300: Rise of an Empire: Film Review

by Todd McCarthy

The Bottom Line

Here's blood in your eye.

Opens

March 5 (France), March 7 (U.S.) (Warner Bros.)

Cast

Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Lena Heady, Hans Matheson, Callan Mulvey, Rodrigo Santoro, Jack O'Connell,

Eva Green and Sullivan Stapleton star in director Noam Murro's sequel to the 2007 film.

Playing the most vicious, and certainly sexiest, naval commander ever to ride the waves of the Aegean, Eva Green has one for-the-ages scene in 300: Rise of an Empire, in which she decapitates an adversary with two deft sword strokes, then, holding his head by the hair, kisses him on the mouth with pointedly derisive hunger. Given his condition, the man does not respond but, given the bestower, it wouldn't have been surprising if he had, just a bit.

Other than for the pleasure watching Green trying to conquer ancient Greece dressed as a distant forebear of Catwoman, more is less and a little late in this long-aborning sequel to the 2007 bloodbath that was stylistically extreme and just different enough from anything else in its field to become an international action sensation. Centering on mostly aquatic battles that historically took place simultaneously to the Battle of Thermopylae so fancifully depicted in the earlier film, this follow-up slavishly adheres to the graphic comics-meet-videogames look of the original. It would be a mild surprise if box-office results equaled those of the original, which came to $456 million worldwide (slightly more from foreign than domestic tills), but most fans will still probably want to check it out.

Although Gerard Butler's star has significantly fallen due to the 17 mediocre films he's made since 300, it must be admitted that he's missed here; his replacement at the top of the sequel's cast, Australian actor Sullivan Stapleton, just can't bellow on a par with Butler, whose cocky, over-the-top abandon and staunch physical presence leave big sandals to fill. Visually, there was clearly a mandate to stick close to the original's look. All the same, it's disappointing that, after all the years, no effort has been made to augment or riff on the style at all; in fact, the new film is more monochromatic and duller in appearance, lacking the bold reds and rich earth tones that are glimpsed here in brief visits to Sparta and the events at Thermopylae.

Original director Zack Snyder, who moved on to the Superman franchise at Warner Bros., turned the directing reins over to Israeli commercials ace Noam Murro, whose previous feature was the 2008 independent Smart People. However, Snyder stayed around to co-produce and adapt Frank Miller's graphic novel Xerxes along with returning co-scripter Kurt Johnstad. Other top creative personnel are different, which hasn't prevented the sequel from sporting the same bombastic, slo-mo, blood-in-your-face aesthetic.

Narrated by Lena Heady's Spartan Queen Gorgo, Rise looks at the Persian invasion of Greece, in the late summer of 480 BC, from a different angle than did the land-based 300, concentrating on the purported 1000-ship fleet that King Xerxes expected would have an easy time conquering the disunified Greeks. It also provides some nifty illustrated backstory tidbits; that the arrow that killed Persian King Darius was fired by Themistokles (Stapleton), that Artemisia (Green) is a Greek who turned on her own people for what they did to her and her family, and that Xerxes (the returning Rodrigo Santoro), in a vividly illustrated sequence, had himself transformed from man to golden god (who resembles a walking advertisement for a Beverly Hills jewelry store) so he could exact revenge for his father's death by conquering the Greeks once and for all.

So while Spartan King Leonidas keeps Xerxes occupied at the “hot gates,” the non-aristocratic soldier-politician Themistokles dares to engage the mighty Persian navy with a far smaller force, but with much shrewdness. Although he's managed to patch together a coalition of Greek states to try to ward off the Asians's assault, his repeated attempts to persuade Sparta to join in are rebuffed by Gorgo, who insists that her city-state does not share the Athenian dream of a united Greece.

But in 300—or is it 600 now?--2500-year-old geo-politics take a back seat to ranting speeches, ripped torsos, manly-manness and spurting, spilling and splashing blood, which is often aimed strategically at the viewer for maximum 3D effect. When Greeks wade into battle jumping from ship to ship, the film slips way over into video game mode as Themistokles, the father-son team of Scyllias and Calisto (Callan Mulvey and Jack O'Connell) and others implausibly cut through hordes of opponents with little trouble.

