300: Rise of an Empire

Considering the success of the original 300, it was probably inevitable that they would try to cash in with some kind of sequel. The tricky thing about that is that almost all the characters from the original movie were dead, so a sequel would have to build up a new cast to work with. It took them seven years to get around to adapting the Battle of Salamis into a kind of sidequel, and while most of the characters are new, it follows the story of the Persian wars in the same continuity.

The great strength of 300 was how, narratively and emotionally, everything condensed down to a single battle with clearly-drawn lines and direct, easily comprehensible action. Even in a movie as wildly inaccurate as 300 became, it is easy to lay it out for someone unfamiliar with the history: Greeks go here, Persians there, fight. The subsequent military actions of the war, from the naval battles at Artemisium and Salamis to the big throwdown at Plataea, were far more complex, muddled, and sometimes indecisive. Laying all that out for a casual audience was going to be hard no matter how you did it.

Pretty much the only reason Rise of an Empire works is because they didn’t try, and just dove headfirst into the fantastical, hyper-exaggerated stylization of the first movie and went even harder with it. They try to build a mystique around the Athenian leader Themistocles, but despite a lot of myth-making (He did not, in fact, kill the Persian Emperor Darius at Marathon) they just can’t manage to make him very interesting. Portrayed by Aussie actor Sullivan Stapleton, Themistocles is reduced to a bearded stack of muscles who spouts painfully hackey pablum about freedom and glory against a backdrop of spraying CG blood.

The script is definitely a weak point in this movie, as while 300 was not exactly Shakespeare, it managed to carry the day with archetypical moments that went on to become iconic, all delivered by actors who were giving it everything they had. Here they try for the same kind of distilled approach, but they just can’t carry it off. The characters are flat and unremarkable, and none of the lines are quotable or even memorable. The lone exception among the mid-tier acting going on here is Eva Green, who just runs with the role of Artemisia, set up as the real villain of the piece. She acts like she knows exactly what kind of movie this is, and she stalks and prowls and kills her way through her scenes like she is having a grand time.

What saves this is the dedication to action that is completely unreal and yet also completely awesome. Once more the Greeks go into battle with nothing more than leather panties as armor, and have a habit of taking their helmets off just to indicate that they are really pissed off. Once more the Persians are a bunch of swarthy guys with beards and guyliner – the Immortals here are pretty much just Uruk-Hai at this point – and their conspicuous armor does them no good at all. Every battle is a blur of flailing swords, shields and spears painted with immense swaths of slow-motion digital gore.

It shouldn’t work, and in fact the battles are not as gripping as what we got in 300, both because we don’t really care about the characters and because the battles here are just too long and too similar. And yet, with the painterly backgrounds and artificial colors, the whole thing comes together and makes for a visually stunning panoply of violence. No dedicated Sword & Sorcery movie ever had this level of gleeful carnage, but this shows what a well-done Conan or Elric movie could look like. Especially cool are the naval sequences, as I don’t think anyone has ever depicted ancient naval warfare so lavishly, and it looks amazing partly because we have not seen it a hundred times before.

If you took out the historical context – and that would not be very hard – this would be a lavish fantasy film with buckets of violence, lots of muscular guys without shirts, and an arch-villain who swore himself to dark powers and became an eight-foot-tall god-emperor. None of that would be out of place in a Howard story, and in fact he wrote this kind of semi-historical pastiche more than once, though he was usually more careful to stick to the facts. Even the inclusion of Eva Green’s character as a sort of femme fatale Darth Vader fits right in thematically, as well as providing an excuse to get some tits onscreen and provide a nonsensical but vigorous sex scene.

This is the kind of thing I wish would become more standard for fantasy films. Gritty violence, over-the-top action, gratuitous carnality, and overtones of ancient and forbidden sorcery. There’s no reason why a Conan or a Hawkmoon movie could not look this good, or an original film if someone would actually try to write a decent script. Part of the problem is that too many writers think S&S is easy to do, when it is actually a genre that thrives on tight plotting and rich language that evokes atmosphere. We deserve so much more than what we are getting.

