numidia for his protection after Maximus’s death. In the years since, a lot has happened, which we learn through overly ornate flashbacks and exposition. Lucius has come to resent his homeland and his mother, given their time apart. That resentment grows into rage after Roman forces, led by Lucilla’s new husband, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), conquer Numidia in an opening battle that leads to Lucius’s wife’s death. In Rome, meanwhile, a pair of snotty brothers named Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) have become co-emperors. Their reckless leadership has inspired a resistance led by Lucilla and Acacius, and turned the city into fertile ground for the rise of opportunistic power players such as Macrinus.

The plot, packed with so many shadowy conspiracies and cunning characters, is far less straightforward than the one in Gladiator, to its detriment. But amid the bloat, Scott homes in on how the cycle of ambition and retribution can be hard to break. Bloodshed is the cause and effect of every twist in the story, the reason behind Rome’s tumult and the apparent solution to its woes. Violence demands the spotlight, and Gladiator II draws tension from the fact that many of its characters can’t escape their attraction to brutality. In Scott’s hands, ancient Rome has never been more ruthless—or more exhilarating to watch.

The director is a master at pulling elegance out of rough-and-tumble set pieces. During the assault on Lucius’s home, embers swirl like snow, flecks of water and mud smack into the camera lens, and every strike of a sword or blow of a fist lands with primal intensity. Inside the Colosseum, despite the noticeably heavy use of CGI, Scott finds striking images in the chaos: A pool of blood blossoms underwater. An arrow zips across the field. A gladiator tosses sand into the air. These shots are mesmerizing for the viewer, and convey the strange allure of battle for the combatants themselves.

These energetic fight scenes are matched by a collection of flashy performances, with those playing the villains stealing the show. Mescal and Pascal embody their roles’ gravitas and become almost feral when they’re forced into the Colosseum. But Quinn and Hechinger have much more fun leaning into their characters’ boyish petulance, echoing Joaquin Phoenix’s work as the man-child emperor, Commodus, from Gladiator. Washington, however, runs away with the movie: Armed with a Cheshire-cat grin, heaps of jewelry, and seemingly limitless glasses of wine, Macrinus toys with Rome like it’s a massive chessboard full of pawns, and the actor embraces the script’s numerous swerves. He imbues the character with an infectious glee in every scene, whether he’s cheering on the men cutting one another down inside the arena or quietly attempting to manipulate Lucius into doing his bidding.

For all the fun it’s having, Gladiator II does require a working knowledge of its predecessor’s story to understand the stakes, which also means it magnifies the original film’s flaws. The characters are more thinly drawn, with shallow motivations in spite of the plot’s contrivances. The dialogue is more stilted, packed with pat observations about the “dream of Rome” in the face of an empire that repeatedly fails to learn its lesson. And the ending puts forth the vague notion that Rome’s future relies on unifying its people—an earnest sentiment, maybe, but a rather dull conclusion to reach after two hours of savagery.

Then again, Gladiator II doesn’t claim to offer anything more than pure spectacle. The finale gestures at the idea that hope is its own form of power, but even Lucius admits to its limits as a peacekeeping force. “You look to me to speak,” Lucius says as he addresses opposing armies about to fight. “I know not what to say.” Maybe Macrinus, who believes that Rome is doomed to brutality and bloodshed, has a point when he asserts that violence is “the universal language.” After all, to borrow a revered gladiator’s words, it’s undeniably entertaining.

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J.Crew has 2.7 million followers on Instagram, and more than 300,000 on X. But earlier this fall, it announced that it was trying to reach prospective customers the old-fashioned way: by reviving its print catalog. In 2024, everyone shops online. But in recent years, some retailers have returned to the catalog as a way to attempt to grab a bit more of shoppers’ coveted attention. People can and do scroll past the endless stream of marketing emails and digital ads on their phone. But completely ignoring a catalog that appears on your stoop or in your mailbox is tougher. Simply put, you have to pick it up, even if you are planning to throw it in the recycling bin—and brands hope that you might flip through some glossy photos along the way.