For much of the time, the Greeks have luck on their side and director Murro and his team clearly visualize how low clouds and fog hide the straits into which the home team induces the invaders to unwittingly enter. They also show how the outnumbered locals effectively use a circling strategy to disrupt the Persians's attack mode, sending many to a watery grave.

To be an unsuccessful subordinate to Artemisia is not an enviable thing; her punishments, as we've seen, are most creative. But as her opponents's successes mount, the imperious warrior develops an admiration—and maybe something more—for Themistokles's skills. Implausibly, he accepts her invitation for a shipboard summit, at which their intense enmity crosses the line into craven lust, resulting in a contest of rough and varied sex that leaves them both with a hightened sense of competitiveness. That she doesn't kill him afterward like a praying mantis seems entirely out of character.

Although Themistokles's inspirational speech to his dwindling supply of troops is nowhere near as rousing as Leonidas's was before the Spartans's last stand in 300, the result in the Straits of Salamins is quite the opposite. In their final armed face-off, Artemisia takes the opportunity to insult Themistokles's lovemaking skills, but the man has the last laugh.

If Rise proves to be anywhere near as successful as its progenitor, one or perhaps two films could follow that would be set in the following year, 479 BC, when the united Greeks, this time with Spartan help, put an end once and for all to Persian dreams of local conquest with same-day land and sea victories at Plataea and Mycale, respectively.

More than in the original, it's often easy to tell where the small foreground sets occupied by the actors end and the digitally created backgrounds begin. The score by Junkie XL is predictably orotund, although some unusual and arresting moments emerge here and there.

Variety Film Review: ’300: Rise of an Empire’

Eva Green commands the screen — and a large Persian naval fleet — in the highly entertaining not-quite sequel to Zack Snyder's "300."

Few recent tentpoles have lent themselves less naturally to a sequel than Zack Snyder’s “300,” a movie in which nearly all the major characters died, while a brief coda showed a unified Greek army about to lay waste to the remnants of Persia. But Snyder and co-writer Kurt Johnstad handily surmount that problem in “300: Rise of an Empire,” which offers a “meanwhile, back in Athens” story to complement the Spartan narrative of the first film, along with an even higher quotient of impaled torsos, severed limbs and rippling Mediterranean musculature. Anchored by Eva Green’s fearsome performance as a Persian naval commander whose vengeful bloodlust makes glowering King Xerxes seem a mere poseur, this highly entertaining time-filler lacks the mythic resonances that made “300” feel like an instant classic, but works surprisingly well on its own terms. Arriving in theaters on the box office fumes of “The Legend of Hercules” and “Pompeii,” it should prove to be the ancient epic auds have been waiting for.

If “300” was largely a boys-only affair, “Rise of an Empire” very much belongs to the women — specifically one woman named Artemisia (Green), who sports a warrior’s stoic countenance and the blazing azure stare of a femme very fatale. As a young girl, we learn, the Greek-born Artemisia watched helplessly as her entire village (including her parents) was slaughtered by other invading Greeks, earning her a healthy distrust of her own people. Spared but sold into slavery, she was rescued by the Persian King Darius (Igal Naor), father of Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who raised her as a kind of surrogate daughter and stoked her warrior ethos. And while Xerxes battles things out with the good King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, seen in recycled footage from the first film) on land, it is Artemisia who leads Persia’s charge against Greece by sea.

She’s a ferocious presence, but well matched by Sparta’s own Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey, reprising her “300” role), who has less screen time but also serves as the movie’s narrator, holding forth on the long and bloody backstory of the Greco-Persian wars as she guides a warship toward a looming battle. (Both “300” films have made effective use of a slightly formal, literary voiceover to evoke the oral tradition of Greek epic poetry.) Fittingly regal and stern, Gorgo recounts the first clash of these two great armies, a decade earlier at the town of Marathon, which plays out in flashback as the first of the movie’s extravagant battle scenes. The outnumbered Greeks engage the weary Persians before they have even managed to row their boats ashore, while the valiant Gen. Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) hurls the fateful spear that deals King Darius a mortal blow. We learn, too, of the strange dark magic by which Xerxes evolved from his once-human form into his more familiar appearance: that of an 8-foot-tall Grace Jones after a rough night at a piercing parlor.

