Episode Transcript
36 Overdraft (00:03)
Whatever everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Nerd German Report. I'm your host, Pauly, and joining me as always is Mr. Shows. Brian, we have been waiting for this moment for quite some time, Ever since it was announced and it was rumored, Brian, I was like, why? But they find it, like you said, Brian, you read a story that they said that they did it. What we thought could not be done from a movie that was already considered a classic
go ahead and do a sequel to that and make it Terminator 2 -esque, right? Then we get the trailer, Brian.
And Brian, I'll go back to the reference that I made to you Brian a long time ago, Somewhere in Time, Christopher Reeve and James Seymour. If you haven't seen the movie, go check it out. It's a love story, it's kind of weird in the sense of how it could occur, but it was interesting nonetheless. And just to spoil
He had to hypnotize himself into believing that he was in the past. And how he was taken out of that trance was when he was reminded of the time that he was in when he saw a penny buying. And it told him the year that he was in. Then it went back to where he was.
Brian, when I started hearing the music of this film, Brian, and this is prior to when we start, when I started watching the trailer, Brian, I was fine. I was like, okay, okay. And then the music hits Brian and I'm taken away. I went back to the first trailer, the gladiator trailer, Brian. I'm sure many people did as well. And there were people in the comments that wrote, we know why you're here.
The music that they chose to sort of end this trailer with Brian, it seems like it goes through some sort of process or that it has to go through this person who does this trailer and it has to throw in modern music into this somehow. And it ruined the experience and I'm sure ruined the experience for everyone who watched it, Brian. It's
That's what everybody's been talking about as of late. Your thoughts, Brian, on once you saw it, Brian, and did you have the same reaction? Yes. I think my problems with the trailer start before Church in the Wild makes an appearance, the Kanye West, Jay -Z track that everyone's talking about.
It
I'm a little bit of a geek for trailers and trailer music. that's your, you're, you're kind of getting into a little bit of my wheelhouse here. I generally have found it disappointing and annoying that the, the chic thing to do with most trailers these days is to do a cover of a song, you know, as opposed to finding actual score either that sets the mood.
for the type of movie and the type of story you want to tell. So for example, to your point, the original teaser, now this is three minutes worth of a teaser, but the original teaser for the Russell Crowe Gladiator is only about 90 seconds. And they use the, one of the great scores of all time, which is the opening theme from Conan the Barbarian. And it's been edited and chopped up a little bit. If you've ever seen the opening credits of Conan the Barbarian, that's the song that plays as
The sword is being forged, Conan's father's sword. And it lets you know immediately that that movie is serious. It lets you know that Gladiator One is serious, it's relentless, it's dark, it's intense, and that's the point of the music. But this has become, to your point, very formulaic. You often see a little bit of instrumental, and then you pick your cover. And that's kind of what most trailers do these days. I don't really know why. There's every once in a while that it works.
If you want to see an example of a trailer where it works pretty well recently, it's actually there's a trailer for the wild robot, which is an animated movie of a kid's classic. And the first trailer uses a remix of Louis Armstrong's, a wonderful world, but digitized into almost like a robot's voice. It actually is a beautiful trailer. think that movie for kids and families is going to be great. That's an example of where it can work. But what I don't understand is gladiator one, not only is a best picture winner,
It's an award nominated award winning score. You have the music from Hans Zimmer sitting right there. Don't you want to echo and make people recall the themes and the greatness of the first film by using his music in the second trailer? It's the easiest thing you could possibly do. And they choose not to do it. Right, but they...
go out of their way, not necessarily to sort of shoot the film similarly, but Brian, but a lot of the shots are very similar. Why not use some of the same music you used before to take us back to that time? And if there were to be a surprise music, the new leads own music, right? In the film. But you gotta do this, yo? Like what? Like really?
Is there, is there a guy that has it that these, that they call for these music for, for, these movies? Yeah. So the short answer is yes. There are companies that do nothing but this and there are production companies that write music and remix music that is precisely for this reason. Some of it's on Spotify these days. Some of it's on YouTube. but it's an interesting comparison. We've been talking about this a lot with Superman of this idea of for modern Superman, James Gunn, Superman.
We don't want to hear the John Williams score but the reason for that is because that movie is trying to chart a new course a new iteration of the character this movie Needs to bring you back to the spirit of the original there. would argue the opposite is true. You should be using Hans Zimmer's themes to make people remember what they loved about part of what they loved about the first one So I think yes the soundtrack to me was a fail
from the very beginning. And it was very disappointing to hear that choice. However, I was overall disappointed. And the other thing that I would say, and I don't know what your thoughts were, I went back and when I watched that first Gladiator trailer, it's very focused. You know exactly what that movie is trying to tell you, right? The tagline, right? The general who became a slave, who became a Gladiator, who defied an empire.
And then the only line I think you hear Russell Crowe speak in the trailer is, this life or the next, I will have my vengeance. Perfect. Like, sleek. Like, it looks cool. And you're like, this is a very, very focused revenge story, you know, involving loss and really cool visuals. I found myself kind of confused by this trailer. There was a lot going on. And a lot of visuals that looked really cool, as I expect Ridley Scott epics to look.