Catalogs’ heyday came before the financial crisis—but they never fully went away, and billions have been sent to American consumers every year since. The catalogs of 2024, in part a nostalgia play for those who grew up with the trend, are generally sent to targeted lists of customers who have either shopped with a brand in the past or are deemed plausible future buyers. Some retailers are maintaining what they’ve always done: Neiman Marcus, for example, continues to send a catalog, even as some of its peers have stopped. Both traditional and digital-first companies use catalogs: Amazon has issued a toy catalog since 2018. Brands have started playing with the format too, taking the concept beyond a straightforward list of products: Patagonia puts out a catalog that it calls a “bona fide journal,” featuring “stories and photographs” from contributors. Many of these catalogs don’t even include information about pricing; shoppers have to go to the website for that.

Amanda Mull, writing in The Atlantic in early 2020, foretold a new golden era of catalogs—brands at the time were becoming “more desperate to find ways to sell their stuff without tithing to the tech behemoths.” Since then, the pandemic has only turbocharged consumers’ feelings of overwhelm with online shopping. Immediate purchase is not necessarily the goal; these catalogs are aiming to build a relationship that might lead to future orders, Jonathan Zhang, a marketing professor at Colorado State University, told me. The return on investment for companies is pretty good, Zhang has found, especially because more sophisticated targeting and measurement means that brands aren’t spending time appealing to people who would never be interested (this also means that less paper is wasted than in the free-for-all mailer days, he noted).

With catalogs, brands are supplementing, not replacing, e-commerce: Zhang’s experiments with an e-commerce retailer found that over a period of six months starting in late 2020, people who received both catalogs and marketing emails from a retailer made 24 percent more purchases than those who received only the emails. A spokesperson for J.Crew told me that following the catalog relaunch, the brand saw a nearly 20 percent rise in reactivated customers, adding that this fall, 11 percent more consumers had a positive impression of the J.Crew brand compared with last year. E-commerce is the undeniable center of shopping in 2024, so brands are finding creative ways to use in-person methods to build on its success—including, as I’ve written, reimagining the brick-and-mortar store.

A well-designed catalog may appeal to some of the same sensory instincts that enchant die-hard in-person shoppers. Catalogs work especially well for certain types of products: Zhang said that “hedonic” categories of goods—luxury clothing, perfumes, vacation packages, chocolate—are some of the best fits for stories and photos in a print format. (I smile when I think of Elaine taking this type of luxury marketing to parody levels in her stint running a catalog on Seinfeld.) Zhang himself has been wooed by such a campaign: Around February of this year, he received a mailer from a cruise company (one he had never interacted with in the past). He spent a few minutes flipping through. In August, when he started thinking about planning a winter vacation for his family, he remembered the catalog and visited the company’s website. “That few minutes was long enough for me to kind of encode this information in my memory,” he said. He decided to book a trip.

The catalog has moved forward in fits and starts: 30 years ago, they were the central way to market a product directly to consumers. Then the pendulum swung hard toward online ads. Now we may start to see more of a balance between the two. Some of us would rather turn away from advertising altogether. But if brands are going to find us anyway, print catalogs could add a little more texture to the experience of commerce.

Related:

Why the Restoration Hardware catalog won’t die Stores are small now.

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A New York judge said that he would indefinitely postpone sentencing in the hush-money criminal case against President-Elect Donald Trump. Former Representative Matt Gaetz said that he will not return to Congress next year but will continue to work with the next Trump administration. Democratic Senator Bob Casey conceded the closely watched Pennsylvania Senate race to Dave McCormick last night.

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The Books Briefing: Cher’s memoir is a valuable document of a young girl thrust into the adult world, Emma Sarappo writes. Atlantic Intelligence: Alex Reisner’s recent investigation for The Atlantic found that dialogue from tens of thousands of movies and TV shows has been harvested—without permission—by big tech companies, Damon Beres writes.

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Evening Read

Paramount Pictures

Gladiator II Is More Than Just a Spectacle

By Shirley Li

Long before “thinking about the Roman empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way into becoming that year’s second-highest-grossing film, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as—I’m just guessing here—your dad’s favorite movie of all time. “Are you not entertained?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus goaded the crowd in a memorably rousing scene. We really were: Here was an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, via visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.

For Gladiator II, now in theaters, Scott has somehow taken it a step further.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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