All this is neatly dispensed in the first 30 minutes or so, leaving the rest of the running time for the kind of elaborately choreographed combat that was “300’s” stock-in-trade, here with the violent storm waters of Aegean substituted for the narrow mountain passes of Thermopylae. Though Snyder has stayed on as writer and producer, “Rise of an Empire” was directed by Noam Murro, a veteran commercials director whose lone previous feature, the 2008 Dennis Quaid dramedy “Smart People,” offered no indication that he could handle a project of this size and scale. But Murro acquits himself more than well, borrowing a lot from Snyder’s playbook while managing to find his own way through the material.

Working with Australian d.p. Simon Duggan (“The Great Gatsby”), Murro re-creates the previous film’s distinctive, duochromatic palate (ochre for day, deep-blue for night), with the actors again performing against mostly digital sets — a look that may not be to the tastes of some analog cinema purists, but which comes as close as any movies have to a cinematic equivalent for the vibrant, active panels of the comicbook artist Frank Miller (whose work inspired both “300” films). Murro favors a somewhat faster, messier look than the first “300,” with a constantly tracking, swooping camera in lieu of Snyder’s more fixed, meticulously composed tableaux, and a minimum of the super slow-motion that gave “300’s” battle scenes their dreamy, ethereal air. And when it comes to blood, of which there will be plenty, Murro’s is darker, thicker and gloppier than Snyder’s bright-red pointillist splays.

“Rise of an Empire” never quite shakes the sense that we’re watching an undercard bout while Leonidas is off fighting for the title, and how could it not? Under Themistokles’ command, these Athenians are an altogether more civilized lot than their neighbors to the south, lacking the suicidal fire in their bellies that drove the Spartans to seek their so-called “beautiful deaths.” These farmers, poets and artists — heck, even Aeschylus himself (Hans Matheson) is among them — go more reluctantly to war, and Themistokles himself cuts a less iconic figure than mighty Leonidas. But when push comes to shove, they rise to the occasion, and the movie’s long, impressively sustained central naval engagement (modeled on the real-life Battle of Artemisium) is as exciting for its large-scale clashes of military might as for its minutiae of Greco-Persian battle strategy.

The images are duly spectacular, as Murro’s camera swoops and dives from every conceivable direction: Greek ships charging the Persian armada like so battering rams; mighty wooden vessels reduced to splinters by the jutting rocks of a narrow strait; nautical and human debris swiftly subsumed by the churning tempest. Yet not a bit of it is as startling as even a fleeting glimpse of Artemisia’s icily intent stare. Elsewhere, Murro and the writers fold in some compelling side business: As in “300,” there’s a focus on a pair of father and son soldiers, Scyllias and Calisto, the latter played with appealing humility by the rising young star Jack O’Connell (fresh off his bracing star turn in the IRA drama “71,” and soon to be back at sea in Angelina Jolie’s “Unbroken”).

Three visual effects houses and two vfxsupervisors share credit for the movie’s seamless integration of the real and the virtual. Also making a major contribution: the Dutch electronica composer Tom Holkenborg, aka Junkie XL, whose throbbing, muscular score seems to be echoing forth from some distant place in the cosmos.

’300: Rise of An Empire’ Review: More of the Same, But Slightly Less

That said, Murro hasn’t turned fans’ beloved “300” into some kind of solemn eulogy for antiquity’s lost soldiers; far from it. In fact, he matches Snyder’s sense of bloody camp blow for cringe-inducing blow, expanding the first film’s meat-and-potatoes combination of sex and violence into a full-blown smorgasboard, thanks to an ass-kicking centerpiece sex scene between Themistocles and Artemisia that’s sort of hilariously “empowering” as a portrait of two equals competing to show who possesses more testosterone.