Are you ready for tons blood, yelling, more physically fit men wearing practically nothing and enough slow-motion shots that almost give you enough time to get up and grab some more popcorn? Then you must be ready to see 300: Rise of an Empire. Where the first movie, 300, focused on the battle of King Leonidas and his force of 300 men who fought against King Xerxes and his Persian army. This new movie, which acts like a sequel/companion piece to the story we already know. While King Leonidas is off fighting in one part of Greece we now see what the other half was doing at the same time and after Leonidas sacrifice. Here we follow Greek General Themistocles who leads the charge against invading Persian forces led by mortal-turned-God King Xerxes and Artemisia, a vengeful commander of the Persian navy who will stop for nothing to destroy all the Greeks.
The new movie starts almost ten years before the first movie, where we meet our new cast of characters and grain some history of the Greek and Persian aggression towards one another. We meet Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) whose main goal is to unite Greece’s forces to stop the coming Persian army. As he tries to do this, King Leonidas takes his 300 men and goes off for their journey, which is the first flick. Now leaving Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) in charge of Sparta, Themistocles tries to enlist her army into his, she in her grief, refuses, leaving Themistocles and his army alone to face Xerxes’s war ships being lead by the blood-thirsty Artemisia (Eva Green) who is a legendary warrior in her own right.
So once you get the timing figured out, which isn’t presented in the best way, you start to see the pieces of the movie fall into place. Unlike the first movie, Zack Snyder is just producing and has some involvement with the screenplay, leaving the directing duties to Noam Murro, a relative newcomer to Hollywood, who now must make this movie stand apart from it’s predecessor while trying to make it his own.
This is where the movie doesn’t work. It’s way too much like the first one. You get that the filmmakers want to keep the films looking like each other to keep that in the same world feel, but this new movie just doesn’t look as polished and it relies way to heavy on using all the same tricks we’ve already seen. It never seems to break away from the original film. Which, honestly, gets old real fast. The slow-motion action shot. To say it was over used is an insult to the phrase, “over used”. In every fight scene this trick is used so much that it begins to slow down the movie. What once was a useful and creative way to show action and blood has become an annoying cliché that drags down a fight scene rather than making it better. Forgoing good fight chorography and style for a “cool” looking move isn’t making the movie better, just shows lazy filmmaking.
As does all the blood. I’m sure there was some real practical blood on set, there just has to be. But all the slow-motion CGI gushing blood that propels itself from the body about 5-8 feet at a time hitting everything in its wake, including the camera lens, leaving it dirty for the remainder of the scene. What could be a good-looking effect once or twice becomes a standard for the whole movie. Every single person who gets killed has this wasted effect of CGI blood. It just takes you out of what could have been a interesting fight, but your eye instead of focusing on the talent is too busy watching the lack luster, bad looking CGI blood coming at you because of some 3D gimmick. The first movie didn’t need to rely on these cheap tricks, so why should the sequel/prequel.
The “sets”, the look and the general over all vibe have the same appearance and appeal as the first movie. The color palette is once more high contrast and surreal. Focusing more on the actors than having a real set to interact with. Sometimes it looks really good and other times everyone on screen has that CGI green screen glow/halo around him or her. It doesn’t pull you out of the movie, but it is very noticeable.
The characters are interesting and you understand where each one is coming from and why they make the choices they do. Each actor does a really good job doing what he or she was asked to do. The lead Sullivan Stapleton is enjoyable, doesn’t have the quite the same bravado that Gerard Butler had, but he does a fine job being our hero. As does his warriors. We get to know handful and they are all very well acted and played their roles well. Seeing Lena Headey portraying the queen of Sparta once more is a nice treat and we get to see her shine more here. We get a backstory on the God King Xerxes, once again played by Rodrigo Santoro, and even his character gets filled out more. But who will stand apart and be remembered most from this fill is Eva Green in her portrayal of Artemisia.
Artemisia is by far the most fascinating character in the movie. In fact, there are certain times you wish the movie was all about her. She is amazing. Not only is she breathtakingly beautiful but also Eva Green has become quite a polished actress who should be getting more villainous roles. She is quite good in playing the bad girl. But the real showstoppers are her costumes. She has this balance of hard and soft in a way that forces men around her to recognize her as both a warrior and a woman. She alone is worth seeing the movie for.
At the end of the day the movie is fun with allot more positives than negatives. Is it as good as the first movie? No. Was this a needed film? No. Do you walk out of theater mad that you wasted your money? No. You feel pretty satisfied, if you’ve seen the trailer there’s really no mystery to what they movie is like, because you’ve already seen it. The real villain of the movie is the first film, because you continuously comparing it. Also doesn’t help that filmmakers made allot of bad film choices, which are being made from the start and never go away. If you can shut off that part of your brain for a while and just watch a really beautifully talented woman kick the snot out of shirtless dudes for 90 minutes then you’re good. And sometimes after a bad week, that’s all you need.