Ridley Scott“Gladiator II” is full of memorable action scenes, from a bloody showdown with CGI baboons to Paul Mescal outwit a charging rhinoceros in the Roman Colosseum. But one sequence that’s sure to leave audiences with the most questions is a pretty insane set piece where the Colosseum is filled with water and sharks. The gladiators enter the arena on a boat as a mock naval battle is staged, much to the delight of the sadistic emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger).

But was the Colosseum actually flooded with water and sharks in real life? It’s a question that’s justified because Scott often plays fast and loose with the story. For example, “Gladiator II” has a character reading a newspaper 1,200 years before the invention of the printing press. And don’t get me started on Scott’s “Napoleon,” which was so full of historical inaccuracies that French historians snapped the director and said he “spat in the face of Frenchmen.”

When it comes to the naval battle of the Colosseum in “Gladiator II,” Scott surprisingly doesn’t stray too far from history. A form of ancient Roman theater was called “naumachia”, where sea battles were staged for entertainment either in pools where battles had already taken place or in flooded amphitheatres. Prisoners or POWs would face soldiers until one side was the winner.

The first naumachia recorded dates back to 46 BC. and were approved by Julius Caesar, and some of them were eventually staged in the Colosseum. The Roman emperor Domitian is believed to have instigated a naval battle in the Colosseum in AD 85, for example. “Gladiator II” naumachia raises the stakes by adding sharks, though it’s unlikely to have happened in real life.

Chris Epplett, a Greek and Roman history professor at the University of Lethbridge, told Vulture that he is not aware that sharks were ever introduced into the Colosseum, although “there was a period when they could have flooded the floor of the arena. There was basically a period of, I think, 10 to 20 years before they put in the whole basement, when they could have flooded the floor and had displays of marine animals and stuff.

To talk to Amount at the “Alien: Romulus” premiere earlier this year, Scott made sense of the sharks by saying, “It’s easy. Someone said, ‘How do you get sharks in the Coliseum?’ I said, ‘You can build the Coliseum – how stupid are you?’ I mean, you catch some sharks and lob them in. They could do that.”

“Gladiator II” is now playing in theaters nationwide from Paramount Pictures.