But it did not seem to me nearly as focused in terms of its purpose as I hoped it would be for the sun. Forced people to sort of ask more questions than.
sort of, I guess, wait on this movie. Because my wife was already telling me what this movie's about. And she just saw the trailer, like, whose son is this guy? You know what saying? Whose father was Lucius, you know? listen. By the way, and I think your wife is spot on, I was surprised there was no fade cut of the kid from the first one into Paul Mescal to really remind people, this is who you're dealing
Cause that's like a super well known kid. Yeah. You could have used the same joint. Like, are we going back to flashbacks? Really? Like I would have actually had the face of the kid from the first one and actually just faded it into Mescal and then people would immediately know it's same guy. Great. Now I know what I'm dealing with. Yeah. Yeah. I don't blame her. think there's a lot of people who are still confused as to who Paul Mescal is actually playing. I have a lot of concern Brian that this movie may.
have a lot of executives.
I know Ridley Scott does his movies the way he wants to do it, but this to me with the music choice sort of tells me that this isn't Ridley Scott's movie.
more say than just Ridley Scott's for this movie, you know? Could be. I mean, I think also Ridley Scott is one of, he's a, he, you know, we criticize Zack Snyder for director's cuts and Ridley Scott is another one of these directors that likes to tinker and often edits and re -edits and re -does his movies. And sometimes that works really well and sometimes it doesn't. You know, as we said, like Kingdom of Heaven is the one I point to where that's a very average theatrical cut, but the director's cut is incredibly good and in almost completely different film.
This movie to me almost has a feel of going in that direction. Or even like the theatrical cut of Kingdom of Heaven, there's some spectacular set pieces. But the movie's so chopped up in the theater, it kind of doesn't make any sense. I hope it isn't the case though, Ryan. It feels like there's a lot going on, right? There's like really cool water scenes in the galley, then there's like this kind of seum stuff. And then I gotta throw this out there, because I text you do this.
Training day, ancient Rome. don't know that that's what we're going for, but there was a lot of Denzel doing his Alonzo Harris. Right. That's what it felt like. Am I wrong? Like, is that what he was doing? can go and do a montage of that same shot for that was an American gangster when he was saying soul brother. Yeah. He does that with the last 10 times in his career. I was
Okay, so he's just kind of going to be Denzel, I guess, but wearing a toga. Yeah. I don't know that that was what I thought. I hope that's not the case. But that's what the trailer pitched. The trailer kind of made it clear to me that they don't trust Mescal to headline the movie because there's a lot of Denzel. The trailer is really Denzel centric, even though Mescal is the lead. the original trailer had other famous actors in the movie,
There was no question from the get -go Russell Crowe was a star. Now Russell Crowe already was a major star by the time Gladiator came out. I mean, he had been nominated for an Oscar in the insider. so he was already hot, but it was interesting to me that they basically were like, Hey, did you know Denzel's in our movie? Hey, did you know Denzel's in our movie? That was seemed to be a lot of the point of this trailer. And I don't know that that was the best decision. Yeah.
He does look cool. mean, Denzel is always, you know, character. You want to see how different he plays his character or how cool he plays his character. But yeah, I'm a bit concerned, that this movie and I live up to what we hope it can be in terms of story. I'm not too concerned with set pieces, Brian. I know he's good with that. Yeah. And the shots we get of like the Coliseum with the beasts and
There's one of the Coliseum flooded, I think, with crocodiles in I mean, there's some crazy stuff where you're like, okay, that's going to look very cool because that's really Scott and he's in his bag. But will it make sense when I'm watching it? I don't know. Here's the thing, Brian. It's like I almost feel like we're watching a redo or a remake of this gladiator almost.
But like riffs on the characters, right? Cause it's like the Oliver Reed character is Denzel, right? Oliver Reed in the first one was the former gladiator who retired and won his freedom. And right. That's clearly Denzel. He's the retired gladiator. then it's also like, you know, it was almost like someone said, you know, it'd be better than one Commodus. What if we had two Commoduses? Cause there's two crazy looking weirdo albino emperors going on in this. Right? And that's kind of what they have. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why I was like,
So we're gonna get someone we really don't care about in these two guys, right? They're just gonna be the evil guys. You know, comedy is sort of like...
King Phoenix killed that road man. Unbelievable.
I make fun of that, that, he sleeps so well cause he's So the whole point of the end of the first one in theory is that Russell Crowe's victory over commonists paves the way for Rome to go back to being a Republic. That's the whole point of the ending. If we are now 20 years later and we've basically backpedaled fully.
into the tyranny of these two emperors and Mescal effectively has to do what Russell Crowe did to upend the empire again. Then this movie is challenged with making us believe why that's necessary. Like how did we get there? Cause the whole point of the first one was that we were going to go in this new, more hopeful, more democratic direction. And the trailer makes clear that's not what happened. So how, how did that get subverted? Well, he's going to be fighting his, the general, the new general, right?
I, are you sure that's the villain? Because there's clearly a scene at the very end of that trailer where it looks like he's about to cut his head off. And I'm like, I don't know. I feel like Pedro Pascal is being dangled to us as the main villain and maybe he's not. Cause they showed an awful lot of that. What would be the final battle, right? Of them fighting in the trailer. If so, that's a lot of giveaway. Yeah. It's concerning Brian. That's what it is. I'm with you. was like,
I had these individual flashes of like brilliance and I will absolutely go see it, but it felt like it felt like expensive train wreck more than expensive
Yeah, let us know in the comments section below what you guys think. I you've listened to many podcasters and other people react similarly to what they did with the Toreador for Gladiator 2, most notably the music choice. But are you concerned is the question of how good
Gladiator 2 can be. I just feel like we're not getting purely a really Scott film. getting, I feel like we're getting a studio film that won't, that will be more spectacle than story. I think that's a good summation. And if the studio put nearly $400 million into it, then they might be getting what they deserve if this thing doesn't turn out.
to the level we hope it came. Yeah, that is on the conversation below. What you guys think? And we'll see you next time on the NJ Report.