The Season of Blood

The rains came with the ninth moon, and every man who lived by the will of the Nahar looked to the southlands where darkened clouds gathered over the distant mountains. There, at the very edge of the world, dark forests dreamed on the foothills of the most ancient lands and the rains fell upon the mountain slopes like silver veils.

The river swelled with the floodwaters, and the people gave thanks to their gods as the river filled its muddy channel and then swelled outward. Dark waters flowed beneath huts built upon stakes, and cattle moaned as they waded through the water that rose to their bellies. The river deposited dark soil across the fallow fields, and men knew that when the waters faded, the earth would be remade, and renewed.

Utuzan stood on the terrace of the white palace, watching as the waters flowed and inundated the land beneath the moon. Even the lower districts of Shendim itself were subsumed; the narrow streets became rivers, and boats plied them as they did the sunken river channel in the high summer. He smelled the dark, fecund odor of the water and turned his face aside. A river of mud and dung transformed to a miracle by people who scratched out their living on the shore, crushed between basalt mountains and waterless wastes.

He closed his eyes and saw again, in his mind, the land he remembered. He saw the dark blue waters of the Sea of Xis, smelled the sweet breezes that blew across it. He saw Akang not as it was now, but as it had been. A city taller and cleaner and grander than any he had yet seen in this fallen age. Even his brothers he saw, and not when they had been his enemies, but when they had all been young and full of fire, and it had seemed they might stand together against the world, if need be.

300

A lot of ink has been spilled over this movie, and even more about the battle it is based on. I won’t be digging into it much here. There are a lot of threads you could chase about this film, and most of them don’t have much to do with it as a story. Pointing out that the Spartans were a fascist race of slavers, or that the European obsession with the battle can be traced to 19^th-century racist theorizing may be perfectly valid points, but others have already tilled that soil.

Instead, rather than dwell on all the troubling philosophical underpinnings and plentiful historical inaccuracies, I am going to try to look at the film as complete in itself – as a story about a battle and the men who fought it – rather than anything else. Because I think so many people have picked apart the subtexts that the actual text gets lost in the shuffle.

Because 300 is not a historical document, and it is very plain up front that it is not even going to try to be. Even within the context of the movie we have the additional layer of Delios’s narration, framing the story as a version of events told by a narrator who is definitely exaggerating to make a better story for his audience. In the movie, Delios is telling the story for a purpose – to try and rouse Sparta, and in fact all of Greece, to fight the invading Persians. Thus he is absolutely making shit up to tell a better story at every chance he gets. So we have a story inside a story inside another story, presaging the obsession with this kind of multileveled storytelling that would later result in Snyder’s masterpiece SuckerPunch.

So 300 is not a version of history, but rather an example of mythologizing it. The Spartans are all courageous and meet death with a smile, the Persian invaders are barely human beings, consisting of hordes of terrified slaves driven by cruel overseers. The Persian Immortals are like Kabuki-masked demons, complete with a hulking, berserking giant. The emperor is attended by an executioner who’s arms have been replaced by saw-blades for better decapitations, and entertained by a goat-headed man playing the fucking zither. Xerxes himself is shown as a giant possessed of possibly godlike power – someone so far removed from human he is more monster than man.

But if you showed this movie to someone without any knowledge of the historical/cultural baggage, they would still be blown away by an intense, stylish, and visually arresting war story. There’s a reason why this movie was showered with mixed reviews and a shit-ton of money at the box office. The storytelling devices it uses are obvious and unsophisticated, but they fucking work. This is a classic story of desperate men fighting to the death against overwhelming odds.

Firmly in the tradition of Sword & Sorcery, the Spartans are not shown as being what we – as modern observers – would call good men. They are a warrior culture, and they are plainly depicted to love warfare and battle, and seek it out. Like so many of Howard’s heroes, they prize valor above all things, and throw themselves into the fury of war with a gladness that modern war stories avoid showing. Leonidas is a king, but a warrior king, and his duty is to lead his people into war and to victory.

