A decade ago, I rewatched Gladiator in a freezing cold forward-operating base outside Mosul with Kurdish Peshmerga, cocooned in brightly-coloured blankets. When I complained that the sound wasn’t working on the small television, someone replied “Surely you must know every word?” and he was right: I did, and so did everyone else there. There are few modern films of which this could be said, and at times it seems Sir Ridley Scott made all of them. Gladiator alone is arguably the last of the mass market blockbusters to have achieved both critical acclaim and global cultural currency, a conscious homage to the golden era of Hollywood epics. From Bladerunner to Alien, Black Hawk Down and Kingdom of Heaven: Scott is a master of the genre movie, creating sumptuous film equivalents of what Graham Greene called “entertainments,” thrillers with an aesthetic or philosophical edge raising them far above the medium’s simple demands.
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