The first Gladiator film changed film music, completely. It was the first time a real “prestige” film had been scored that way – you could write a book about its influence, all the reasons why nothing was the same again afterwards – but that’s for another time. Over two decades later, the sequel – the imaginatively-titled Gladiator II, so trite a title I always had to check when I read anything about it that it wasn’t a joke – has been released to a generally muted response, absent the litany of great movie stars who adorned the first one (for understandable reasons – either their characters having died, or they themselves having died) but Ridley Scott being in the saddle for a production like this at the age of 87 is a pretty remarkable feat, whatever else you say about it. Hans Zimmer scored the director’s three movies after Gladiator and then they never worked together again for some reason so it wasn’t a great surprise that he didn’t return to do this, his place taken instead by Harry Gregson-Williams, who has written most of the best music for Scott’s films post-Zimmer.

It’s always difficult for a composer to follow in another’s footsteps when those footsteps are as renowned as Zimmer’s and Gregson-Williams has done a decent enough job. The score is built on some DNA from the original – themes here and there, sounds and textures (including the voice of Lisa Gerrard) – but is its own thing. I don’t think the more “ethereal” sections of it work quite as well as Zimmer’s did – here we often hear a male vocal providing the spiritualism, but it sounds a bit more perfunctory to me – where the composer does more come into his own is in the action material, of which there is no shortage. A couple of big differences between this action music and the original’s – positively, the orchestra sounds like an orchestra this time round, and you can never beat the crisp sharpness of that purer sound, and the integration of ancient instruments means it packs quite a punch at times – but the sad thing is that it just isn’t anywhere near as memorable. I’ve been listening to music by this composer for thirty years and still don’t really know what makes him him – I’ve loved some of his music in that time, some has not been to my taste – here he’s ticking all the right boxes, but as soon as it’s finished it’s hard to think of much to say beyond “that was decent” – I doubt Zimmer was thinking “I’m going to change film music forever” with the first one, but he was thinking of doing something new and different and memorable which is always much harder on a sequel. Many of the times the score really soars – such as the fantastic “Strength and Honour” – are when Gregson-Williams directly builds on Zimmer’s music. It’s all fine, it’s obvious a load of very hard work went into creating it, it’s just missing that X-factor (or Z-factor, perhaps).

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