Another barbarian trait of the Spartans is their prizing of honor above life. The 300, after all, did not survive the stand at Thermopylae – they died. But it is plain they would rather have died than retreat. Even when they know they are betrayed and have the chance to escape, they stay. Partly they stay because of their code of honor, but part of it is the sheer exaltation of a battle to the death. Like Conan and Kull, they will meet death smiling. The famous Laconic wit (“Then we will fight in the shade”) is something Howard’s warrior-heroes would have understood completely.

The battles themselves wallow in an almost entirely fantastical landscape, with enemies masked, veiled, and deformed into parodies of human beings. They ride strange beasts, throw bombs, and fight with inhuman fervor, their fanatical devotion to their god-king contrasted against the Spartan’s own iron-hard code of honor. Neither of these motives is entirely understandable to the modern mind, and they are attempts to depict an older way of believing and behaving that is also commonly found in S&S stories

With its ferocious warrior heroes, enemies like monsters from the dark corners of the world, the whispers of magic out of ancient times, and a bloody battle against invaders from an elder world, 300 conjures almost every Sword & Sorcery trope there is. If Xerxes had turned into a giant snake at the very end, it would have been inescapable. In the end the movie proves that whether they are based on history or made up out of whole cloth, stories like this work for a reason.

The Accursed Hero

The wasteland was hung with delirium in the heat of the day, and the horizons shimmered like flame. Sun blazed down and reflected from the empty sand and merciless rocks, leaving no place of shelter nor a scrap of shade in which to hide from the blistering heat. Kardan’s shadow was directly beneath him, and so he knew the sun was at a hateful zenith, watching him with an unflinching eye as it awaited his death.

He knew he was not far from that dark kingdom, for only his will kept him moving despite his wounds. None of them were mortal, but he was scored by a dozen of them, the blood long since dried to black crust. His scaled armor was rent and hung from his massive frame, the bronze and horn scales rattling as he moved, the metal searing to the touch. His sandals were coming loose, the ties trailing behind his footsteps to leave traces in the sand of their own. In his right hand he clutched his notched and twisted sword, and in his left hand was his bronze-headed axe, the head still clotted with hair and pieces of bone.

His lips were cracked with thirst, and he resisted the urge to lick them, for his tongue was swollen and dry, with no ease to give. Instead he bit the strips of peeling skin for the pain it gave, and the drams of energy he could take from each small sting. Carrion birds circled over him, sure of meat soon to come, and he cursed them in his mind. The circling shadows would soon bring his pursuers upon him, and then he would have to turn at bay and face them.

He heard them, then, the chariot wheels rattling over the stony desert pan, and he lurched toward a great rock, twice as tall as he was. He put his back against the burning hot stone and lowered his head so that his heavy brows gave his eyes some shade from the noontide sun. He saw the hunters coming through the shimmer of heat, and he wished he could spit upon the ground.

Three chariots appeared over the ridge, and he heard the drivers’ whips crack as they drove their weary horses onward. This land was not gentle to either man or beast, and he knew only the fear of exhausting their beasts had allowed him to outpace his pursuers for so long. He saw the glint of sun on bronze helms and spearpoints, and he saw the skirmishers jump from the backs of the chariots as the drivers moved in and turned to circle him. Behind each driver an archer stood, ready to loose arrows if he was not brought down.

Kardan breathed harder through his teeth, clenching his jaw and letting rage boil sluggishly through his veins. He did not have much strength left, but he would spend it to buy the blood of his enemies. He lifted his battered sword and axe and watched the three skirmishers close in. They carried their little crescent shields and each one had a fistful of javelins, and he knew if he let them they would set barbs in his flesh to make him easy prey for the archers. They moved into range, hefting their long darts, watching him. He had killed six men already this day – they would not take him lightly.